Garda shooting - Thugs need to be stopped

The bravery of Garda Paul Sherlock in confronting the armed thugs in Dublin yesterday was in the best tradition of the force.

He is warmly commended and has all our best wishes for a speedy recovery.

The whole community must ensure that those responsible for his dastardly shooting are taken off the streets. The wounding of Garda Sherlock is a grim reminder of the risks and vital responsibilities that our uniformed gardaí undertake every day. They are ultimately our last line of protection against anarchy and the law of the jungle.

Some people might not have cared while the criminal elements responsible were shooting each other, but violence inevitably breeds further violence.

Compassion for the Garda Sherlock must be backed up by a determination to ensure that those responsible for this vile act face the consequences.

The reaction of all branches of the Government and the public generally must be a determined and united effort to ensure that the shooting of a garda is stamped out before it attracts imitators and becomes as common as the other shootings and stabbings that have blighted every segment of our society in recent times.

Hardly a day passes that somebody is not shot or stabbed.

Society must tackle the primary causes of such crime, which is spreading. All too often gang leaders are becoming the role models for impressionable young people in underprivileged communities.

People are earning more out of the drugs trade in a matter of hours or days than they could earn in a lifetime of honest toil. As a result, violent crime is being glamourised.

It was ironic that an inquest was stopped yesterday into the deaths in Lusk of the two men who were killed in the course of an armed robbery in May, 2005.

Justice Minister Brian Lenihan seemed somewhat dismissive of the fact that the other man involved might actually serve less than six years in jail for his part in that armed robbery.

“At the root of all this is the drugs trade and the huge consumption of drugs in Ireland today and the money being spent on them,” said Mr Lenihan.

Such crime might be an offshoot of our comparative affluence, but at the rate things are going people could soon hark back to the saner days when we were supposedly poorer, because in reality we had a sense of values then that were unquestionably richer.

The changes may be the result of affluence or a consequence of greed and indifference. There is little doubt that society has been largely indifferent while the criminals were eliminating each other. But there will be a heavy price to pay for this indifference, because those who are shooting each other will also shoot anybody that gets in their way.

The events of yesterday are a reproach and a warning to all of us that these problems must be tackled in a determined way without further delay.

The response will have to be a multifaceted one in which serious attention is paid to the views of people from the communities that have been plagued by these thugs.