[javanissen]

I see a few phenomena here:

1) The US was rebuilt after WW2 to be highly car-centric, with disastrous results for pedestrian safety. It is actually more dangerous for children to move in public because of this automobile centricity in >95% of US spaces, which drives cultural shifts

2) US media is highly sensationalist; Fox News is popular and generally serves to make viewers frightened of the world

3) The US has 340M people to Ireland’s 5.6M people, so from a base rate, we’d expect ~60x more lurid headlines to come out of the US