Two very different tribes gathered in Carlow, a market town just over an hour’s drive south of Dublin, last night.
One was there to mourn Alex McCarthy, a 16–year–old member of a Traveller family, who was one of five young men killed in a car crash in the early hours of Sunday morning.
He was being laid to rest at St Mary’s cemetery, opposite the local Gaelic Athletic Club.
The other group was attending an evening vigil at St Clare’s Church, in the town centre, to pray for three women and a young child who were seriously injured in the same incident.
Each wore contrasting uniforms. McCarthy’s clan, dressed to the nines, followed a white, horse–drawn carriage carrying his grey and silver coffin.
The crowd at St Clare’s was more understated. They held candles and arrived by foot.
This divide was more than simply aesthetic. For the two groups are on opposite sides of an increasingly furious public debate.
It follows what happened at 3.04am on Sunday, when McCarthy and four teenage friends decided to drive a high–performance BMW at 75mph southwards on the north–bound lane of the M9, near the eastern outskirts of Carlow.
The five teenagers were affiliated with the ‘Lucky Dip Gang,’ an network of 60 to 100 Irish youths who drive extremely dangerously in stolen vehicles then post the footage on TikTok and Snapchat
Sisters (l-r) Ella Hendricken, Niamh Kinsella and Alma Kinsella continue to fight for their lives after a BMW driving the wrong way on the M9 hit them. Niamh and Alma remain in a critical condition while Ella was also seriously hurt in the collision
Alex McCarthy, 16, was one of the five teenagers in the high–performance BMW. He died at the scene after the vehicle collided head–on with a Hyundai on the M9
Tragedy ensued. The group in the BMW, who were trying to flee the Gardai (the Irish police), were involved in a head–on collision with a Hyundai, which was carrying three sisters – Ella Hendricken and Niamh and Alma Kinsella – along with Alma’s seven–year–old son Yemi.
All five of the teenage boys, aged between 15 and 18, who were wearing black balaclavas, died at the scene.
The four passengers in the Hyundai, who had been driving to the airport to attend a wedding in Britain, were taken to hospitals in Dublin. They remain critically ill.
It was a terrible waste of life. But in the ensuing days, the tragedy has become an international talking point.
At issue are the deeply unsettling circumstances in which it came to pass and the thorny question of who is to blame.
And to appreciate why, one must first understand that McCarthy and his associates were not your everyday hoodlums. Instead, they were ‘content creators’.
Specifically, they were members of the Lucky Dip Gang, a group of between 60 and 100 Irish youths who have achieved a dystopian sort of social media fame through the reckless driving which led to their deaths.
The gang, made up of teenagers and first identified by police in 2022, drive extremely dangerously in stolen vehicles then post the footage on TikTok and Snapchat.
The more reckless their behaviour, the more clicks it tends to generate and the greater kudos they enjoy. So–called ‘Lucky Dippers’ are said to be responsible for at least 300 crimes in the past year, including burglaries and car thefts.
Irish government officials have blamed platforms like TikTok for algorithmic incentives and slow content moderation, raising the prospect of billions in fines. Pictured is the scene after the crash
A Gardai spokesperson said the incident occurred at 3am on the morning of August 16 when one of the cars was travelling in the wrong direction
They and a growing number of copycat groups are thought to be partly responsible for a rising crimewave – the number of vehicle thefts in Ireland has almost doubled since 2021, from 3,951 to 7,893 cases per year.
According to leaked law enforcement figures, the 11 most active gang members, whose average age is 16, have now been arrested and charged with a total of 427 crimes. That is an average of 39 charges each.
Yet almost none of them have been imprisoned – and their sense of impunity seems astonishing.
In the minutes leading up to Sunday’s tragedy, for example, McCarthy and his chums filmed themselves driving at high speed away from Gardai patrol vehicles, with blue emergency lights flashing in the background.
Several clips of these exploits are now doing the rounds online, having been posted by associates by way of a grotesque tribute.
One bears the message: ‘Ur last spin boys. To hear your voices in this boys has me in a pain that can’t be described.’
Another shows a man in a black balaclava in the BMW’s passenger seat, along with the caption ‘I love ya brother’ and ‘Gonna be missed boys’.
A third, addressed to McCarthy’s 18–year–old fellow passenger Kamil Pustkowski shows a man performing dangerous manoeuvres in a vehicle with the comment ‘This one’s for you, Kamil’.
