After two Garda deaths, Carol Coulter notes the lack of detention places for young offenders
It has emerged that the youth thought to have been driving the car that killed Garda Michael Padden and Garda Anthony Tighe was on probation following conviction for car-related offences. He had 24 previous convictions, 20 of them committed while on bail.
This does not come as a surprise to lawyers working with children and young people. There is a chronic shortage of places for children who are either severely troubled or who are already in trouble with the law, a shortage highlighted time and again by Mr Justice Peter Kelly in the High Court.
The cases that come before him usually concern children in the care of the health board who are in need of secure accommodation. Time and again he highlighted the fact that such accommodation did not exist in sufficient quantities, as vulnerable young people ended up absconding from unsuitable residential care, or in bed-and-breakfast accommodation, occasionally with tragic results for themselves.
Paradoxically, his success in highlighting this problem contributed to the shortage of places for those equally in need of secure accommodation, but in places of detention, because they had committed crimes.
All too often, the only place that one of the children appearing before him could be sent to was Oberstown House, Trinity House or St Michael's House, intended for young offenders.
Combined with an overall shortage of places of detention, this led to young offenders who appeared before the Children's Court, and were either sentenced or remanded, being turned away. Within hours they could be back on the streets.
"You come into court in a case," explained Mr James McGuill, a solicitor who regularly represents young offenders. "Classically, you're released on bail. Then you don't show up for trial. A bench warrant is issued. In an adult case, this would mean custody pending trial. But there's nowhere to put them.
"This means that unbailable people are out on bail. The law on bail, where people who are not likely to turn up for trial don't get bail, does not apply to juveniles because there's nowhere to put them.
"This gives these young people an absolute sense of immunity. If nothing happens to you when you're a 'wheel-man' for one crime, why not do it for others?"
Juveniles over the age of 16 go to St Patrick's Institution, which has 239 places, and has not had overcrowding since its expansion following the building of the new women's prison.
This week it had about 220 inmates, according to a spokesman for the Department of Justice.
It holds offenders between the age of 16 and 21, but it is a prison rather than a place of detention with a therapeutic and educational function, like Oberstown, Trinity and St Michael's.
Many of the offenders there are hardened, and a young offender going there is likely to learn even more about crime than he would on the outside.
"When you hit 16 you're liable to be sent to St Pat's, " said Mr Gerry Durcan SC, who represented a number of the children before Mr Justice Kelly.
"Often judges will give them a chance the first time they offend at that age, with a suspended sentence, because they know they'll get into the system and pick up even more skills of that nature."
Another solicitor working with such young offenders said judges' orders have been frustrated hundreds of times in relation to such children. He estimates that about three times as many places are needed as exist at the moment.
According to the Department of Education, in Oberstown House there are 26 places, in Trinity House there are 27, and in St Michael's and St Laurence's in Finglas there are 33 - a total of 76 in the Dublin area for remanded and convicted offenders and, often, for those who have committed no offence at all, at least not yet.
- In Britain, troublesome youngsters could be held in a new type of secure foster home, the Home Secretary, Mr David Blunkett, announced yesterday.
In a significant shift from traditional thinking that young offenders were best left with their families whenever possible, Mr Blunkett said he was looking for new ways to deal with persistent 10-year-old and 11-year-old troublemakers."Intensive fostering is a real option which we should be exploring," he said.