WE HEAR all the time about anti-social behaviour from the young – I told off a group of teenage girls in the High Street the other evening who were throwing café chairs about – but older people can be just as bad.

This Sunday evening, just outside the Co-op in Shamrock Street, a large, shaven-headed, tattoed middle-aged thug came out of the shop, dropped two plastic cola bottles, despite a bin being only six feet away before getting into a people carrier/4x4 with another skinhead, a brassy blonde and two Doberman/Rottweiler-type dogs. I hesitated for a moment but decided that if I did not confront him as I had with the girls it would be cowardly. I asked him why he had done it and told him he should pick them up. The reply, of course, was filled with obscenities and threats but, thankfully, he had driven off when I came out of the shop again. Of course, what I SHOULD have done was taken his registration number and called the police.

My point is this: if decent people do nothing when the law is broken in front of their eyes nothing will change for the better. It may not be likely but it is possible, JUST, that having been pulled up for his anti-social behaviour perhaps for the first time in his life this thug may feel ashamed and change his ways.

For evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good people to do nothing.

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