WHEN FACED WITH a tragedy like the one that claimed the lives of five teenagers and critically jeopardised the lives of three women and a child last weekend, one hopes that something resembling real leadership will emerge from somewhere.

While the rest of the country was rapt by the senselessness and scale of the tragedy, only the minister for justice was thinking ahead. Jim O’Callaghan sprang into action, getting in front of the TV cameras, and proposing that it would be of some benefit to make it illegal to drive the wrong way down the motorway. 

The implicit suggestion here is that those five children who hurtled to their deaths on M9, endangering countless other innocent drivers, thought that what they were doing was perfectly legal. It isn’t, by the way. Driving a car the wrong way down the motorway at a high enough speed to instantly kill all five occupants is already against the law. Obviously. If neither that nor the threat of death did anything to stop those kids, then neither will making a slightly more specific law. Obviously. 

It is therefore no surprise that O’Callaghan’s tough talk has done less than nothing to deter others from doing the same in the nights that have followed. Dramatic irony kicked in almost instantly, and it has since been revealed that the practice has continued more or less unabated since O’Callaghan was, once again, caught in a state of reaction rather than proactivity.

In addition to a needless new law, O’Callaghan has also promised that gardaí will finally be trained in such chases. Not anytime soon, but some day. Next year, maybe. What a message to send to any would-be deathriders. We’re making the obviously illegal thing you’re doing illegal in a different way. Also, we have nobody capable of correctly enforcing that law. Let that be a lesson to you.

Far be it from me to question the wisdom of only realising that problems are problems after it’s too tragically late, but it seems somewhat self-evident that ideally we would be addressing this practice before it gets to the point where untrained gardaí are chasing teenagers the wrong way down the motorway at high speed. It seems that if you’re going 120km/h or more against traffic, several times a week, in a bid to stop a bunch of children from doing the same, something has already gone catastrophically wrong. 

While it is of course unacceptable that gardaí are not trained in this practice, it’s also unacceptable that the conversation in the aftermath has broadly skipped over whatever conditions have led to this state of affairs. It has been observed this week that this kind of attitude essentially regards crime as a phenomenon that emerges from nowhere. That, at some point in the life of a 14-year-old boy, a switch is flipped, and he becomes a ‘thug’. Factors such as material deprivation, under-resourcing of social services, and social alienation must all be taken well into account before assuming that some children simply possess a wanton desire for the destruction of themselves and others.

While it is almost beyond comprehension as to why anyone, child or otherwise, would take part in something so dangerous, it also seems evident that social media has exacerbated the root problems. It would be reductive to say that young people are driving the wrong way down the motorway simply so they can post the evidence to Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok, but it also behooves us to consider the role that these media have played in encouraging, incentivising and rewarding such attention-grabbing behaviour. 

Young people lacking feelings of power, status or control can find that meaning through social media platforms, where they know that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people will have their eyes glued to their screens as they watch teenagers tempt death on the open road. 

TikTok, citing ongoing investigations by An Garda Sîochána and Comisiún na Meán, this week declined to appear before an Oireachtas committee to answer questions about its role in facilitating this kind of behaviour. Alan Kelly, chair of the Oireachtas media committee, described TikTok’s refusal as “a slap in the face”, but of course, tech companies only act with this kind of impunity because we have long since signalled to them that there’s no real reason why they should ever do what we ask. 

Ireland’s longstanding kid-gloves approach to the tech companies who have headquartered themselves in Grand Canal Dock (including TikTok) is doubtlessly why Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg feels comfortable buying himself a castle in Waterford and threatening to spend more time in Ireland, for example. 

The timing of Zuckerberg’s purchase is inauspicious. While Zuckerberg’s platforms (including Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) have not been named in the aftermath of last week’s crash to the same extent as TikTok, the same kind of videos are to be found there too, and have been for years. This is not limited to dangerous driving but includes videos of harassment, bullying, violence, racial hatred, and whatever else you’re having yourself. As of this week, Meta is in court in the US, facing claims from 29 states that their platforms are designed with the intention of addicting young people and children.

In its legal defence, Meta is arguing that social media addiction does not exist. At the risk of prejudicing the outcome of those court proceedings, let me simply say: once you’re done reading this article, go on and put your phone away for 24 hours. 48 hours. If you’re not addicted, you should be able to put it away forever, actually. Give that a go and see if your palms don’t start to itch after about 15 minutes. See if you don’t instinctively reach for your phone, even when it’s not there. Then imagine you’re a 13-year-old who’s been using a phone since before you could tie your shoes. Whether smartphones and the apps therein are addictive is no longer up for debate. 

At this point, it stings even to refer to these apps and platforms as ‘social media’. By now, nearly all of us know first-hand that the effect of these platforms is to isolate us. Spend less of our time looking people in the eye, or paying attention to what they have to say, instead pouring our focus into whatever is happening online. It’s a constant distraction, powered by hollow incentives, such as the rush of dopamine that comes from getting a like or a follow or a share or a view. The infinite scroll is little more than a well you can drink from forever but never be quenched, like something from an Irish myth that ends in much the same way: children suffering cruel fates at the hands of cruel gods. 

Zuckerberg, more than any other, is the architect of the digital world we’ve all been left no choice but to inhabit, and all the pernicious influences that come with it. And he wants to spend more time here in Ireland. In a bloody castle, no less. At least no monks will have to die this time around, but the optics still aren’t great. 

It is telling that Zuckerberg feels comfortable setting himself up like a lord on Ireland’s southeast coast. Clearly he and his people have surveyed the socio-political landscape and seen little downside, little prospect of pushback, no sense that he will be unwelcome here as he rides the amusements in Tramore or respectfully declines to sit in front of Oireachtas committee hearings.

We harbour these tech companies in our docks because we rely on the tax revenue that they bring in. The precarious work they offer drives our employment figures in the right direction. We enjoy the status that comes with being the ones tasked with regulating some of the largest, most important companies in the world, as if we would ever actually dare. The presence of these companies — each one a rogue nation unto itself — on our shores has become part of our evolving identity, just as the Vikings, Normans and Brits did before them. 

And just as those forces reshaped Ireland, generation by generation, Big Tech is doing the same — changing Ireland’s social landscape in a way over which we exert no control, contributing to catastrophes for which we have no answer. And just like our most infamous historic invaders, we invited them in.