Antisocial Behaviour
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-16
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Barry Ward (FG), Dún Laoghaire

I thank the Minister for his acknowledgement of the work gardaí in Dún Laoghaire and Blackrock are doing. I was delighted to welcome him to Blackrock when he visited recently. I appreciate his attention to the issue. I also acknowledge what he said about the progressiveness of the Children Act. That is important but if we are relying on Oberstown or incarceration for children, the system has already failed at that stage. There are people locally who tell me that there are young children who will say to them when they are confronted about their criminal behaviour that they cannot be touched or be arrested or face the consequences that would apply to an adult. The younger they are, the more they believe that and as long as they believe it, they will continue to act with impunity. They will continue to disrupt the lives of lawful and law abiding citizens in our communities.
It may be that a legislative response is required, but I also think that we should be having a conversation about this and asking ourselves what we need to do to ensure that there is some kind of an arrest to the antisocial behaviour that is creating victims in our local communities. As I said, the spectrum of activity ranges from bad behaviour, shouting or whatever in a local area to much more serious things like property damage to businesses, theft, robbery, assault and more serious matters. If only for the reason that we want to protect those children from the consequences of getting on a slippery slope to more serious criminality as adults, it is incumbent on us a legislature and as a State, on the Department and on An Garda Síochána to put a stop to this. We need to make sure the message gets out to those kids that if they are going to behave antisocially and criminally, there will be consequences and they will suffer them. I recognise what the Minister said about the juvenile liaison system. It has yielded results. There is no doubt about that. Maybe it needs more resources and maybe we need to make it more effective and more commonly used but there cannot be a message to young people, or children in particular, that they can behave with impunity because they cannot.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-16