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CHAIR OF THE Oireachtas Education and Youth Committee, Fianna Fáil TD Cathal Crowe, has said he is “sick of seeing people eulogising and heaping praise” on the five teenagers killed in Sunday’s crash on the M9.

In a post on Facebook on Tuesday, the Fianna Fáil TD said the five young men were “thugs”.

“Our sympathies and concerns should be for victims. Our support should be for An Garda Síochána,” Crowe said.

Independent senator Lynn Ruane criticised Crowe for the comments and said it is “beyond disturbing to me to see the Chair of the Committee on Youth speak about young people in such a dehumanising way”.

The five teenagers were killed early on Sunday morning when the BMW they were travelling in drove into oncoming traffic on the M9 near Athy, causing a head-on collision, as they sought to evade gardaí.

The car the BMW collided with was carrying three sisters aged in their 20s and 30s and the 7-year-old son of one of the women. All four remain in hospital in conditions ranging from serious to critical.

The five boys have been named as Jack Kennedy (17), Kamil Pustkowski (17), Joe Carthy (15), Alex McCarthy (17) and Jeremy O’Brien (18).

Social media accounts linked to the boys and others have shown posts that glorify so-called ‘joyriding’.

Since their deaths, tributes posted to the teenagers online have attracted thousands of comments on Facebook.

Speaking to The Journal, Ruane said:

“Heaping shame on already grieving families and young people does not prevent future tragedies and it doesn’t help reduce the potential for future victims.

“It stands in the way of accountability and in the way of creating real interventions for young people and creation of safety for everyone.”

She added that in times of tragedy, it is “easy to point fingers instead of showing real leadership by creating the conditions to think about solutions and prevention”.

“We have to have very difficult conversations in Ireland about how we work with and engage with young people, for their safety and for society’s safety.

“The overall aim of a society should always be to engage with the complex questions of how we live together, side by side, and how we build a society where victimisation, cycles of violence and risk-taking behaviour are reduced to the point where tragedies like this do not occur,” Ruane said.

When contacted by The Journal today, Crowe said he had nothing further to add to what he said in the Facebook post.

His fellow member on the Oireachtas Youth Committee, Social Democrat TD and youth worker Jen Cummins, also took issue with the language used by Crowe and said now is “not the time for name-calling”.

“It isn’t language that I would use. As a committee, we focus very much on education and very little on youth, and perhaps this is one of the moments where the Education and Youth Committee could now focus a little more on the youth part,” she said.

Among the committee’s key priorities, most of which relate to education, is to consider policy issues related to youth facilities in communities and the recruitment and retention of youth workers.

Cummins said youth organisations are crying out for increased funding as they are not currently able to meet demand for their services.

“We can’t support young people if the resources aren’t there,” she said.

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