Bomb Scare at the Passport Office

The passport office dispute has descended into farce. If we’re lucky.

At of a quarter past one today, Garda checkpoints had blocked off either end of Molesworth Street, on Dawson Street and Kildare Street. A security cordon roped off the corner of Molesworth Street and South Frederick Street, where the passport office stands, and a garda stood sentinel outside the door.

Across from the passport office, the crowds who had been queuing for passwords shuffled around and about, while pressmen and cameramen milled about in their midst. Mounted on his Dublin Bike, An Spailpín asked the obvious question: What’s going on?

“It’s a bomb scare,” said a man in a Northern accent. “It’s the Continuity CPSU,” said his mate, leading An Spailpín to wonder if they were joshing. If there were a bomb scare, all the people who are milling around are hardly in a safe place to be if the device were any size at all. To say nothing of it bloody exploding, as bombs are notoriously wont to do.

I moved on, and asked a cameraman. “Bomb scare,” he said, before moving languidly on, exquisitely bored. He clearly didn’t seem to phased by events, and the atmosphere in the crowd was better humoured than it was on the TV news last night, when things seemed to be getting quite techy indeed.

An then your Spailpín started wondering: what if we’re not lucky? What is some lunatic has been singing arias from Doctor Atomic in his weekly bath, and is planning a spectacular? Slightly sick at the thought, An Spailpín cycled hurriedly away to hope for the best.

Let’s hope it’s just a crank. It is massively inconvenient for everyone concerned, of course, but that’s better than people getting killed and maimed. But on the larger scale, isn’t it remarkable, really, how the passport affair has galvanised public opinion?

The Irish public service is astonishingly wasteful, which costs citizens of this state cash money every single day, both in terms of what’s spent on the public service and what doesn’t get done because the Union leaders seem to equate answering the phone with building the Burma railway.

The nation takes all this philosophically, accepting it as being like the rain. Part of what we are. A couple of hundred people can’t go on holidays and all of a sudden it’s panic in the streets time to man the barricades. A strange sense of priorities.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, politics, crime, recession

When Will We See Hello Magazine's Gangland Edition?

An Spailpín Fánach is genuinely incredulous at the way crime and criminals are reported in the Irish popular media.

There is no journalistic need to give criminal activity the level of press exposure that it gets. In a proper, law-abiding society, “Three hoods hanged. Weather continues fine” on the bottom of page two would do the trick nicely. What else do you need to know? Instead, a bizarre glamorisation of criminals are criminality has emerged, and shows no signs of abating.

The reason why this glamorisation is currently the case is because this type of reportage sells papers. But it also tells us quite a lot about who buys papers, and the news is far from cheering.

If you want to sleep safe in your bed without worrying about gangland shootings, drugs, robberies and all the various other criminality that goes with all this, reading about shootings and drug deals and feuds doesn’t make any difference. Only the nicknames change. The rest goes on and on.

If you want to do something to tackle criminality, vote for political parties who will either enforce the current laws, enact new laws or do both until it’s really not worth the criminals’ while to continue with criminality. In Michael Collins’ words about something else entirely, it’s all a question of what breaks first – the body or the lash.

The huge press reportage of criminals and criminal activity does nothing to stop criminals committing crimes. What it does do is glamorise the criminals, and make it appear to the less sophisticated among the community that being a drug dealer or a murderer or an armed robber is no different from being a butcher, a baker or a candle-stick maker.

A teacher friend of the blog was rather taken aback when one of her young people replied “a drug dealer” when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. But why wouldn’t he?

Drug dealers are the major figures of the community in which he leaves. He can read about the local exploits of Dublin criminals in the Irish papers, and he can feel part of the great brotherhood of ganstas glorified by rappers in the US.

Remember Jimmy Rabbitte’s remarks in The Commitments about Dubliners being the blacks of Ireland, and northsiders being the blacks of Dublin? An Spailpín is pretty sure that there is a huge population who believe that. Look at the posters on sale on Henry Street on Saturday afternoon. Tony Montoya abounds. It is a very real culture, and it is being succoured and supported in the media.

