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TIKTOK HAS BANNED the account of one of the teenage boys who died in a fatal crash on the M9 near Athy on Sunday, as questions grow over the role of social media posts in encouraging reckless driving among young people.

An account that posted from the inside of a stolen car that travelled the wrong way up the M50 the Sunday before last has also been banned – it had garnered over 4,000 likes and over 5,000 shares.

Five boys aged in their teens died when the car they were travelling in drove into oncoming traffic on the motorway, causing a head-on collision.

Four people in another vehicle, including a mother and her seven-year-old son, were seriously injured.

The five boys have been named as Jack Kennedy, Kamil Pustkowski, Joe Carthy, Alex McCarthy and Jeremy O’Brien.

The Journal’s examination of social media accounts linked to the boys and others involved in similar activity shows a network of accounts interacting with and encouraging one another, rather than a single social media “challenge”.

Accounts share videos and images of vehicles, garda pursuits and reckless driving, frequently using the same hashtags and engaging with one another’s posts.

According to TikTok, the firm is now closely monitoring content related to the recent reckless driving incidents and removing videos that break the platform’s rules.

Social media’s role in encouraging dangerous driving has come into sharp focus following yesterday’s crash, which happened just a week after eight teenage boys were injured in a similar incident on the M50.

Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly said that the most troubling aspect of the rise in wrong-way motorway driving was that in some cases it was being carried out “for social media likes”.

His comments were echoed by the Garda Representative Association’s vice president John Joe O’Connell, who has said that “numerous gangs” of teenage boys are trying to “outdo” each other by posting videos featuring stolen vehicles and interactions with gardaí.

A TikTok account featuring pictures and videos of Kamil Pustkowski has now been banned by the platform.

The account featured videos filmed from the perspective of someone driving a car, including multiple clips showing gardaí pursuing the vehicle.

One video appeared to show a vehicle being hot-wired.

An Instagram account using Kamil’s name remains online. It includes footage of gardaí pursuing a vehicle, with the caption containing the hashtag “chase on”.

A second TikTok account showing images of Pustkowski, which was active in 2025, also remains online and contains similar material, although it has fewer followers and lower levels of engagement.

Several posts on that account are captioned “get me famous”.

Other posts show boys with their faces covered posing beside a car, with what appears to be a joint visible in the shot.

One viewer commented: “outside Oberstown is crazy”.

The account subsequently posted a screenshot of a Crime World article headlined: ‘Lucky Dip gang taunt gardaí by posing with stolen car outside Oberstown Detention Centre’.

“Organised Crime Gang”, the caption of the TikTok post reads, followed by a fire emoji and hashtags including “viral” and “keep up”.

That post received more than 260 likes and 136 shares.

An account featuring videos and images of Jack Kennedy, another of the teenagers who died in the crash, also contains posts captioned “get me famous”.

One blurry video shows a car driving along a main road with the words “no licence no problem” overlaid on it.

Several accounts using the “no better crew” hashtag remain active on TikTok, showing similar content featuring what appear to be stolen vehicles.

Many of the posts show videos that seem to have first been recorded on Snapchat and then reshared on the platform.

The accounts range from those with relatively large audiences to smaller profiles with limited circulation, but the latter frequently interact with one another.

Posts from the banned account, which had more than 2,200 followers, regularly featured the hashtag “no better crew”.

Other accounts use the same hashtag to post videos showing vehicles and pursuits, with similar levels of circulation.

One video posted by an account which also features the word “unknown” in its username has the caption “finders keepers” and uses the hashtag “All fake”, which also appears on other similar posts.

Other videos showing stolen vehicles claim that the footage is “AI generated”.

In one video, a sticker bearing the word “stolen” has been superimposed over a vehicle’s licence plate.

In another video that shows a vehicle being hot-wired is simply captioned ‘crime’.

Locations including Dublin, Limerick, Ennis, Cork and Galway are identified in captions posted by accounts sharing this type of content and interacting with one another.

The accounts are now also being used to share tributes and RIP messages following the deaths of the five boys.

Several feature the words: “you can replace the car, but you can’t replace the boy in it, be careful boys”.

Many of the RIP posts called the boys who have died “legends”.

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