(The Nationalist, 10 November 2000)
A few months ago when I was in Belfast I took a taxi to the railway station. The driver was a chatty sort of person so I asked him about his life and work, and he was ready to talk about it. He told me what it was like in the city when he took his turn covering night calls. He said it wasn’t uncommon to see children as young as eight or nine years old on the streets at four or five in the morning, drunk, and trying to find their way home.
I was surprised and shocked by this. I had known that there were lots of problems in inner city areas but I wasn’t prepared for anything like that. Hearing it about teenagers would not have surprised me, but eight or nine year olds? – that was something else.
A few days later I was in another taxi, this time in Dublin, and I told the driver what I had heard from his colleague in Belfast. He must have sensed that I was shocked by it but he looked at me as if I were Rip van Winkel who had just woken up. ‘You don’t have to go to Belfast to see that’, he said, ‘You’d see the same here any night.’
An obvious question came to my mind. ‘What are their parents doing?’ His answer came as an even bigger shock. ‘It’s their parents who do it’, he said. ‘They send them out to steal. The children buy drink or drugs with some of what they get and the parents take the rest.’ I wondered whether he was having me on and telling me a tall story, but he assured me that it was the truth. I was floored by this and reflected that I had never heard anything like it in twenty years in what we used to call “darkest Africa.”
A fairly common reaction to such problems is to call for the government to deal with the matter. New legislation will be demanded, perhaps a new social service agency will be set up, and more resources in the form of personnel and money will be voted into place. All well and good. And they are about all that a government can do to deal with such problems.
But do we really think that such measures are adequate? Should we not in honesty go further and ask whether they are not simply a way of salving our conscience by creating the impression (the illusion, perhaps) that we have dealt with the matter when all we have done is to keep it at arm’s length? Might it not be the case that by focussing attention on a government response we are evading the challenge and effort of a personal response? The challenge for parents is very obvious: build family.
But for everyone, whether parents or not, shouldn’t we ask whether we have not created a society so individualistic that a sense of community has been lost? An African proverb says, ‘The neighbour who does not correct my child is a traitor.’ Is it enough to mind our own business, to keep ourselves to ourselves, to say in a prissy way that we don’t want to impose our own values on others and then turn away in silence, like the people who saw the toddler, James Bulger, being led away by two ten year olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables (who went on to torture and kill him), who thought it strange but, in the end, did nothing?