The horrific collision on the M9 motorway in south Kildare in the early hours of Sunday morning has shocked the country. Three sisters and a young child, travelling north on their way to Dublin Airport, were struck by a stolen BMW carrying five masked teenage boys.
The women and child were hospitalised with conditions ranging from critical to serious. The occupants of the other car all died. It is an indication of the force of the impact that it took emergency services several hours to confirm how many bodies were in the car.
Sunday’s crash comes only days after a similar incident on the M50 in Dublin, when a stolen car carrying eight young people drove the wrong way down a slip road, colliding with a vehicle driven by a man in his 20s. Several people remain in hospital.
Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly has been unusually forthright in his response. He condemned as appalling and reckless the practice of driving against oncoming traffic, and made the observation that such behaviour is now, in some cases, carried out for social media likes. This is not simply dangerous driving. It is the deliberate courting of catastrophe for spectacle, a mindset that treats the lives of strangers, and the drivers’ own lives, as currency to be spent for the approval of an online audience.
RM Block
The social media platforms on which this material circulates are not innocent or passive actors in this process. When footage glorifying lethal and illegal driving, along with other crimes, is posted, shared and amplified, the companies that host it bear a responsibility they are conspicuously failing to meet. They should be removing such content, preserving it as evidence and cooperating with the Garda, rather than allowing it to inspire imitators.
The State has a responsibility to force these companies to act more responsibly. It also needs to equip its own officers with what they require to do their jobs properly. Gardaí are placed in an invidious position. Forbidden from pursuing vehicles that drive against traffic, they need better training, clearer legal protection and indemnity, and modern technology such as drones that can track offenders without endangering the wider public.
Every citizen setting out on an ordinary journey has the right to expect to travel safely on public roads. They should not be exposed to a terrifying, catastrophic and life-changing event because a handful of others have decided that other people’s safety is no concern of theirs.
The culture that produced Sunday’s carnage must be named for what it is. It is not mere recklessness. It is nihilism, a wilful indifference to whether anyone, including oneself, survives the night.