Joe Duffy was taken aback on his show recently when someone suggested that junkies are now a part of who we are. Joe wasn’t buying this. But it’s not like junkies have come here from a galaxy far away, like the prawns in District 9 (or are going back there, worst luck). This is part of the culture now, and the popular media is embracing it, either innocently or cynically.

The picture at the top of this post might look funny now, but don’t be surprised to see it in the shops someday soon. If it’s not already here. God help us all.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, culture, society, journalism, crime, anti-social behaviour

Hooliganism

“In Poland,” said the man on the bus, “we don’t let our children put their feet on the seats.”

An Spailpín was on the bus home, queuing for the next stop. Ahead of me, a man was talking to the driver. They knew each other. Perhaps they spoke in English in order to practise; perhaps the driver wasn’t Polish as well, but an immigrant from somewhere else. I don’t know.

“If the children are on their own, of course, they will put up their feet – it’s the natural instinct to rebel,” the man continued. “But what I can’t understand is why they do it when they are accompanied by a parent. Why don’t the parents stop them from being so selfish?”

An Spailpín has thought hard about that Polish man in the past few days since the horrific shooting of Aidan O’Kane in East Wall, Dublin, on Sunday night. An Spailpín does not attempt, of course, to draw a parallel between putting feet on bus seats and gun crime. But your correspondent is pretty damned sure that if a child has sufficient consideration to put his or her feet on the floor and leave the seat opposite open for other commuters, that child will not then collect a dozen eggs when he or she gets home and goes off with his or her friends for an evening’s hooliganism.

The bigger picture here is not this particular shooting, terrifying though it is. The issue is that there is a sub-strata of feral youth that exists outside of the society that supports them, and there is zero political will to tackle the situation. Because tackling the situation would mean a radical rethink of the way Western society has been organised since the Second World War.

In certain areas of cities, there are gangs of children hanging around outside convenience shops in the evening. Their pastime is to harass and annoy the people working in the shop. Does it ever occur to them that these shop workers are people just like themselves, trying to get by, who don’t need a depressing job made worse by this hooliganism? No, it does not. All they are into is themselves. They show exactly the same ability to empathise or look to the future as an animal.

And what can the shop security do about this? Nothing. That’s why the kids persist. Their parents don’t care. The children know they can’t be touched. What’s the point in chasing them if you can’t do anything once you catch them? What’s the point in calling the Guards? What are the Guards going to do? The Irish Times reports that Mr O’Kane contacted the Guards on Saturday night after an attempt was made to torch his car. But what were the Guards to do? What do they ever do?

There are two factors here. The first is that there is a tremendous abdication of parental responsibility. You only need a license for a dog, not a child, after all. The second is that the Guards’ hands are tied by a judicial revolving door process. If you have twenty previous convictions, what earthly difference will a twenty-first make to you? How deeply depressing is it to read in this morning’s Irish Independent that a thirteen year old being held for questioning in the Aidan O’Kane killing is out on bail, while the prime suspect, a fifteen year old, has “made several court appearances in the past?”

At some stage, unknown to ourselves as a society, we lost the big picture. At some stage the needs of the many became less important than the needs of the few. Societal order is held to ransom because nobody is willing to be judgemental; nobody is willing to say that hooligans are not victims. They are hooligans, full stop.

How unwilling are we to say that? We’re so unwilling that the only person who uses the word “hooliganism” to describe people throwing eggs at other people’s houses is myself. “Anti-social behaviour” is what hooliganism is called now – look at the story in the Irish Times again. Anti-social behaviour is turning down an invitation for after work drinks in Neary’s; throwing eggs at people’s houses, annoying shopkeepers and shooting people is criminal hooliganism, and should be punished as such.

Mr Dermot Ahern, Minister for Justice, said in the Dáil debate on the Shane Geoghegan killing that “the Government will rule nothing out which is reasonable and consistent with the rule of law in tackling these gangs head on.” Note the phrase “reasonable and consistent with the rule of law.” That phrase is a copout. That phrase allows all manner of squirming to avoid taking actions that will cut this sort of stuff off at source.

