Are boy racers to blame?

Boy racers are not to blame for the recent spate of road accidents.
So one car enthusiast has told Hot Press. “People who modify their cars don’t race them – it costs too much money. The last thing you want to do is smash it up,” Declan Connolly insists.
Connolly, a 22-year-old forklift operator from Ballymun, who has spent €3,500 in two years doing up his 1994 Honda Civic, admits that he has become increasingly irritated by the focus on boy racers as the cause of crashes. “Every time you see a crash in the paper, it’s never really a boy racer. There’s young drivers in accidents – but look at what they’re driving. There’s nothing boy racer-y about them.”
Declan Connolly is a fully paid-up member of the Pimp My Ride generation: the guys – and occasionally girls – who modify their cars, adding spoilers, alloys and souped-up engines to hatchbacks.
He’s given it what he calls “the works”: a full respray, full body kit, 17-inch alloys, tinted windows, and – as we speak – a new engine is being fitted.
Declan says that modifying cars is a healthy activity for young men. “It’s a project, something to do in your spare time. It keeps you away from other stuff – you don’t want to go down the road of drugs or whatever… it’s just toys for big boys.”
It may be down to what the term ‘boy racer’ is understood to mean. Certainly, recent road deaths have highlighted the vulnerability of young people, or some of them at least, when they get behind the wheel of a car.

Sexual performance
There are just 200 people living in the Co. Monaghan town of Threemilehouse. Recently, five young men from what is little more than a village were killed in a car crash that horrified the nation. At 19 years old, Brian O’Neill was the youngest of those who lost their lives. Ciaran Hagen was 20, Dermot Thornton and Gary McCormack were 21 and the oldest of the five to die, John McQuillan, was just 27.
“The reality is young people between 17 and 24 make up 6% of the Irish population, a tiny group, but they are massively over-represented in the deaths on our road,” says Noel Brett, CEO of the Road Safety Authority. “You’re seven times more likely to be killed [on the road] if you’re between 17 and 24, especially if you’re a male.”
You could say that the statistics speak for themselves in terms of the danger posed by male drivers in their late teens and early 20s.
“What we’re trying to do is not lecture young people, not blame them or stereotype them,” Noel Brett says. “The vast majority are really sensible, considerate road users. However a small number do absolutely crazy, reckless things.”
Roisin Shortall TD, Labour’s Transport spokesperson, also has trouble with the term boy racers. On the run-in to the next election Labour are planning a major study of young male drivers
“People talk about the whole thing of boy racing as if we know what it is, but we don’t,” Shortall says. “We know the impact of it – loud screeching engines, cars flying past us on the road, and, from time to time, tragic stories of casualties. But we don’t know an awful lot else about that phenomenon.”
Galway East TD Joe Callanan said in the Dail recently that ‘For Sale’ signs on cars are one way that illegal racers communicate with each other. He points out that young men have always taken risks on the road, but the difference now is how much more powerful their cars are. “Every young man has money and has a car, and that’s great, but they can be inclined to push it that bit too far,” he says.
For his part, Noel Brett is hopeful that a risqué new ad campaign from the RSA, due to hit cinemas soon, will have the desired impact. It makes a direct link between bad driving and poor sexual performance. If anything can get through to young lads, that might just be it.