Ah yes, being 14 years old. Close your eyes, let memories from this time wash over you. The ever-present fear of homework; massive shame over your rapidly morphing teenage body; the true dawn of your awakening tastes of music, movies and art; colossal amounts of bodily shame; the opening shots of, what would prove to be, a long and bloody war of attrition as you sought liberty from under your parents’ yoke; vast, infinite wells of profound bodily angst, and, being arrested for driving with more than the legal limit of alcohol in your blood.
This is the point where -, if this article were a well-produced trailer for a 1980s screwball comedy film – there would be a record scratch and this whole debacle would judder to a planned halt. Unfortunately however, in spite of my frequent insisting that all College Times content should be created as irreverent 1980s style trailers instead of articles, we lack both the resources and the will-power to make this happen. As such, we must content ourselves with informing you, by way of article, the bizarre news that a 14 year old was arrested for drink-driving over the Christmas period.
Information pertaining to drink-driving statistics from the 2018/19 winter period was released by the PSNI to highlight their winter anti-drink driving operation this week. While the report concerned overall trends relating to the number of arrests made as compared to last year, they released some information relating to several exceptional cases. One of these, as revealed by Assistant Chief Constable Alan Todd, was that the youngest offender of the 322 people arrested by the PSNI between 30 November 2018 and 1 January 2019, was a 14 year old.
Speaking about the arrest, Assistant Chief Constable Alan Todd said, “At 14 years of age, the youngest person detected shouldn’t have been on the road – let alone failing a breath test. This individual is being dealt with for a number of motoring offences, including Taking and Driving Away.”
While their may have been a 100% increase in the number of 14 year olds arrested for drink-driving during this period as opposed to last year (I’m making an educated guess here), there was good news in that the overall number of arrests made on people over the limit decreased by 10.6% when compared to last year.