Most of these grisly tributes offer no sympathy at all to the four innocent victims of the gang’s criminal behaviour. In fact, they appear to celebrate it. And that has sparked public anger.
On Tuesday, a funeral director’s online tribute page for McCarthy was taken down after it was
bombarded with critical posts. Facebook tributes from family members of the dead youths met with hostile responses, many of them criticising the Traveller community from which some of them – but not all – hailed.
The reaction has also sparked violence. Video footage on X purports to show a female relative of one of the five teenagers confronting an online critic in the street this week.
Family members film her grabbing the middle–aged woman’s hair and throwing punches.
Other online videos from the Lucky Dip gang focus on glamorising dangerous driving. Most depict youths driving the wrong way down a motorway, an activity regarded in this warped world as daring and entertaining.
One, filmed on Dublin’s M50, shows a driver making a U–turn at night–time before hurtling against the flow of traffic.
As lorries and terrified car drivers flash their headlights, the vehicle swerves from the fast lane into the hard shoulder. Another shows a car careering down the wrong side of a busy carriageway in Cork, narrowly avoiding a head–on collision with two lorries.
A third, filmed in the day in heavy traffic, shows a gang member speeding down the hard shoulder. Each video has clocked up millions of views online.
Creating such content is a full–time job and last week’s tragedy seems to have done little to discourage copycats.
In the early hours of Thursday, a car drove the wrong way up the M50 and N3 before crashing in the Dublin suburb of Ashtown.
Staggeringly, it was at least the fourth such incident logged by the authorities in Dublin in little more than a week.
Jeremy O’Brien (pictured) was one of five teenagers to lose his life in the collision
Kamil Pustowski (pictured) was another of the five teenagers who died in the car that was driving the wrong way down the motorway
And some have ended in devastating injuries. Earlier this month, eight teenagers – one of whom was just 13 – suffered serious injuries in a head–on crash after they drove the wrong way down the M50.
And last Tuesday, in Finglas, Dublin, a high–powered car with five teenagers in it rammed a Gardai vehicle, flipping it on to its roof. Video footage, filmed inside the stolen car, soon emerged on social media.
In other words, this is a criminal class which feels entitled to behave with absolute freedom from any form of punishment. And that is sparking heated political debate.
According to the Irish government, the main villains of this tale – aside from the youths themselves – are not lawmakers, the courts or even the police for failing to stamp out this behaviour, but the rapacious social media companies who have allowed footage of illegal driving to be shared on their platforms.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin declared that Sunday’s tragedy was the result of ‘an irresponsible and dangerous act’ which was ‘being done for likes on social media’. While enterprise minister Peter Burke said TikTok had allowed ‘very extreme [footage] … to sit there for protracted periods of time’, adding that this was ‘not good enough’.
Government sources are now floating the idea that TikTok could be fined as much as 1.5billion euros [£1.28billion], or 6 per cent of its global revenue.
Yet since Ireland’s economy hinges on its status as an accommodating tax haven for Silicon Valley firms, few believe the platform will be properly held to account.
TikTok, in particular, seems to regard itself as beyond reproach. It has turned down an invitation to explain itself before the Irish parliament’s media committee next week, claiming that such scrutiny would not be ‘appropriate’.
Cynics also point out that the Dublin government is on a sticky wicket when it comes to road safety, with two backbenchers from ruling party Fianna Fail facing recent scandals.
In January, Michael Cahill was convicted of driving at 124mph and suspended from driving for two years; Malcolm Byrne has admitted failing a roadside alcohol test but is yet to go on trial. Neither has lost the whip.
In any case, politicians seeking to blame US tech firms for a breakdown in law and order should look closer to home. Take the Gardai. It has cut the number of traffic enforcement officers from 1,046 to 645 since 2009 and no longer employs a single officer who has completed ‘pursuit training’.
Health and safety rules also mean the force now has a policy of never following vehicles travelling the wrong way down a motorway – a rule which joyriders are happy to exploit.
This appears to date back to 2021, when three gangsters died in a head–on crash while being pursued down the N1. The officer pursuing them was controversially prosecuted for ‘endangerment of life’.
On Monday, John O’Connell, head of the country’s policing union, says: ‘Our members are not going to follow [them]. We’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.’
Even if young joyriders are eventually caught, the chances of them being imprisoned are almost zero – thanks to Ireland’s ultra–liberal law and order policies.
