Trina O'Connor

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124 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 7 Sep

Trina O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Today with David McCullagh · Should parents be punished for the crimes of their children? · 21 May 2026 podcast

So there is responsibility there on the parents in Ireland.

No, I mean, well, you see, if the judge places an order that there needs to be some sort of family support or some sort of guidance given, so like a community order, the parents will have to sign up to that.

And there are consequences if the parents don't get involved in the justice process for their child in Ireland.

Children can be taken into the ward or court, into the care.

So it's much more nuanced than, you know, lock them up because if we lock up parents and the parents are already struggling, then there's other children there that can cause harm to them.

Yeah.

So Fagan's Law was brought in in 2024, I think.

It originally started in Australia.

So it's a law that's designed to target adults who encourage young people or coerce young people to commit crimes.

So basically, in Ireland, it was introduced under the Children's Act

And what it means is that the court can impose a supervision order on parents or they can bind parents over to ensure that their children have to work with, say, TUSLA, for example, and there's welfare and supervision, but also they can be criminally held responsible if they are found to be responsible for the child getting involved in crime or

if they've facilitated the crime so it's a very tricky one david because often children um who if a conviction is going to go ahead children will have to give evidence and that can be very tricky because sometimes the people who acquiesce them because it's such a family it's um people in the neighborhood and that kind of thing like organized crime gangs they have to give evidence so um

In Ireland, though, there has been, as far as I understand, 17 criminal proceedings have been initiated under this, but I couldn't get the numbers for convictions.

Yeah, absolutely.

And in Ireland, like our age of criminal age of responsibility, I think it's 40, it's 12, I think.

And I think they're looking to increase it to 14 because we're one of the lowest in Europe.

So, yeah, I mean, we have to look at what's going on because sometimes people say, like, what's wrong with them?

And I would say, ask the question, well, what happened to them?

Because if a young child of 10 or 11 is involved repeatedly in antisocial behaviour or even in violent behaviour,

we have to look at what's going on under the bonnet.

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