Five teenage boys were arrested on Friday in relation to the assault of a teenager in Co. Meath this week, which gardaí are treating as a hate crime.
The 14-year-old victim has received treatment for serious facial injuries in hospital following the incident, which was recorded and has been shared online over five million times.
Education Minister Norma Foley said he is keen to return to school in the coming days. Two teenagers were arrested late on Friday afternoon in connection with the attack, and were questioned at Garda stations in Co. Meath by gardaí specially trained in dealing with minors.
Three other teenage boys had been arrested earlier in the day, for alleged offences under the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act, 1999. All five were released without charge, and gardaí said a file will be referred ‘in the first instance’ for consideration for admission to the Juvenile Diversion Programme in accordance with the Children’s Act, 2001.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said that he was ‘glad to hear that arrests have happened’. He said he had spoken with the boy and his mother over a video call ‘just to express my solidarity and support’.
‘They were happy that the gardaí had engaged with them, and the school too,’ he told reporters in Tipperary. Mr Varadkar said that the public should look at its own actions and that while they may be sharing the video as a sign of ‘solidarity’, any content which showed the humiliation of a victim should not be shared.
He said that a new Online Safety Commissioner and a media commission – Coimisiún na Meán – were being set up to regulate social media and online media.
Mr Varadkar criticised Twitter in particular for ‘failing to live up to its obligations’, stating: ‘I had a chance to have some engagement with one of the companies yesterday. Google said to me that they were doing everything to take it down off YouTube, which they’ve done. [It is] hard to find on Facebook and, I believe, on TikTok as well.
'Twitter, as often is the case, is not living up to its obligations, in my view, in terms of its own community standards, and not for the first time. I think we should be willing to distinguish between companies that do make an effort to apply their own standards and those that are failing in applying their own standards. To me, that includes Twitter.’
Minister Foley said on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that society ‘is ‘still reeling’ from the attack in Navan. She added: ‘This will not be and will never become the culture within our school communities. It is not acceptable, and it is not who we are.’
