Government high on rhetoric while drug lords kill for control of streets
The Government has been trying to pull the wool over our eyes with a combination of its own self-deception, political opportunism and cynical indifference.
On coming to power in 1997, this Government promised to tackle serious crime, but then effectively ignored the inevitable implications of so-called joyriding.
As a result of their persistent indifference, totally innocent people are now being endangered nightly on our streets and some have been murdered by those irresponsible thrill-seekers.
This, like the fallout from our drug problems, has been predictable for years.
On Gay Byrne's Late Late Show in 1992 Barry Galvin, then State Solicitor for Cork, warned that the country had become a haven for drug traffickers.
We were told that ten major drug dealers, driven out of Britain and Holland, had set up in the south of Ireland. Now surprise, surprise we have a serious drug problem not only in Dublin, but also in Cork and Limerick.
It will keep spreading like a cancer, because we persist in treating the problem with failed methods.
An effective way of tackling the lure of drug dealing would be to eliminate drug profits by treating addicts as patients and providing their drugs at close to cost under prescription, just as diabetics are treated with insulin.
That would take the profit out of drugs and afford an opportunity of coming to grips with the problem.
In one of my first columns here in April, 1995, I noted that the United States had the same kind of drug problems for over 25 years.
The Americans had spent more than $300 billion on drug enforcement, but they were only throwing good money after bad.
"It is pointless adopting methods that have failed so dismally elsewhere," I argued. "If our leaders persist in making the same mistakes they will deserve nothing but contempt."
Back then it was estimated that it took £150 a day to feed a drug habit in Dublin.
Very few could pay that kind of money, so they stole things worth about four times the value to get the money for a day's supply of drugs. The dealers essentially enslaved these people.
The easiest way for an addict to get money was to set up his own mini drug network by getting other people hooked on heroin so that he could supply them and have them do the stealing.
The whole thing spread on the same principle as pyramid selling.
All too often the victims were vulnerable children who did not know any better. It was like the modern equivalent of a Charles Dickens novel in which children were being "hooked" and used for stealing.
The drug gangs could buy heroin in Amsterdam for £25,000 and sell it on the streets of Dublin and Cork for £500,000. Youngsters in Cork told Tom Maguire in an RTÉ interview that they were clearing around £2,000 a week selling drugs.
They were making more than the Taoiseach at the time. People were prepared to take the risks, because they could make more money on drugs in a matter of hours than they could earn in a lifetime of honest toil.
In their 1987 book, Blood in the Streets, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the imminent collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.
As a result their next book, The Great Reckoning, was an instant bestseller when it came out in 1991.
"The new threats to peace that seem likely to emerge in the '90s could make even the most hard-nosed Cold Warrior nostalgic for days when ponderous communists bureaucracies were the principal enemies of progress," they wrote.
"We will see a reversion to conflict along tribal and ethnic lines." They forecast the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
They also predicted the spread of terrorism to Japan and the USA, where they singled out New York City as particularly vulnerable.
In the light of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, and the destruction of the twin towers in New York, the authors' other predictions merit serious reconsideration.
Davidson and Rees-Mogg contended that the drug situation had the potential to undermine even the most developed societies.
In 1990, for instance, the cocaine trade in the US alone was worth $95 billion a year, which was more than the total economy of Saudi Arabia with all its oil wealth.
With so much money at their disposal, the drug lords had the means to purchase the political clout to threaten domestic peace anywhere in the world.
The authors predicted that illicit drug profits would finance the development of criminal gangs and the corruption of police and public officials.
"Nothing could be better calculated to destroy the foundations of economic progress than to hand billions of annual cocaine profits to murderous drug lords," they argued.
In the aftermath of Veronica Guerin's murder, our politicians were compelled to act. Fianna Fáil got the credit for taking a hard line on criminal activity.
As leader of the opposition, Bertie Ahern suggested that then Taoiseach John Bruton was giving "the impression that the Government is not serious about combating crime". That was on April 2, 1996.
"Other jurisdictions operate a system of zero tolerance to crime," Bertie complained. "We seem to tolerate all crime in this country."
The Rainbow Coalition lost power in 1997 because the Labour Party fared so badly in Dublin, not due to the 1992 U-turn in getting into bed with Albert Reynolds, but because they had appeared to be soft of crime.
Fianna Fáil milked the frustration of Dublin people with promises of zero tolerance.
"It is hard to imagine a more corrosive threat to the quality of life in our community than that posed by those who engage in the evil trade of drug trafficking," John O'Donoghue stated in his first Dáil speech as Minister for Justice and Law Reform on July 9, 1997.
"One message should go clearly from this House today; there will be absolutely no let up in the fight against drug trafficking. The fight will be intensified."
It sounded like the law and order crap spouted by Richard Nixon, the disgraced American President.
"The Government's zero tolerance approach is about action on the ground and by way of legislation to curb the activities of drug dealers and other serious criminals," O'Donoghue declared on November 12, 1997.
The selection of available drugs was still quite limited. "You can't get good coke in this town," Eamon Dunphy explained in an infamous 1998 interview with Ireland on Sunday's Rachael Borrill, who noted that "Dunphy admits he would love to try crack, but moans again, it's impossible to buy on the streets."
Five years later, there is no shortage of cocaine.
The Criminal Assets Bureau may have put the continental drug lords to flight and won many drug battles, but we are losing the war, because hard drugs are cheaper than ever.
The deadly implications of giving a free hand to drug gangs have been apparent north of the border.
Nobody should be surprised therefore at the mess in Limerick, because our Government has been courting disaster.
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