Children and crime - Society is obliged to intervene

SO, OUR crime gangs are using children as young as 10 to carry drugs and guns. Should we be surprised?

Yesterday Fr Joe Young, who worked as a curate in Southill for 25 years, described these children as “spiritual orphans.” He described how, despite all the talk and the promises and urban regeneration we are losing another generation of children to crime in Limerick.

Describing how some children are abandoned by their parents who spend their time in the pub, he called for immediate intervention to help children who he described as “being left to forage for themselves”.

The world Fr Young describes is alien to most of the people in this country but his suggestion that the state should confront and penalise parents who abandon their children would have near universal support.

A society — where a boy of 15 appears before a children’s court charged with having a powerful handgun — which does not intervene to try to help him, is either indifferent or deaf.

It would also be very stupid as there is no point in being horrified in four or five years’ time when these unfortunate children give two fingers to the world as they are led away from the courts to serve substantial periods of their lives behind bars.