Ireland’s 2001 Children’s Act says that ‘a period of detention should be imposed [on any juvenile] only as a measure of last resort’, meaning many can clock up dozens of offences before being given a custodial sentence. And even then, there will almost certainly not be space in prison to accommodate them.
Sinn Fein’s Matt Carthy, the justice committee’s chairman, tells me that this country of more than five million citizens has just one young offenders’ institution – the Oberstown Children Detention Campus. And it only has room for 46 inmates.
While Mr Carthy’s Left–leaning party champions prevention alongside imprisonment, he says that ‘people who pose a threat to communities are undoubtedly now at large because of cuts to budgets’.
Hermann Kelly, a former aide to Nigel Farage, who leads the Irish Freedom Party, takes a more old–fashioned view. ‘These criminal scrotes need less bail, and more jail,’ he tells me. ‘We also need to make parents of repeat offenders take proper responsibility for their children.’
Historically, young hoodlums who had committed petty crimes in Ireland’s working–class neighbourhoods would have been ‘sorted out’ by members of the IRA, Mr Kelly adds.
They no longer hold significant sway. Meanwhile, he argues, parliament’s proportional representation system – which makes it virtually impossible for one party to secure an overall majority – has for years forced centrist parties to form coalitions with Left–wing groups which champion liberal justice policies.
Mr Kelly is particularly scathing about powerful government–funded NGOs (non–governmental organisations) which also lobby for a soft–touch approach to young offenders.
They include the Irish Penal Reform Trust, which receives more than half of its annual budget of 500,000 euros from the taxpayer.
He says: ‘I was looking at their website and it shows that they have seven employees, all of whom appear to be middle–class white women.
Joey Carthy (pictured) also died in the crash. Online tributes posted by friends and relatives praised the deceased teenagers’ criminal acts. These posts sparked violent confrontations and severe public backlash, leading to funeral tribute pages being taken down due to critical comments
Jack Kennedy was the fifth teenage boy to lose his life in the crash
It’s not these people’s communities who are affected by the lawlessness their liberal policies lead to, it’s the working–class ones.’
By way of example, while I was driving to the scene of Sunday’s crash, I heard a resident of one such community, named Joanne, on a radio phone–in. She was a neighbour of one of the five boys involved and said that he and his siblings were prolific criminals who had terrorised the local streets for years.
‘When we moved into the estate in Carlow, they were smashing in our windows within the first 30 minutes of moving in,’ Joanne said. ‘He was allowed out on to the estate to do whatever he wanted along with the rest of the family.’ Commenting on his death, she added: ‘I’ve no sympathy, none whatsoever.’
The track record of the five youths certainly beggars belief. At least three had previously bragged online about driving the wrong way down motorways, with some posting videos of themselves driving at more than 120mph.
Others had posted news articles and social media appeals from victims of car thefts, alongside pictures of themselves standing on top of the stolen cars.
Only last month, McCarthy was quizzed by Gardai over a hit–and–run in Carlow on July 8.
A motorcyclist suffered life–changing injuries after being hit by a stolen black Ford Ranger pick–up. Joey Carthy, who also died in Sunday’s crash, was also called in for questioning over the incident.
This week, a relative posted a tribute to Carthy which showed his other favourite hobby: filming himself carrying out burglaries then uploading footage to TikTok.
Next to footage of him in the bedroom of a sleeping 87–year–old was the caption: ‘You didn’t care Joey, u walk in on top of people while there [sic] asleep [laughing emoji] you really wore the wild one rest easy living legend.’
Another alleged ‘legend’ was Pustkowski, who had a TikTok account showing himself driving stolen cars and vans. In one, he is seen driving the wrong way down a motorway with police lights in the background: ‘Tyre gone still smoked’, reads the caption.
Pustkowski was facing multiple charges for theft and motoring offences. As part of his bail conditions, he was not supposed to leave Limerick at any time – an instruction he had ignored.
Jack Kennedy, the fourth teenager to die on Sunday, was arrested in July on suspicion of car theft after an incident in which a vehicle was driven the wrong way down the M50. He was yet to face charges.
The fifth youth, Jeremy O’Brien, was a suspect in a dangerous driving incident which took place in April.
While they will no longer be joyriding, there seems to be a limitless number of admirers who are willing to take their place. And given the heroic status they are being accorded by fans, few would bet against this social media crimewave which has terrified Ireland eventually spreading to Britain.
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