The opposition are no better. Mr Charlie Flanagan, the Fine Gael spokesman on Justice, has called for tougher sentencing on murder and possession of deadly weapons. Tougher sentencing is a marvellous idea. The only thing is that tougher sentencing means longer sentencing, which means bigger prisons and more prison officers. How are we going to pay for that? It’s fine in principle, but it helps all the old people living in Ireland who are now even more terrified of hooded youth than before not a whit. It’s nothing more than pointless hand-wringing.

If the political class want to do anything to cut down on this hooliganism, why don’t they introduce legislation – and that’s what they’re paid to do, isn’t it? Legislate? – that allows shop security, for instance, to use necessary force to defend the premises. This means that a security man can give a hooligan a shoe in the hole and not have to worry about losing his job as a result of it. Some people will claim this will lead to victimisation, and this is an example of the needs of the few outweighing the needs of the many once more. But if some guy gets a busted lip when he didn’t deserve it, it’s worth it if it allows people to do their shopping and get on with their lives in peace. Nobody every died of a busted lip.

The other common argument against a return to common sense is that these sort of measures victimise the vast majority in communities who are good and upstanding citizens. Aidan O’Kane was one such good and upstanding citizen, and Aidan O’Kane is dead today because neither he nor the police could stop hooligans from pelting his house with eggs or setting his car or his bins on fire. That’s the bottom line. It’s that simple.

In Poland, they don’t let their kids put their feet on the seats of the buses. We need to take a lesson from Poland.




Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, hooliganism, anti-social behaviour, crime, Aidan O'Kane, society

On Joyriders

For all the hand-wringing that goes on in the media about death on the roads, it’s unlikely that people realise just how serious the problem is. A court case in this morning’s Irish Independent gives a rather distressing illustration of just why the problem is as bad as it is, and exactly how far it is we are from a resolution. Very, very far indeed.

The facts are these. Aengus Ó Snodaigh, a Sinn Féin TD but also a citizen as you or I, was at an ice-cream van investing in ice-cream on March 6th last year when one Mark Moran, 23 years old, drove along and started doing wheel-spins on the public road. As one does.

Mr Ó Snodaigh went over to Mr Moran to remonstrate, as doing wheel-spins in a residential area is dangerous. This is not as one does, for fear that one will be treated as Mr Ó Snodaigh was. Mr Moran told Mr Ó Snodaigh to “f*** off, you and your IRA mates, I’m not afraid of you.” Mr Moran then got out of the car and headbutted Mr Ó Snodaigh. The Guards appeared, and Mr Moran evacuated the scene con brio.

The Guards gave chase, and when they caught up with Mr Moran, Mr Moran gave his brother’s name. Sound of him.

While he was doing his wheel-spinning, Mr Moran was under a five year ban for uninsured driving. Mr Moran has managed to amass, at the tender age of 23, 32 previous convictions, mostly for driving related offences, including a three month stretch in the slammer last year for uninsured driving. And to put the tin hat on the story, Mr Moran told the court that not only was he driving while banned from the roads, he also had a few drinks “for Mother’s Day.”

To recap: Mr Moran was up before the court for driving without insurance, driving while banned from the road, driving with drink taken, and assault (sticking the nut on Mr Ó Snodaigh). And that’s just today’s racecard – Mr Moran has thirty-two previous convictions at the age of 23. Thirty-two. How did he fare before the court? To quote the Indo, “Judge Ann Ryan found him [Moran] guilty and said he must realise, as the father of a young child, the danger his driving was posing to children in the area. She remanded him on bail to January 26 to see if he is suitable for 240 hours community service.”

The Irish Times report of the case tells us that Jude Ryan added that “she was prepared ‘to give him a chance to give something back to society.’” Now. What exactly do you think are the chances of that happening? God help us all.


Technorati Tags: Ireland, society, crime, joyriding