Crime and leadership - Lenihan must show he has resolve

YOU KNOW you are approaching the nadir in any cycle of crime or violence when someone demands the Army be called in “to tackle the problem head on”.

If the call is made by a politician it’s often just hysterical grandstanding that clouds the real issues and allows those really responsible off the hook.

If gun crime, gang crime or drug crime are becoming unmanageable it is usually for a few simple reasons — the most obvious of which is that the gardaí either can’t cope or don’t have the resources needed to do the job. It is never that they don’t want to do the job.

Those resources include a justice system that can impose meaningful sanctions allied to a prison system that can accommodate those sent there for the full term imposed on them.

We have neither.

Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy has initiated some reforms but the feeling that the force is a conservative organisation that would benefit from external perspectives endures.

The force’s retreat from most of rural Ireland and its tardiness in embracing the benefits of computer technology have done a lot to undermine its reputation.

But then, the gardaí would be entitled to be fed up with being made scapegoats for a system that plainly is not working.

They, after all, have political masters who are elected to ensure that the laws of the state are respected by their application rather than being undermined by being ignored.

A society that tolerates bystanders being shot dead just because they have witnessed a murder — twice in the last year — does not have a policing problem. A society that tolerates young foreign students being strangled to death within days of arriving in the country does not have a policing problem.

It has a problem of leadership and politicians not delivering what is needed to confront the situation.

It is possible to confront the criminals undermining our society, as was shown in the immediate aftermath of Veronica Guerin’s death.

However, resolve and leadership are needed.

Let us hope Justice Minister Brian Lenihan can find one and show the other.