Niall Gilligan cleared of assault

And by your response you think a young child should be given a severe beating for a minor indiscretion.

I sincerely hope you don't have or never will have children or be in charge of any children if you think a violent beating by an adult is the correct way to punish them for a relatively minor incident

Does anyone know if or indeed what verbal exchange took place between Mr Gilligan and the kid, prior to the physical side of it?

not trespassing though was it , or once off ,him and his chum did a lot of damage to the inside , left off fire extinguishers stole keys. hardly their first time out and about

this is a fine example of the sort of **** behaviour that going unanswered creates **** people as adults .

some one posted already here about a situation where if he had brought the kid home or called to the parents door Gilligan would have ended up in court regardless. .

Gilligan went a bit hard yes but also glad he got off and only for his popularity in the community he would faced years of intimidation from this wee shitebag and his family for years , now that seems unlikely

sounds like the parents went for the all carrot and no stick approach to raising their kids while mr Gilligan went with the opposite 😄

The article in the Independent doesn’t reflect very well on the parents. They don’t seem to see the child’s behaviour as seriously problematic or an indictment of their own parenting.

I guess if you think there is nothing wrong with intruding on other peoples property you won’t see why there might be a reaction to it.

I don't think Gilligan denied beating him with a stick.

"might" does the heavy lifting here and it is debatible.

either way, even in the slight possible event it did deter him from whatever, that is not justification for him being beaten to a pulp for which there is none i'm afraid.

won’t someone think of the children 😄 cue hand wringing

Youngsters, acting the bollix and consequences.

This video went up on twitter yesterday.

While we can,t see his face clearly with his hood up, we can see he was acting the bollix and playing with fire.

Luckily for that particular youngster on that bus, the man he targeted showed self restraint and didn,t react in anyway.

But what if had of been another man the wrong man on the wrong day scenario and if a different man reacted with one good hard open hand slap to the youngsters face ? does anyone think a man should face arrest or charges for being unwilling to put up with unprovoked aggression if that had of been a different man on a different day ?

Whoever the parents of that little **** are they obviously never taught much regarding acting the bollix with unprovoked aggression towards a random stranger can have consequences, if and when he decides to do likewise towards another random stranger he may not be so lucky .

We’re all in agreement that the boy was trespassing, nobody disputes that, yet it keeps getting repeated like it’s breaking news.

The real issue for the empathetic person is the beating he received and of course the frustrations Gilligan endured. Even Gilligan’s own supporters admit it was a deliberate revenge attack to injure and “teach him a lesson”. Nobody buys the self-defence story, it's barely mentioned here.

So it boils down to this:

One side thinks grown men should dish out their own justice by beating children.
One side believes no man has the right to take the law into his own hands and beat up a child.

In that case, you believe grown men should dish out their own justice by beating children.

Even if they were adults trespassing they shouldn't have been beaten. A quick check of the criminal justic act does not have being beaten up as a punishment (https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1994/act/2/section/13/enacted/en/html).

But it's a local GAA man, he was never getting convicted. Rubbish decision.

Not sure why you're keeping on with this nonsense. The case appeared before the court and he was found not-guilty. Also the whole GAA favoritism thing is getting old now as well.

Lol, trespassing, criminal damage and theft is relatively minor? And to top it all off, lying about what happened. It'll be a long time before some other scumbag creeps into that property intent on damaging something that doesn't belong to them.

A sensible jury. Vandalism is rife in Ireland and very rarely are they caught.