Hallowe’en happens every year, but its miseries are preventable

However, I am suggesting we deploy the four or five thousand army personnel here in similar peacekeeping activities. Peacekeeping and crime prevention.

LAST Friday evening, the taxi to take me to a TV studio was running so late that the driver kept telephoning to report his limited progress.

“Hallowe’en,” he said, when he eventually arrived. “Big bonfire half a kilometre down the road. Any other way out of here?”

Short answer? No. The bonfire was now two storeys high, on the sea-side of the road, the wind from the sea blowing the flames right across the road. The only road.

“Get through it if I go fast,” the taxi driver said, and accelerated.

The problem, as the car went through the flames, was the smoke, which cut off his view. For half a second, he hesitated, and me and my American friend, in the back seat, wondered how soon the petrol tank would blow. Then we were through it, the windscreen coated with the tarry black smoke from the burning car tyres at the fire.

We passed other bonfires on the journey, which took four times as long as it normally would. Bonfires surrounded by capering children wearing sheets and other long inflammable robes, few of them supervised by adults. The adults present were frequently of the young male variety, clutching drink bottles by the neck.

“Tonight, the A&E’s will be full of people burned because they fell into the bonfire drunk or got pushed,” the driver predicted. “Kids with eye injuries from illegal fireworks. Lads glassing each other.”

The American, wide-eyed, looked a question at me. I explained “glassing”. She looked horrified. Mishewaka, South Bend, Indiana, apparently doesn’t do Hallowe’en bonfires or glassing.

A work colleague was foolish enough to have dinner in a pleasant restaurant in the middle of our capital city the same night. He and his three friends, emerging at 10.30pm, walked the short distance to his parked car, stepping over pools of puke and urine and skirting groups of heavily-costumed revellers, high as kites and aggressive as rottweilers. They were just in time to see a drunk caving in the side of their car with a rubbish bin. They didn’t call the Guards, because they figured — rightly, as it turned out — the Garda Síochána might be a tad busy, that happy night of celebration.

By morning, the city looked like a set for a movie of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and smelled like a cesspool. The fire brigades had been called out once a minute throughout the night to cope with out-of-control bonfires. Forty percent of those callouts involved attacks on the firefighters. Gardaí were also attacked. Several of these public servants ended up in hospitals that were already clogged with the drunk, the drugged, the stabbed, the burned and the glassed. The clean-up alone, according to the local authorities, will cost more than a million.

And that’s not counting the immeasurable damage done to the environment as the bonfires released more dioxins into the atmosphere than is released throughout the entire year by industry and domestic burning.

Strumpet City, 2008.

“What will happen?” my American friend asked, appalled and frightened by the sort of behaviour she associated with TV coverage of race riots in American cities in times past.

Another short answer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Hallowe’en, in one single night, sums up everything that’s gone wrong with Irish society over the past 10 years. It is the exemplar of the anti-social behaviour, the alcohol-sodden violence justified by the ever-present plaint “you gotta have a laugh,” the disregard for the built and natural environment that is seen but less obvious throughout the year. The Hogarth cartoons of debased Britons during the eighteenth century gin craze, with their damaged babies, half-naked comatose mothers, puking drinkers and suicides hanging in the shadows of abandoned buildings, are eerily evocative of present-day Ireland.

It happens every year. Its miseries are preventable every year. Its mutilations and murders are regretted and tut-tutted over every year, but what can you do?

I’ll tell you what we can do.

ONE bit of the Irish public service works pretty damn perfectly. It’s well-equipped, highly disciplined, multi-skilled and widely experienced. It’s regarded, internationally, as best-in-class, its teams beating those from much wealthier countries in open competition. It’s up to speed, up to strength, distributed throughout the country and has the transport and logistics to get to trouble spots quickly.

I’m not suggesting we stop the Irish army doing its marvellous peace-keeping work in places like Chad, but I AM suggesting we deploy the four or five thousand army personnel here at home in similar peacekeeping activities. Peacekeeping and crime prevention.

Take the bonfires as one single example. Once upon a time, back in reasonable Ireland when the nation had a sense of proportion, kids would drag fallen branches and build them into a pyre in the few days before Hallowe’en. In recent years, the bonfires have been getting bigger and bigger, and the advance planning has started weeks before, with lads rolling car and lorry tyres to the site of the fire.

Now, the sources of such tyres are not infinite. Not many readers of this paper have a private stash of car tyres in their conservatory. Car tyres get kept in a limited number of locations. Predictable locations. Wooden pallets, ditto.

So why not, in the month before Hallowe’en, put the army in place around those locations and issue a warning that — just as a coat pocket full of beer cans are not going to be allowed if you’re attending a concert — anybody found in possession of an old car tyre without a bloody good explanation is going to have it confiscated from them?

Banning of car-tyre bonfires, and active prevention of same, would have immediate gains for public health and safety and for the Environment. John Gormley and Eamon Ryan may, currently, feel their hands are tied in lots of areas where they would wish to take environmental action. They could push this one without cost to the state — indeed, it could save local authorities and the health service money, this time next year. And if the economy, this time next year, is going to be as weak at the knees as seems likely, the Government simply cannot countenance the several million Euro Hallowe’en costs the state each year.

Dermot Ahern might also look at a little amendment to the law, based on a provision in American traffic legislation. American roads carry signs telling you that “Speeding fines will be doubled when workers present.” In other words, if you’d be fined $500 (€395)for speeding on a particular road, you’ll be fined $1,000 (€785) if you’re caught doing so when road-workers are around and likely to be endangered by your behaviour. Over here, the Minister for Justice might double the penalty for assault if the attack is on a firefighter at the scene of a blaze.

The moment you mention doing anything local with the army, it’s assumed that you’re trying to reduce civil liberties.

Not so.

Part of the army’s mission is to act in support of the civil power. If it did so, in preparation for predictable annual flashpoints like Hallowe’en, it would enhance civil liberties and radically improve the quality of Irish life.