Madam, – It’s an absolute scandal that troubled Irish teenagers are being sent to a remote island in the middle of the Baltic Sea to receive the help they need, as reported by Tom Tuite (Home News, June 15th). It conjures up bleak images from a film by Ingmar Bergman. Is there nowhere in this country where they can be rehabilitated?
I went off the rails myself in my mid-teens, due to the effect on me of listening to my mother haranguing my inebriated father night after night, and the bad atmosphere in the house the next day.
I became disillusioned with life, lost interest in my studies and started cheating in my exams – I always called it “copying” – and then after becoming a day boy at Easter in my fourth year, started mitching from college and hitch-hiking to various towns in the North and shoplifting on a large scale. My decline culminated in my taking an overdose of tranquillisers in the summer of 1970, shortly after Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico with a marvellous team that included the incomparable Pele. So I can identify with troubled teenagers.
We live in a country where billions can be found to bail out greedy bankers, and yet we read every day about services to our most vulnerable citizens – children in care, people with intellectual and other disabilities, old people, inter alia – being withdrawn or cut by the HSE.
Surely if we can spend such vast amounts of money restoring our delinquent banks to health, we should be able to afford the relative pittance that it would take to construct and staff treatment centres where our juvenile delinquents can get the help they need, instead of exporting our problems to Sweden. – Yours, etc,