Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

I want to talk about something that is ongoing. It is not specific to today but it has been happening every single day and every single year since this State began, and anecdotally, it appears to be getting worse. I am talking about antisocial behaviour and, in particular, antisocial behaviour by those aged under 18. Young people are invariably good. We had a discussion a while back about the fact that only 2% of young people ever come before An Garda Síochána. However, a lot of our young people are now under threat from random violent assaults by gangs of 12- and 13-year-olds going around. I had parents come to me after a lad got a punch and his eye socket was damaged. It was just a random attack. Equally, I know of parents walking around in a park with a buggy when a gang of four youths came over, threw bricks and sticks at them and verbally abused them. If they happen to be from another country originally, racist tropes are thrown in as well, but it is abuse given to anyone. A gang of lads went into one of my local cafés, stole bottles, walked out brazenly and then came back in and threw the contents of the bottles at staff. This is happening every day. I am not talking about the stuff that requires four mountain bike gardaí from Operation Irene in an estate in my constituency, where fires are lit regularly, drug dealing takes place every day and somebody got attacked with a machete recently. That is high-level stuff that needs to be dealt with, true enough, but the lower level stuff is what puts people in peril walking around. Many times it is young people who are randomly attacked.

I want to talk about consequences. There were 15,813 referrals of 12- to 17-year-olds to the Garda youth diversion programme in 2023 and 15,790 in 2022, representing 10,000 and 8,400 offenders, respectively. They are the ones who reach the threshold to get an antisocial behaviour warning or an antisocial behaviour order, ASBO, and to be put onto a Garda programme.

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