Opinion

Allison Morris: We must understand why boys like Keane Mulready-Woods choose a life of crime

Murder victim 17-year-old Keane Mulready Wood
Murder victim 17-year-old Keane Mulready Wood Murder victim 17-year-old Keane Mulready Wood

The murder of Keane Mulready-Woods has caused shock and revulsion across Ireland and rightly so.

The 17-year-old was dismembered, his body parts to be placed at the homes of rival drug gang members as a warning.

It marks a new era for the gangland crime problem that has plagued parts of inner-city Dublin for years and spread to other areas such as Limerick and Drogheda.

Keane was in the eyes of the law still a child but that has not stopped some horrendous commentary justifying his murder.

I have also seen some shocking examples of journalism from sections of the media who really show their privilege in the most embarrassing and uninformed ways at times like this.

Keane was at an age when many children are still at school.

And yet he had already come to the attention of police as an active foot soldier for a ruthless gang of Drogheda-based drug dealers.

In the rush to justify this young lad’s horrendous fate, there was little attempt to understand or question what has happened to a forgotten and disenfranchised section of Irish society.

Why are children as young as 13 shunning school for a life of crime?

Why is society - government, politicians, police, youth services - all failing this generation?

What is being done to save these children from a life of crime before it’s too late?

In the age of rolling online news, instant headlines for fast moving lives, there is a danger of providing the soundbites readers want without stopping and thinking about the bigger picture.

As a journalist I’ve always been interested in the people behind the headlines.

I’ve said this before but I became a journalist because of the way my community were portrayed in the media.

In the west Belfast of my youth violence was an everyday occurrence, funerals happened far too often and armed soldiers were negotiated around like an obstacle course just to get to school in the morning.

It wasn’t normal by any means but it was my normal, our normal.

The very posh English blokes sent to cover the Troubles spoke about the people who lived in the place I was growing up in, my friends, neighbours and relatives, like a sub species.

In their view, we were two dimensional, angry, violent, uncivilised, cruel, born with a bloodlust.

There was little attempt to understand the underlying causes of this situation many of us had been born into, the inequality, the extreme poverty and social deprivation, caused by a government that had decided we were to be squashed like cockroaches.

The state papers released in 2016 gave an insight into that thinking.

In a memo to former secretary of state Tom King the then head of the civil service Sir Kenneth Bloomfield said west Belfast had a "ghetto mentality" and a large section of the population was alienated from "normal civilised behaviour".

Abnormal yes, but there were historic, political reasons for that. Terrified, yes, poor, most definitely, it was an economic waste ground. But uncivilised - that I dispute.

Education has always been a pathway out of poverty, but it is not being granted to all young people equally.

Violence in Derry last summer involved teenage ‘footsoldiers’ recruited into a republican paramilitary group without aim or objective.

In loyalist areas young men continue to be recruited into loyalist paramilitary organisations who have hundreds and in some cases thousands of members, they also have the lowest rate of educational achievement.

That there are higher levels of ongoing criminality and paramilitary activity in areas of high social deprivation is not some unexplainable coincidence.

And the same applies to areas of Ireland where the leadership of these gangs are considered veterans if they make it to their late 30s without being murdered.

A young person with no hope or prospects is easily recruited into any organisation or gang.

If they’re jailed or murdered there will be three more people ready to take their place and so they need to be positively diverted long before it reaches that stage.

Understanding what it’s like to grow up in these circumstances requires listening to those for whom this is a lived experience, rather than just reporting on them from a distance like exhibits in a zoo.