AROUND 2 p.m. on Sunday the white convertible screeched round the estate, doing "hand brakers". The roof was down and the driver and all his passengers were wearing sunglasses.
"My Ma says that they're fearless," one woman said yesterday. "That car nearly toppled a few times and they all would have been crushed." It was the start of a bad Easter Sunday for the estates of Knockmore and Killinarden in Tallaght, Co Dublin.
At 11 p.m. gardai sent two patrol cars into the area after reports of three stolen cars being driven through the estates. By then, a large crowd had gathered to watch the cars a Nissan, a Vauxhall and a Honda stolen in Rathmines, Terenure and Rathfarnham.
Gardai became targets and one of the patrol cars had its windscreen broken. The two patrol cars left.
Six patrol cars returned and one of them was rammed from behind by a stolen car. The two gardai in the car suffered back injuries. One woman who lives along the road said she watched the colour drain from the faces of two gardai as their car was swamped by the crowd, armed with bottles, bricks and anything else they could find.
A garda had her lip split when she was punched in the face and another was admitted to hospital with leg injuries after he was hit with a brick.
The youths set alight one of the cars at Knockmore Crescent. According to one man, one of the youths at the centre of the trouble stayed in the central grass area, swinging an iron bar and shouting: "This isn't the end of it."
The roads around the Tallaght council estates are a dream for youths taking cars. There are virtually no speed ramps or bollards as used in suburbs elsewhere.
Traces of havoc are everywhere. On the fastest, straightest stretches the asphalt is streaked with burnt rubber. The drivers have a ready audience for their bravado with hundreds of children.
"We don't call it joyriding," one woman said yesterday. "We call it death riding."
She said the neighbours know the wolf whistle code used by the youths to signal the approach of various cars.
"There's one for `here's the cops' and another for `here's the other car.'"
The incidents come in waves, another young woman said. "They all get arrested and it all goes quiet. Then they'll get out and they'll have a reunion, stealing as many cars as they can. And they'll keep it up until the Garda or the Special Branch come in."
Another woman pointed to her garden wall where new bricks mark the spot where a stolen car demolished it.
She has lived in Jobstown for 17 years and remembers a time when it was worse.
"The women going to bingo at night would have to be pressed tight into the walls because there'd be stolen cars all over the place."
All the residents who spoke to The Irish Times preferred not to give their names. "You don't live, around here," one woman said. "You come and take notes and I get my windows put in if you use my name.
There is little support for the liberal view that the trouble makers can be reformed if they are given something else to live for.
Zero tolerance is big with most people, who feel that young people should be arrested for drinking on the street.
"If they're locked up then everything's quiet," one woman said, "they should be shot," another man said.
Most residents, believe that Sunday night's trouble was caused by a 15 year old boy who absconded from Trinity House on St Patrick's Day.
Looking at the headline in yesterday's Evening Herald one young woman said: "He's proud of that page now. He's very proud. Now all the rest of them will be trying to get on the front page."
However, one Garda source argued there was no evidence that," the boy was at the centre of the incident. "The child lives for attention." Gardai were still looking for him last night.
One man said the children on the estate who may not steal cars will watch while others drive them rally style. "They bring the crowd. It's the crowd that turns them on."
Another man said gardai did not respond quickly enough to reports of stolen cars and allowed crowds to grow before they arrived on the scene. He pointed at the view of the Dublin mountains and said what a great place it was to live, but for the troublemakers. "This started years ago and the guards ignored it and now they can't control it."
This is denied by local gardai. "We are doing the best we can, the fastest we can, with the resources we have."
In the sunshine at Knockmore Crescent two women watched in amusement as television reporters, posed beside the burnt out car. One of the reinforced lamp posts put up to be "stolen car proof" had taken a knock on Sunday night.
"When you have to take your kids off the road at 2 o'clock on a sunny afternoon there's something wrong," one of them said.
