Value of human life

“Human life is sacred and the taking of human life by any group, for any reason cannot be justified,” Fr Michael Canny said yesterday following the murder of Andrew Allen in Buncrana.

There are suggestions that a group calling itself Republican Action Against Drugs killed him.

The implications are obvious — the murderers are trying to cover up their own contemptible behaviour by pretending to be crusading against illicit drugs. Society should be aware that these kinds of allegations in such circumstances are always a smoke screen. Those people are taking the law into their own hands for their own ends.

“It is a kind of law of the jungle, of people trying to impose their will on other people,” Fr Canny emphasised. They are trying to take over and control whole areas.

Many of the more notorious drug dealers in this country posed at different times as Republican activists, but in time, society came to recognise them as greedy criminal parasites.

Their disrespect for human life is such that totally innocent people inevitably get caught in the crossfire.

This is what gardaí suspect happened in Tallaght with the murder of 16-year-old Melanie McCarthy- McNamara. Such behaviour threatens everyone in society.