Tiktok Thugs Maiming For Likes
Manslaughter for nothing, clicks for free.
Night after night, the TikToks roll in: young lads, always lads, tearing down dual carriageways and motorways the wrong way, engines screaming from stolen cars, uploading their exploits to social media while the Gardai (Irish Police) float there helplessly like some spectral beings, with the flashing blue lights for decoration. The Garda motto is - Ag Coinneáil Daoine Slán - Keeping People Safe. Current policy, no one is quite sure who owns this policy, has left them with precisely a few options beyond being weary observers of these TikTok thugs and a silent prayer that nobody dies during their watch. That fragile continuity was shattered in the early hours of Sunday morning. A nation rose to the horror of five young men—boys, really, still unfinished by time - extinguished after their car, having already completed a nocturnal circuit of theft, met another vehicle head-on while travelling the wrong way up a motorway while trying to evade the powers that be.
The Lucky Dip gang, which the five dead miscreants are alleged to be part of, is currently engaged in the national wholesale redistribution of other people’s motors and anything that isn’t nailed down for TikTok content, and they operate with a single, depressingly reliable method while trying to escape from the law, one that usually works. On Sunday they performed it again: a stolen BMW, aimed the wrong way down the motorway like a missile, with five teenage boys inside, five small engines of appetite and speed and the furious unearned conviction that death was something that happened to other people in their cars; they met another car containing three sisters and a small boy. The BMW and its passengers ceased to exist in any corporeal sense and now only exist in weirdly analphabetic social media posts saying “they’re gone too soon” or “only the good die young.”
It’s a curious thing, this modern mania for canonising every joyriding TikTok thug who manages to wrap a car around an innocent family. They are not mourning a saint, while everyone else is far from mourning the fact that the local petty crime stats are about to take a merciful dip. “Too soon” implies we were robbed of something precious. I’d argue the rest of us were being robbed of a quiet life. Save the platitudes for the actual decent souls, and leave the rest to the cold, hard mathematics of fuck around and find out. These people were a menace, not martyrs. If the good truly die young, then the world we actually inhabit, this long, grey afternoon of the living, must be populated exclusively by the bad: the mediocre, the malevolent, the professionally grief-stricken who have perfected the art of outliving everyone else. Mostly writers, politicians, podcast talking heads and the like. All the worst people in society. Especially writers. The virtuous are perpetually being evacuated to the new Jerusalem, like Anglo-Irish aristocrats fleeing the revolution, while the rest of us remain behind in the abandoned castle, rearranging the furniture and posting our own little eulogies. It must be a comforting tenet for people who cannot quite bear the more ordinary truth: that most of the criminally departed were neither particularly good nor particularly early. They simply reached the terminus at the appointed hour, and the rest of you social media imbeciles eulogising the criminal are still stuck in the waiting room, having decided to call it a tragedy so that your own survival might feel, for a moment, like a kind of moral failure. The alternative is too bleak to contemplate. Imagine a cosmos in which the good linger indefinitely, growing old and slightly sour, while the wicked are the ones who vanish in the flower of their malevolence. No one would post about that. There would be nothing left to say.
The other vehicle’s occupants, sisters Alma and Niamh Kinsella in the front, their younger sister Ella and her nephew in the back, were delivered, still breathing but only just, into the fluorescent care of hospitals that will keep them for some time yet, places where the light hums and the hours move in drips. There is a particular cruelty to the modern Irish motorway. It pretends to be a neutral conduit, a pure instrument of modern progress, yet it is one of the last remaining theatres in which pure chance still operates with the force of classical fate. The Greeks had their gods; we have the wrong-way joy drivers. At least their gods announced themselves with thunder and lightning. Ours arrive wearing balaclavas and the residual adrenaline of a night spent testing door handles around the Midlands of Ireland.
What remains is the ordinary reality of four people who had done nothing to deserve the sudden rearrangement of their mental and physical being. Two women in their thirties, one in her twenties, one child of seven. Critical. Serious. The way language is used in these terrible situations is a kind of mercy; it keeps the actual bloody violence at a bureaucratic distance for the news and the like. Somewhere in Tallaght and Crumlin the real work is being done by machines and nurses and doctors, the slow, unglamorous labour of trying to persuade the physical self that it is still permitted to continue. It is tempting, in these moments, to reach for large statements about society, about youth, about the failure of the state to contain the particular species of emptiness between the ears that produces masked teenagers in uncontrollable BMWs at three in the morning. The temptation should be resisted, or maybe not. The sisters and their boy were not symbols. They were a family going to a wedding. The child will have to learn a new vocabulary of pain, and the women will carry, for the rest of their lives, the private knowledge of how thin the membrane is between ordinary motion and the end of ordinary motion. Just because they survived the initial horror does not mean that other horrors await them.
