Bridging the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’

Michael Clifford (Analysis, Feb 17) poses some salient questions in his sortie into serious gun and gangland crime.

He identifies elements of statutory avoidance, social duplicity and poverty gamesmanship perpetrated with relentless abandon by most of “us”, not “them”.

Clifford promotes the avoidance of such an “us and them” deepening divide. Fingering the paltry resort to new law-making as a totally inadequate response, he hammers home the point thus: “In a world of bling, where the individual was raised above any notion of the collective, it would have taken too much societal self-analysis to wonder why teenagers could transmogrify into depraved killers.”

These kind of crime-related questions were of course being bandied around 20 and more years ago, yet no real action-based intervention formula was ever fully elaborated — merely a sticking-plaster approach to fundamental needs and basic rehabilitation supports. Many half-baked, unintegrated, unsustained and under-developed programmes and projects were tossed over the wall towards the issues confronting “them”. Squandering opportunity was rife. Gliding over the root cause and effect thread of serious anti-social criminality is well nigh criminal in itself — a social oxymoron of gigantic proportion, and just not good enough by any measure. Detection and prosecution is at one end of the crime conundrum. It’s the other end of that spectrum we need to address, along with some serious rehabilitation effort. Comprehensively equipped family-support systems, fully integrated as per community need; prison rehabilitation programmes of the utmost creative educational quality and therapeutic efficacy; sustained funding for pro-active wellbeing templates vis-a-vis personal development, productive leisure and substantial work skill sets. These are vital components for transformation, and productive societal enmeshment. They also make overall cost-benefit sense in the longer term.

Thus, may we all potentially flourish as citizens of the same, safe state, not in a “loads-a-money” mode, but within a caring, shared sanctuary of hope and personal fulfilment for all.

Jim Cosgrove

Lismore

Co Waterford