In recent weeks my good friend Anthony Kenny has been awaiting the sentencing of the young man who was driving the car in which his grandson was killed.
Daniel Kenny died in the early hours of Saturday, February 25th, 2006, on Ulverton Road, Dalkey. He was 20. He had been out for a night's drinking with his best friend, Stephen O'Reilly, who had just become a father. Daniel's car, with Stephen driving, hit a lamp-post on a sharp bend near Bulloch Harbour. Daniel died instantly.
Last Monday, Stephen was sentenced, having pleaded guilty to drunk driving causing death. Judge Catherine Delahunt sentenced him to four years in prison, one year suspended.
Anthony Kenny is devastated by this outcome. The founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), Gertie Shields, was quoted as saying that the sentence "beggars belief". Anthony agrees, but from the diametrically opposite perspective. Ms Shields said: "It's a disgrace he got away with four years. It's a small value to place on a young life." Anthony Kenny believes the sentence was too harsh, was disproportionate in a different sense. It is not just that sending Stephen to jail will not bring Daniel back, but that Anthony detects a profound untruthfulness in the sentence in the overall context of events.
Sentencing had been postponed to allow the judge to consider issues of mitigation, including a victim impact statement by Anthony Kenny in which he asked the court not to impose a custodial sentence. Anthony participated in the trial but did not attend either of the sentencing hearings. He felt the whole thing was designed to promote vengefulness, to divide people into those who were "for Daniel" and those pleading for mercy for Stephen. He didn't see it like that.
When he sees Stephen, he says, he sees Daniel. By a different throw of the dice, the roles might have been reversed, and how then, he asks himself, would he have reacted to headlines like "Drunk driver who killed pal is jailed", or photographs of his grandson being led away in chains?
None of it is truthful, says Anthony, and it is most of all untruthful to his grandson's memory. Would Daniel have wanted his best friend, already devastated by what has happened, to rot away the prime of his life in the company of murderers and drug dealers?
Emphatically, no. He found the reporting of the case as disturbing as the sentence. Everywhere the same pictures and the same headlines, none truthful or even faithful to events. Critical details were omitted - the fact, for example, that Stephen was driving Daniel's car. It was reported that Stephen fled the scene of the accident and left his friend to die. Yes, Stephen panicked and ran away, but he came back in short time. It was reported that he made 13 calls on his mobile phone but failed to contact emergency services. Yes, Anthony says, and four of these calls were to Daniel's mobile. What does this mean?
Stephen subsequently told gardaí he knew his friend had died instantly, but Anthony says that at the hospital later he seemed unaware that Daniel was dead. Does anybody, asks Anthony Kenny, seek to put themselves in the situation of the young man in the throes of such a calamity? In one of the phone calls Stephen pleaded with a friend, "You've got to get me out of here. The helicopter is out. Dan is dead." The helicopter was actually searching for a man who had that evening gone into the sea at Bulloch Harbour.
Anthony Kenny believes we have become obsessed with vengeance and he wants no part of it. Vengeance is lies and beyond there is "nothing but abyss".
What happened to his grandson was terrible, but Daniel was also a party to events. The two men got drunk together and made an arrangement concerning who would drive. The worst happened. To see Daniel as the victim and Stephen as the perpetrator is untruthful and wrong. Lots of people drink and get behind the wheels of cars but are fortunate to wake up to nothing worse than a sore head and a bad conscience. Most of those charged with drunk driving get off with a disqualification, and many walk away with impunity on a technicality. What was this sentence, for "driving while drunk or as atonement for the life of his grandson"?
My friend is right. We have become fixated on finding scapegoats for every calamity. Drunk driving is inexcusable, but no less so because the perpetrator manages to get home without killing anyone. As that helicopter symbolises so eloquently, we live in a society that offers its young men nothing but hostility and emptiness and then wonders why they do crazy or despairing things.
Daniel and Stephen grew up loving sport in a society where sport and alcohol are made synonymous by sponsorship and everyone has long looked away from any proposal to do anything about this.
But when the unthinkable happens, everyone knows what to do: finger the scapegoat; chain, label and condemn him; and then get back to the bar.