When Assistant Garda Commissioner Mr Tom King laid responsibility for recent disturbances at Killinarden and Knockmore in Dublin at least partly at the door of parents, many citizens will have applauded. Those who applauded are, perhaps, tired of seeing responsibility for misbehaviour pushed further and further away from those who misbehave. A riot will inevitably lead to criticism of the Garda for not having done enough, or for having done too much, to deal with it. A prison break out or spectacular crime will be blamed, almost as a reflex, on the Minister for Justice. If parents are found to have brutalised or abused their children, there are immediate calls for an inquiry into the behaviour of social workers and into what they did or did not do.
Where, one cannot help wondering, are thugs, criminals and wrongdoers in all this? Do they bear no responsibility for their actions? Is everything they do the fault of someone else? This is one reason why many citizens will applaud the words of Assistant Commissioner King. Less laudable reasons will include the conviction on the part of some that complex questions have simple answers, in this case "make" parents "take responsibility" for the actions of their children. But anyone who has seen children going out of the control of their parents will have seen how powerless parents can be in such situations. And anyone who has seen the struggle facing parents in areas characterised by deprivation will appreciate why it is that some of them fail.
This is why people working directly with the problems which exist on the ground urge caution in how Assistant Commissioner King's words are interpreted. They include Mrs Margaret Ahern, a leader of the anti "joyriding" protests in Cork and Father Edmond Grace SJ, chairman of the tenants' committee which has cleared the drug pushers out of Dublin's Hardwicke Street. What these people say is that the parents of children who are out of control, or tending in that direction, need help more than criticism. It is probably fair to say that, without exception, they do not know what to do, no more than far better off parents know what to do when their children go out of control. Their problems are compounded by the absence of activities for young people in many areas, especially - though by no means exclusively - for young people seen as difficult.
The Task Force on Child Care Services recognised this in 1980 when it called for projects which could cope with young people barred from ordinary clubs and activities. Today there is only a handful of such projects. Even in 1970, when the era of Letterfrack, Daingean and such places was coming to an end, the Kennedy Report saw amenities for young people and support for their parents as key ways of tackling delinquency and family breakdown. They were only half listened to. The reformatories were closed but were not replaced by adequate community or residential services by a State which had never cared much about what happened in reformatories in the first place.
We are paying for that indifference now. Many a person has paid for that indifference in death, injury or misery. Of course this is not to say that the State is guilty of the "joyriding", drug pushing, assault or other ills of society. It is those who commit these crimes who are guilty. But there are things which it has always been sensible for the State to do and which it has done too little of.