We are going to have to invest a lot of money and time in children who go off the rails if we want to lessen the sort of violent tragedies seen of late, argues Padraig O'Morain
One night when most of today's joyriders were toddlers, or not yet born, a call came into a newsroom in which I was working to say gardaí in a certain part of Dublin were being lured into ambushes by local teenagers.
Their way of operating was to put in a 999 call about a made-up emergency to get a squad out. When the gardaí arrived, they and the car were attacked with stones and rocks.
When I rang the Garda station where this was happening, I expected to find myself talking to, at the very least, a disgruntled garda or, at the most, an outraged one.
What I got was a garda who said the kids concerned had had a terrible upbringing in some cases, they had very little hope of getting anywhere in life while all around them they saw people enjoying the fruits of the consumer society. It was no wonder they behaved as they did, he said.
Now, the fact that this garda had a certain empathy with the kids in question does not necessarily mean that he had taken leave of his senses.
I have no doubt that if he got his hands on one of these ambushers, he would have him locked up in a cell before you could say "bleeding heart liberal".
This garda occupies a middle ground which it is very hard to acknowledge in the bad, bad period we have been going through in the past couple of weeks when, it sometimes seemed, every morning news bulletin told of another thug-inflicted death.
It was a middle ground which was very hard to find in a Prime Time programme on RTÉ this week in which Father Peter McVerry and Mr Noel Byrne of the Belcamp Estate steering committee debated the issues.
Father McVerry saw jailing youngsters as pointless and advocated better services to help disadvantaged kids and families.
Mr Byrne was outraged over the behaviour of thugs and the apparent ease with which they reappear on the streets following their conviction.
Yet it does not follow that those who advocate family support services in response to the events of the past few weeks are in any way putting themselves on the side of thugs.
I go home each night on a bus which carries more than its fair share of thugs, addicts and people who are just lost in life to their suburban homes.
One night, I eavesdropped on a fellow who had just been released from Mountjoy as he recounted, to an admiring companion, how to cut people with a razor and to get away in the moments it takes them to realise what has happened. Another admirer lit up a joint and passed it to him as a sort of tribute.
I hope he is back in Mountjoy because I very much fear he has nothing but misery to offer to those whose lives he enters.
But - and this is the point Father McVerry was making - he was a baby once and it is very likely that the priest who baptised him knew where he would end up.
Would it not be better if someone had worked with him or his family to increase his chances of living a decent life instead of one devoted to violence and crime?
This is the point which has been made again and again since at least the 1970s and which got a poor hearing during most of that time.
This Government, to be fair to it, has funded a network of family support centres - but what we have is a drop in the ocean compared to what we need.
There are some "early start" programmes which work with disadvantaged children and their families.
There is any amount of research from abroad to show that such programmes greatly increase children's chances of staying in education, getting jobs and avoiding teenage pregnancy. Yet only a small proportion of the children who need them are in such programmes.
True, most disadvantaged children and adults never commit crime.
However, enough do and to a sufficient extent to cast a shadow over the quality of life in our society.
This is an area in which governments, departments such as Health, Education and Justice and the health boards have let us down.
Waiting until these children become criminals is the worst possible way to deal with them.
We don't need gardaí to deal with the young man who wouldn't dream of stealing a car and driving it off at high speed.
But if, instead, that child grows up to want to steal cars and risk their own and other people's lives, we have to make a massive investment in policing services, courts and prisons - and all too often even that doesn't work.