A family’s bravery - Authenticity of our laws under threat

The courage needed by Thomas Gilmartin and the others who stood up to corrupt Fianna Fáil politicians was altogether exceptional.

That his allegations — proven by the Mahon Report — were not taken seriously by the gardaí demanded even more courage on his part. Despite this he persisted in the face of official Ireland’s stonewalling and the corruption “at all levels of our political system” has been uncovered.

Hopefully, though we can’t be certain, the exposure will change Irish politics for ever. By any criteria this is a considerable achievement and one that has done this State some genuine service.

Nevertheless, it does not diminish Mr Gilmartin’s bravery in any way to suggest that the persistent courage shown by the Collins family in Limerick has been of a different order and probably something beyond most of us. Mr Gilmartin was blackmailed and misused but Roy Collins died in his father’s arms after being shot on the orders of one of Limerick’s most dangerous crime gangs.

It is an indictment of this society that the reward for such active bravery, designed to protect all of us from criminals and their hired killers, is having to uproot your family, close your business and flee the country of your birth, assume new identities and begin to try to build a new life in another country.

Despite constant, 24-hour Garda protection, the threat represented by the gang behind the murder of Mr Collins’s son Roy in 2009 has been so persistent, so threatening and so very real that the family — three generations — eventually had enough. They decided that their future lay well beyond — hopefully — the reach one of Ireland’s most notorious gangs.

It is incredible that this terribly sad moment for the Collins family and the rule of law in Ireland is rooted in the 2004 refusal to admit a 14-year-old girl, a sister of Wayne Dundon, to the Collins’s pub in Limerick. Steve Collins’s adopted son, Ryan-Lee, was shot twice for rightly refusing the underage girl entry. No one has been convicted of that shooting but Wayne Dundon was jailed for seven years for threatening to kill the 18-year-old barman on the night of the attack.

Earlier this month, in an entirely different case, John and Wayne Dundon were found guilty at the Special Criminal Court of threatening to kill three members of the same family. They will be sentenced next month.

Cases like this, and drug-related murders now almost everyday, are a real challenge to the stability of society.

Unless we tackle all crime — blue collar and white collar — far more effectively things will probably deteriorate further. By all means tackle the causes of crime — inequality, poverty, lack of education and some minority cultures as well as “light touch regulation” — but more immediately the authenticity of our laws must be reasserted. This means tackling crime gangs, rogue bankers and corrupt politicians with equal vigour.

It is one of the great crimes of the corrupt politicians that by showing such disregard for our laws, despite their privileged and comfortable positions, that they have squandered society’s moral authority thereby ceding power to those behind the intimidation that forced the Collins family out of Ireland.

Considerable urgency is required if this destructive trend is to be reversed.