Teen Times/Sabrina Ryan: A freshly painted wall in your average Irish town or city. What's missing? Nothing, you might say - but there is in fact a missing link.

The key word here is "average". If it's an average wall in an average town it will have to be covered with pointless graffiti. Give it a week and someone will have defaced it.

Sadly though, it's we who are responsible - we teenagers. Of course, we don't all do it - but I'd like ask those who do this graffiti, why do you do it? It is bad enough for all of us to be tarred with the same brush but you put our education system to shame at the same time.

Let's get one thing straight: "I woz ere" is the greatest display of ignorance yet. It's depressingly poor English and nobody cares about your whereabouts either.

That phrase is mild compared with what can appear. Think of who you may be offending the next time you draw stick figures in various sexual positions in graphic detail.

Graffiti in this country varies from the grammatically incorrect to the vulgar to the downright pathetic.

There is a prime example of pathetic graffiti here in Ennis: "I love chicken rolls." Do you want us to give you one? You know the price of that permanent marker is probably more than a chicken roll?

How much taxpayers' money is wasted each year on painting and re-painting these walls? It all falls back on the average Joe, who now has to pay 20 cent to use a public toilet. All it takes is one upstanding, law-abiding citizen to complain about a crude slogan scrawled on a wall and the appropriate authorities have to deploy staff to deal with the problem.

I've seen it myself. A feud between people is advertised on an alley wall. One writes something nasty about the other, the latter gets upset. They go to the Garda and complain about being threatened. It's a vicious cycle.

The question is, how do we tackle it? I can safely say your average teenager isn't worried about Government expenditure, so don't even try to bring that up. Painting over the graffiti creates a fresh canvas; it'd be a sitting duck. Leaving it as it is offends the general public. Any more ideas?

Well think about it, leave it there, ignore it, let the walls fill up with these slogans. There will soon be only the very top of walls left to deface. It'll take a die-hard vandal to get up there. They'll hop up on their comrade's shoulders and reach up. A single slip-up in this manoeuvre could be fatal. They will come crashing down, breaking bones and (even worse) bruising their ego.

Then they too are dumped on a hospital trolley for two days, where they will have plenty of time to wonder where all that taxpayers' money goes.