World of Politics with Harry McGee

I don’t know when scramblers first became part of the Irish motorbike scene. I can certainly remember them during the eighties, when I was a teenager, first being used off-road and later on the road by a couple of older teenagers in Galway. My memory is that most of them seemed relatively small, about 125cc, no more than that.

Anyway, fast-forward about 20 years. By then, I was working in Dublin and at the time, I was playing a bit of weekend soccer in one of the lower divisions of the Dublin Leagues. One Saturday, we were playing a game against a team from East Wall, near the docks on Dublin’s northside.

Within five minutes of the game starting, a squadron of scramblers and mini-scramblers, all driven by teenagers – most of them wearing no helmets – arrived on the pitch like a swarm of hornets. Very quickly, they proceeded to drive right across the pitch, scorching a trail between players, oblivious to the dangers involved.

By the time they got to the other end of the pitch they had left behind a trail of destruction — massive, rutted tracks.

One or two of the local team became very angry at the way the kids had cut up the pitch. One of the kids was grabbed off his bike as he neared the end of the pitch and given what might euphemistically be called a clip around the ear.

It was my first encounter with scramblers being used in an urban setting, and in a way that looked, on the face of it at least, like antisocial behaviour.

It has been an ongoing issue in Dublin and other urban centres since then. You see kids, mostly boys, dressed in hoodies and tracksuits racing up and down wastelands on scrambler bikes, and sometimes, as we have seen, driving at high speed through residential estates — on roads, on footpaths and on grass verges.

Last week, I trawled through the Dáil records to see how long scrambler bikes had been on the political agenda. There were parliamentary questions dating back 20 years from TDs complaining about their use on football pitches and parks, generally highlighting antisocial behaviour.

Pictured: Grace Lynch…her killing prompted mass outrage – and action.