Surfing the web can bring you to some strange places. My latest journey on the internet began last night when I was checking my visitor statistics. I noticed that one person had found my site by searching for 'finglas st patrick's day youtube'. This was obviously someone looking for footage of the riots there on St Patrick's Day.
It hadn't occurred to me to go looking for footage like that but when I saw the keywords I got the idea to have a look myself. The only clips I found were short and poor quality, shot on a camera phone:
One of the good things about YouTube is that similar videos are linked to each other so, while the St Patrick's Day riot footage wasn't much use it brought me on to more interesting things. One of these was a gangster rap from a couple of teenagers in Finglas about killing a police informer.
I used to listen to a lot of rap by the likes of NWA when I was their age too. The lyrics of gangster rap are graphic and violent but hearing young lads with Dublin accents rapping in the same way makes it seem more real.
I have to admit to doing a bit of rapping in the privacy of my bedroom too when I was their age! It was a good way of venting emotions and I never actually killed anyone despite my violent lyrics. But then again I wasn’t stoned either unlike one of the fellas here. Hopefully they'll grow out of it but there’s a chance that they won't:
From there I moved on to joy-riding and I found plenty of examples of this on YouTube. Staying with Finglas this is one of a lad doing a wheelie on a motorbike:
Still with Finglas here's one of joy-riders racing on the M50. It's set to music and the production qualities of this one are quite good. It's a good clip to see things from the joy riders perspective. People may not want to do that but I always think it's a good idea to look at things from different angles and try to understand why people do stuff like this. In the case of joy riding it's done for the thrill of it, with no regard for the consequences.
I think it's telling the way they turn the camera to look at the cars as they overtake them. You can just imagine the scene inside the joy-riders car as they overtake each one. So while the clip shows the fun side of joy-riding it also unwittingly shows the anti-social aspect of it too. Part of the thrill of it is in disturbing other people and scaring them.
Incidently this could be another good argument for getting rid of the tolls. These guys treat the green light and the raised barrier as the start of the race:
And speaking of anti-social behaviour here's one of joy-riding in the middle of a housing estate in broad daylight. I don't know what estate it is. I'm just glad I don't live in it. Imagine trying to raise children in an environment like this. Would you be able to do it and keep them away from this type of behavior? It wouldn't be easy:
Finally, just to give some balance to this in case it appears that I'm just out to knock Finglas I want to assure you that I'm not. There are many areas where this type of thing goes on and some of those happen to be in Finglas. My sympathy to the normal people living there who have to put up with this type of stuff.
I'm sure many people looking at these clips are thinking that the solution is tougher policing and 'taking the gloves off' etc, etc. As an argument against that here are some YouTube clips from 'hoods' in Belfast. Joy-riders there have been getting knee-capped and their limbs broken for decades. The extra danger only seems to have added to the thrill:
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