OVER the New Year, I found myself on a local radio phone-in show discussing law and order with a GP in his mid-forties and a 17-year-old A- level student.

One of the callers set us off talking about corporal punishment. Being a policeman, the birch immediately came to my mind, but the other two panel members took it as a cue to discuss caning in school.

The GP argued that caning was perfectly acceptable if it taught children discipline and acted as a deterrent. Yes, he said, when asked, I did smack my children, but only as a form of love.

The young student exploded. She said smacking was not love but a form of child abuse.

I'm afraid I tired a little of the debate. I don't have strong views either way about whether it is morally or ethically right to violently punish another person.

All I know is that it doesn't work. At my Catholic school in the late 1960s we were regularly caned and it motivated some of us to misbehave. Each Monday morning, we'd put 6d in a kitty and the person who'd had the most canings by 3.15pm on Friday would scoop the lot. At 3pm on a Friday, you could see those near the top of the league vying with each other to get a last minute caning and so win the week's prize.

I think the record canings in a week was 17. One week - probably when the seriously naughty ones were all off sick - even I scooped the kitty.

It didn't teach many lessons. Within a few years of leaving school, 13 of my 36 classmates were serving custodial sentences - I know because I locked a few of them up.

Then the radio show moved on to talk about birching adults. Again, I tired of the debate because, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, it doesn't work. The courts don't use half of the powers they have now, so how likely would they be to use a more hardline measure? They would not.

And would it have any deterrent on the increasing number of career criminals who see any punishment as an occupational hazard? It would not.

On my way home from the show, I stopped off for a drive-through burger. The car park was littered with packaging. A couple of very respectable-looking teenage girls drove in in an S-reg Vauxhall Corsa. They seemed charming enough until they emptied all their rubbish out of their car window and drove off.

And this summed up the pointlessness of the discipline debate to me. It all comes down to respect - in this case respect for the environment and respect for other people who neither want to look at your rubbish nor have to collect it.

You can't thrash that respect into people and you can't just expect it to appear in them. It has to be nurtured and taught, caressed and cherished by good parents and good schools in a good environment.

MY gym this week has been full of "new starters" - people who have resolved to be healthy this new year. Even my 16-year-old daughter is gearing herself up.

The other favourite resolution is to quit smoking and one-in-three who tried last year succeeded.

I just hope that someone is looking at the long-term consequences of all this because in 50 years' time it could have a real impact on our economy.

As more and more people stop smoking, the Government's revenue falls. It also means more and more people will live longer. But as people grow older they become like cars - old cars need more maintenance than new ones. Increasing numbers of older people are bound to put more strain on the National Health Service and on the Exchequer which will have to pay out more in pensions.

It all sounds very worrying - unless, like me, your resolution is simply not to worry but just to be happy in the new year.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/news/ mallon.htm