Teenage Murders – Who Takes The Rap?

The crime pages always make grim reading – but last Saturday, the news was blacker than most. The nationals had all gone big on two murder convictions, which had been reached the previous day.

Only the Irish Times stopped short of the banner headline treatment – and even they ran a shot of one of the guilty, sixteen year old Darren Goodwin, emerging from the court in handcuffs, as their main front page pic.
The murders were both essentially random – and thoroughly vicious. They also had in common the fact that they involved teenage perpetrators. In Mountmellick, Co.Laois, in 2002, Darren Goodwin, now 16, attacked 14 year old Daragh Conroy, using a hammer to bludgeon him to death. Goodwin admitted subsequently that he would have preferred if he had killed his own father.
In an adjacent court, Christopher Dunne from Kilbarrack on the north side of Dublin, was found guilty of murdering Alan Higgins, after an attempt to steal Higgins’ mobile phone turned into a fatal assault. Dunne was carrying a knife on the night of the murder. The evidence suggested that while his two friends, Michael Maher and Anthony Whelan, already convicted of manslaughter, beat Alan Higgins around the head, Dunne stabbed him in the side of the chest – an area normally covered by the arms, which the seventeen year old Higgins had raised to protect himself from the blows.
Alan Higgins had contracted leukaemia as a child – but he had overcome the illness and recovered fully. Now at the age of 17, he was assaulted, robbed, beaten, knifed and left to die. Christopher Dunne pleaded not guilty, but the jury came to a guilty verdict quickly.
Newspapers have a habit of turning the coincidence of events like this into a national crisis. What’s happening to Irish society? What has become of our kids? The usual causes are trotted out. The loss of religion has led to a moral bankruptcy. We are lacking authority figures. Children are watching violent movies and playing too many nasty video games. And we are on the road to hell in a handcart as a result.
My own reflections are a little bit more mundane.
No matter how hardened you are, it is deeply shocking to be confronted with the fact that a young teenager is capable of battering someone to death with a hammer. That it was premeditated, done in cold blood, and apparently for nothing other than the satisfaction of the killing itself, makes it all the more horrific and incomprehensible. Darren Goodwin also stole a mobile phone, but that was incidental.
There is no mitigating factor. No excuse. Nothing, really nothing, we can hang onto. But there may be something that we can learn, even from an eruption as difficult to come to terms with as this.
Forget apocalyptic analyses for a minute. Ignore theses about the decline and fall of Irish society. Instead let’s think about what might actually make a difference.
It is obvious that poverty and deprivation are a factor. Where this social dimension is concerned, children with serious problems need to be identified earlier and given more and better help by teachers, schools, social workers and remedial services. The emphasis should be on assistance, support, development and inclusion, rather than on an attempt to impose discipline.
The services which are currently in place for children at risk in Ireland are completely inadequate. I won’t attempt to go into the complexities of the situation here, but there is no doubt that the money, which is currently being spent by the Government, could be far more effectively used. Nor is there any doubt that dealing with the deficits, of which there are many in the system, should be a political priority – and that this is the kind of area in which we need to invest heavily over the next five years.
But there is another dimension to it too, that is of relevance to every individual – from the age of 15 upwards.
It was remarked that, in court, the parents of Darren Goodwin – who live their lives separately – themselves looked like children. They were both teenagers when Darren was born and are barely 30 now. As a result of the events for which Darren was on trial, they have been plunged into an irreparable sadness. They will have to live, forever, with the fact that their son is a murderer. It is a hell of a cross to bear, made all the more difficult because underlying it is a catalogue of what society considers failure – on their part.
The vast majority of hotpress readers are at an age where they are having sexual relationships – whether committed or uncommitted. Some are of the age that Darren Goodwin’s parents were when he was conceived. Others are older and more prepared for having their first children – though it happens a lot of the time, nonetheless, without planning. Very many of them, even those who have not crossed the Rubicon of pregnancy, are thinking about the big decisions that these matters of giving life and nurturing life entail.
In a personal sense, this is at the very heart of the matter. It’s not just important but essential to recognise what’s at stake where sex is concerned – and to act responsibly, come what may, in that light.
The latest pan-European Durex survey, which covers Ireland for the first time, confirms what many of us already suspected: too many Irish people still have unprotected sex. It is a form of Russian roulette. Not just in relation to the threat of sexually transmitted diseases – though that is a hugely significant issue. But, equally importantly, in relation to the possibility that having unprotected sex will place you and your partner in a position where the biggest and most difficult decisions of your life may have to be taken under great stress and without the kind of anchors that you really need, to be confident you’re doing the right thing.
It is possible to be sensible, responsible and safe – and at the same time to have a great sex life. That should be one guiding principle.
But if you do decide to have a child, or to carry on a pregnancy, then a whole other set of issues arise. Even couples living together can make a terrible mess of bringing up children – because, well, who ever said it’s easy? It isn’t. How you approach the challenge is enormously important, whether you are living together or apart.
You have to know that in being party to an act of love that leads to pregnancy, you are giving up a part of yourself – and, whatever the outcome, do it with grace. You have to recognise that you have a responsibility to the child that you are father or mother to. And you have to embrace the fact that you have a responsibility too to the other parent – whether you can, or do, decide to live with him or her.
I know this is easy to say and far harder to manage, if the circumstances are difficult and especially if the other parent is hostile – but the primary objective has to be to provide the child that you have helped to bring into the world with a place in which he or she can feel safe, respected, minded and loved.
Too much other shit gets in the way of this simple truth, far too often. But it is the bottom line. And that means that you cannot afford to be selfish. It means learning the art of compromise. It means being committed – and meeting the commitments you make. It means NOT doing what you want when you want to. It means NOT getting drunk and running late or failing to show up. And it means being able to forgive, and to move on, if mistakes are made by your fellow parent – partner or not.
Children are desperately vulnerable. They need time, care and attention. They need to know where their parents are and when they will see them. It is possible to make even the most unlikely situations work, if the adults involved put the children first. It is an old-fashioned thing to say, maybe, but this is the responsibility we take on when we bring – or when we engage in the sex that results in us bringing – a child into the world.
It isn’t a guarantee that tragedy will not befall us, or that some unpredictable twist of fate won’t enter the equation. But children who are in no doubt that their parents love them are in a far better position to handle the slings and arrows that the rest of the world will inevitably throw at them.
It is up to the parents of today, and of the future, to play their part in achieving that. It’s not a conclusion that will help the parents of Darren Goodwin or Christopher Dunne much. For them, and even more so for the parents of the children who were murdered, we can only feel heartfelt sympathy.
And sorrow.