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Have you heard about the latest TikTok trend sweeping across Ireland and the UK: stealing a car and then intentionally driving at high speed down the wrong side of a motorway?
The first of these incidents to cause a serious accident was about two weeks ago on the M50, the main ring road in Dublin. Two vehicles collided, resulting in eight teenagers and one man being hospitalised. When I first heard about it, my immediate thought was that it must have been tourists from a country where they drive on the right, who'd made an honest (if deadly) mistake. You can get a direct ferry from France to Ireland, and upon disembarking you will see signs warning you that we drive on the left here.
Then the following weekend, a second incident occurred in Kildare. Five teenaged boys deliberately drove a stolen BMW the wrong way down the M9 motorway three times, before finally colliding with another vehicle. All five boys were killed, while the four occupants of the other vehicle (including a small child) were seriously injured. Footage was recovered from one of the boys' social media profiles which he filmed during the escapade, emblazoning laughing emojis on top*. The realisation that they (and also the drivers on the M50) had done this deliberately for social media clout disturbed me profoundly. The Garda Síochána (Irish police) were heavily criticised for failing to pursue the vehicle, but they defended themselves on the grounds that most of their officers hadn't received appropriate training for dangerous chases like this. (Who could ever have foreseen that the police would need training in how to deal with someone driving on the wrong side of the motorway, not as an evasive manoeuvre, but literally for its own sake?)
Then, for the hat-trick, seven people were killed on Saturday morning when a car deliberately drove the wrong way down the A66 motorway in Middlesbrough (in the UK) and collided with another vehicle. The second vehicle was a police car, and the seven dead include the two police officers inside. Although police officers were pursuing the offending vehicle, it seems the police car they crashed into was not part of this pursuit and the decision had been made to abandon the pursuit seconds before the collision. Nonetheless, the Gardaí's decision not to pursue the M9 perpetrators seems a lot more defensible in hindsight.
A bit over ten years ago, I remember an idiotic trend of people getting themselves killed taking selfies in dangerous places (e.g. leaning out the windows of moving trains) or getting their friends to take pictures of them planking on top of tall buildings. As moronic as this was (and with such a laughably skewed ratio of risk to reward), at least the only people being endangered by these stunts were the people doing them. This is a whole other ball game: at least two bystanders have been killed so far, and at least five injured. I know teenage boys have a reputation for thinking themselves bulletproof, but this shower of arseholes seem wholly lacking in the most basic of self-preservation instincts.
And what scares me most is that I fear the breathless coverage of these horrific accidents will actually entice more teenagers to do likewise. Not in the sense of copycat crimes; not in the sense of glamorising the perpetrators, the way the media does (intentionally or no) whenever there's a school shooting; not even in raising awareness of the concept of driving the wrong way down a motorway to people who would otherwise never have considered it. The reason one carries out a stupid dangerous stunt like this (filming it all the while) is to demonstrate that you're a tough cunt who plays by his own rules. If people actually get maimed or killed while executing these stunts, then someone who does one and emerges on the other side unscathed seems like even more of a tough cunt than they would otherwise – the amount of death and injury that results quantifies how dangerous the stunt is. Thus, every additional corpse makes partaking in these stunts more appealing to someone eager to be seen as a tough cunt.
It also reminds me of a theory I've heard from multiple independent people that there's sort of a "conservation of rebellion" that comes with adolescence. Teenagers are driven to shock and appal their parents, but in the past all they had to do to accomplish this was dye their hair, get a tattoo or pierce their ears with a safety pin. All of those things have since become fairly normalised, but the adolescent urge to act out and disrespect one's elders hasn't gone anywhere, so teenagers are driven to ever more extreme lengths to do things their parents won't approve of.
And here's where it leads us, apparently.
*Even the footage that doesn't show any collisions is scary enough. If I was in the leftmost lane on the motorway and saw a car barreling the wrong way down the hard shoulder, I genuinely don't know how I'd react.
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