In a climate of endless terror our on-the-spot rights are being eroded

I WANT to draw your attention to a new bit of law that is coming soon, and I want to try to urge all of you to shout stop.

Or at least, to think about what is proposed. It involves giving yet another power to the gardaí, and an almost completely arbitrary one at that. On the face of it, it sounds simple and innocent enough, and that may be the reason it has sparked almost no media interest whatever.

I'll tell you in a minute what that new power is. Before I do, I have to say that it's just another example of the increasingly oppressive nature of the society in which we live. When you start to add them up, you begin to wonder about the nature of the change that is coming over us. More and more of the way we live our lives is being regulated. More and more of the things we do are forbidden, or attract penalties out of all proportion to the offence. More and more, we live in a world where other people know what's best for us.

Most of the time, I feel pretty angry about this. Sometimes I feel the need to keep my irritation in proportion. Like last weekend, when I looked at the pictures of maimed and murdered children from Russia and wondered how it is possible to deal with the animal barbarism that can do such things.

No parent can feel anything other than sick at heart when you realise the pain that so many parents were put through. It's not just that their children died, terrible as that was, it was how they died, in so merciless, pitiless and cruel a fashion.

And you know in your heart of hearts that those deaths, which will linger in the memory for ever, are just part of a cycle of terror and oppression. The inevitable response of the Russian authorities to the outrage will be more oppression, within Russia itself in the name of internal security, and within Chechnya in the name of stamping out terrorism. The actions will provoke reactions, and more people, perhaps more children, will die horrible deaths.

Last week was Russia's 9/11. On a different level, and in a more insidious way, there are increasingly ominous signs that the continuing reaction to America's 9/11 has created a climate of fear and oppression in that country. A great many writers and commentators in the States are becoming concerned and anxious about the continuing erosion of civil liberties that has accompanied the climate of fear generated by the war against terrorism. Here, for example, is a paragraph from a new book by one of America's most incisive commentators, Lewis Lapham (the book is called Gag Rule: on the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy): "President Bush likes to tell his audiences that, as Americans, 'we refuse to live in fear', and of all lies told by the government's faith-healers and gun salesmen, I know of none so cowardly. Where else does the Bush administration ask the American people to live except in fear? On what grounds does it justify its destruction of the nation's civil liberties? Ever since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, no week has passed in which the government had failed to issue warnings of a sequel. Sometimes it's the director of the FBI, sometimes the attorney general or an unnamed source in the CIA but always it's the same message: suspect your neighbour and watch the sky, buy duct tape, avoid the Washington Monument, hide the children. Let too many citizens begin to ask impertinent questions about the shambles of the federal budget or the disappearance of a forest in Montana, and the government sends another law-enforcement officer to a microphone with a story about a missing tube of plutonium or a newly discovered nerve gas."

I'm not suggesting that there are easy answers to the question of how you deal with terrorism in the short term, or that some price won't have to be paid if terrorism is to be defeated, or at least prevented from wreaking its worst excesses. But it is essential surely for all of us to be vigilant about the creeping sense of oppression in the world around us.

AND that's true here at home, too. They may be pettier examples in some respects, but I've lost track of the motivation for all the rules and regulations with which we are increasingly surrounded. In fact I've more or less come to the conclusion that it is the consequence of government whose power has gone to its head. They know best, they are the only ones who know how to regulate behaviour, they can do no wrong.

That's why every time Seamus Brennan is stuck for a press release, he attaches penalty points to something else, until the system is almost entirely discredited. That's why the only apparent solution they can think of to under-age drinking is to ban kids from being in pubs, even on holidays with their parents, after 9pm. That's why the total smoking ban, that's why the new working group on obesity which will doubtless impose penalty points on chips and burgers. And that's why, in the latest one, gardaí are to be given the power to issue on-the-spot fines for what are called public order offences. That's right, once it comes into effect, if a garda decides you've had a drink too many, or are perhaps singing a bit loudly in the street, he will be able to issue you with a fine.

According to the only newspaper report of this development I could find, this is the first time members of the force have been authorised to issue immediate fines for less serious public order offences. The fines will apply to two categories of offence, disorderly conduct and intoxication in a public place. Apparently, after studying average fines handed out by the courts for such offences, officials in the Department of Justice are understood to have a figure in mind for the new on-the-spot fines of something around 100 for each offence.

"The on-the-spot fines would have to be proportionately lower than what the courts are handing out," the department source was quoted as saying. After all, the source added, "there wouldn't be a motivation to pay the fine if an offender had to pay the same in court".

Recent figures showed that more than 100 public order offences were before the courts each day, yet around half of these were struck out without penalty. In future, however, there will be no arrest, no trial, no explanation, no warning. Someone has decided that every garda in Ireland can be trusted to regulate our behaviour, and to punish us if, in their view, we're not behaving appropriately.

Where else in the world, I wonder, have police been given the power to decide who is guilty and who isn't in those circumstances?

And where is all this going to end? Soon they'll be issuing regulations telling us who to vote for. I'd certainly be willing to go to jail over that one!