APPEALING to the consciences of those imperilling the public on scramblers, e-scooters and motorised bikes is a fool’s errand.

There was a brief period of hope following the heartbreaking death of Grace Lynch in January.

It looked for a while that the national revulsion at the senseless accident which took her life would lead some to reconsider their conduct.

Normal, wretched service was soon resumed.

In fact, it got worse with the revelation that the family were being trolled about Grace’s death online.

Never underestimate the depths to which scumbags will sink.

Anecdotal evidence suggests scramblers are as widespread as ever, despite the fast-tracking of a law bearing Grace’s name that bans the use of scramblers and quad bikes in public places.

I was recently driving down a busy suburban road in the west of Dublin and two scramblers, with two youths on each, came screaming up the white line in the wrong direction.

Cars and buses had to swerve to avoid them, and the kids were having the time of their lives.

Kids is the operative word.

These terrors were little more than children. Someone somewhere is responsible for them.

Could they really have no inkling that their darlings were terrifying motorists in early-evening traffic?

The role of parents in the misery being visited on urban Ireland by these e-vehicles is stubbornly overlooked, thanks in on small part to an ideological obsession with blaming society for failing children that have been betrayed by feckless families.

But comments from the incoming Lord Mayor of Dublin provide some reassurance that the blindingly obvious duty on parents to know what their children are doing and how they conduct themselves hasn’t entirely escaped political attention.

The office is a ceremonial one and more readily associated now with petty posturing in service of partisan political positions, like how Christmas is represented in the city, but at least Darryl Barron, elected Mayor last week, had the gumption to acknowledge that parents have a role in how their kids behave.

It’s hardly revelatory, but it counts as noteworthy in a political culture where individualism is prized at the expense of traditional social structures.

Barron talked in a weekend interview about the scourge of antisocial behaviour generally in the city, and the disdain with which young people treat gardaí when apprehended.

He also mentioned arson attacks on playgrounds in recent months, an especially bleak way of damaging the society in which you live.

‘But I also think we have to be honest with ourselves, that mammies and daddies need to know where their kids are,’ he said.

Since then, the cavalry hasn’t exactly charged in behind those sentiments, because they are at odds with public discussion of criminal issues where language is ruthlessly policed by the usual dismal high priests of this new iteration of censorious Ireland.

But parental responsibility should be paramount, and any gurrier found guilty of torching a playground should have his parents or guardians hauled into the dock beside him.

And the same goes with tackling the menace of e-scooters, e-bikes and scramblers.

Not all of the carnage on footpaths and in public parks is being caused by adolescents, but a huge amount of it is.

Any parent that is letting their little darling out in the morning on a vehicle that can kill somebody, kitted out in the uniform of black tracksuit, black puffer jacket and black scarf or balaclava, is culpable before the kid starts their engine.

It was reported in these pages last week that gardaí want greater powers to tackle the chaos these machines are visiting on the country.

This includes calls for a licensing system, which with the use of modern technology should make it easy to identify to whom a vehicle was registered.

Criminals know that officers on foot or in patrol cars can’t pursue a scooter through the narrow paths and chicanes of a housing estate. But if the vehicle could be scanned and identified, it would provide a lead at the very least.

Not that these machines would be legitimately registered in the event of such a scheme, of course. We know that a great many of them are being used to courier drugs, for instance, with dealers wowing kids in their early teens and even younger, with a scooter and then trapping them into lives of criminality, with bleak outcomes all but guaranteed.

To date in this country, ten people have been killed in accidents involving e-scooters, since records began in 2020. Hundreds if not thousands have been injured.

Six children have been put on life support in Temple Street Children’s Hospital in just the past fortnight, doctors warned last week.

They described the problem as an epidemic that is out of control.

And it really does feel like that when someone screams past you on a footpath and you can’t hear them coming because the engines are so quiet.

This plague was predicted here, and it took no special foresight to see it coming.

Drastic action is required – but that must include making parents accountable for the conduct of those under their care.

Trust Trump to resort to foul play 

IT’S not that sport and politics mix, it’s how they mix that matters.

The USA soccer team are a laughing stock after Donald Trump’s characteristic intervention caused a bona fide scandal at the World Cup.

Trump strong-armed the spineless FIFA President Gianni Infantino before the US played Belgium in their last-16 match on Monday, with the team’s star striker, Folarin Balogun, suddenly cleared to play the game after initially being banned for the match after getting a red card in the previous game.

The episode has done enormous damage to FIFA, and the only potential upside is that it could cost the reprehensible Infantino dearly, with reports of growing discontent within the organisation.

Trump, whose gracelessness is his default setting, bragged about calling Infantino to get Balogun off and available to play. He duly did, and the US were battered 4-1 by the fired-up Belgians – not a description often committed to print.

Infantino and FIFA paid the price for getting too close to Trump, who duly used them at the first opportunity.

No sporting organisation can be used as a political instrument and hope to retain its authority.

And it’s a point that needs to be remembered by those trying to make the FAI serve a political viewpoint ahead of Ireland’s games against Israel in the autumn.

If a sport can be used to serve one political ideology, there’s nothing to stop it being deployed in service of a different one in future.

That way madness lies – and ruination, too.

Another bandwagon for our ‘free press’ 

AS SHAMEFUL as the attempts of the Labour Party to shut down justified journalistic investigation into the muddled public account of Helen Ogbu’s arrival in Ireland were, it was wincing to see the willingness of some other news organisations to platform the party’s botched hatchet job.

This was a classic case of being seen on the right side of the story, and so there were headlines about ‘intimidatory and unacceptable’ behaviour written in newsrooms full of people who know damn well that doorstepping is a legitimate and long-recognised tool of this particular trade.

The reluctance of others to probe the Ogbu story is for them to justify, but it’s galling when they are the first out to lecture about the preciousness of a free press in democracy when Donald Trump says something stupid.

When there is a half-baked but still nasty and unsettling effort to traduce legitimate journalism in this country, they turn from fearless watchdogs into supine lapdogs.

It is in truth no great surprise, but it’s worth bearing in mind the next time you read some high-handed screed railing against a demented president on the other side of the Atlantic.

Hold me back and let me at him.