Are the anti-authoritarian Irish becoming a nation of 'grasses'? And if so, why, asks Joe Humphreys
Not so long ago, drivers tended to flash their headlights at speeding motorists to warn them of Garda checkpoints ahead. Now a driver's instinct is to lift a phone and report such rogue behaviour to the authorities.
So it has been in the south-east anyway, where 8,000 motorists rang a pilot Traffic Watch hotline in the first two years of its operation, resulting in 500 Garda cautions and 30 prosecutions. Buoyed by this success, the Garda National Traffic Bureau this week announced the nationwide expansion of the scheme.
A welcome development in road safety, for sure. But does it also signal a deeper change in Irish society? People seem to be flocking to a new range of anti-crime "information" lines, and to be more than willing to dish the dirt on neighbours or work colleagues they believe are up to no good.
Last year, the insurance industry got 1,270 tip-offs about dodgy claims thanks to a new anti-fraud hotline set up to tackle Ireland's "compo culture". The Revenue Commissioners, which reports a steady stream of tip-offs each year from what it calls "good citizens", has toyed with the idea of setting up a similar information hotline. While a spokesman said the move "needed more consideration", he did hail the success of the Revenue's recently relaunched Drugs Watch scheme, which asks people in coastal communities to report suspicious behaviour at sea.
Then there is the daddy of hotlines, Crimestoppers, which has recovered more than €2 million in property and €300,000-worth of drugs since it was established in 1998. A spokesman for the scheme, which offers cash rewards for information leading to prosecutions, said it had been accused when starting out of using "Gestapo-like tactics. But we've heard no negative comments since".
And what of the future? A large number of people, particularly non-smokers, are chomping at the bit for their opportunity to "rat" on pubs and restaurants that fail to impose the proposed new workplace smoking ban.
In the financial sector, meanwhile, "whistle-blowing" is being turned into a corporate virtue, and a compulsory one at that for accountants and auditors, who are being compelled to "shop" dodgy clients under new legislation.
So, the question arises: are we becoming a nation of snitches? And, if so, is it about time? In many quarters, far beyond the feuding estates of Limerick or Dublin, "ratting" on one's neighbour retains a whiff of treachery. The sentiment is often traced to the Civil War: the labelling of "the informer" as the lowest class of character in Irish history. But Beal na mBlath, and the tip-off which led to Michael Collins's death, was only the start of the State's fraught relationship with informers.
More recently, their reputation has been tarnished by "double agents" in the North, including some of dubious value (as exposed by the Morris tribunal), as well as by "supergrasses", whose recent involvement in gangland crime has arguably hindered rather than helped major Garda investigations.
For these and other reasons, law-abiding citizens can today be found prevaricating over the mere reporting of crime, as reflected in the comments last year of Prof Niamh Brennan, wife of the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, when she said she would be reluctant to report an attack on a member of her family to the Garda. While her comments were principally a criticism of Garda leaks to the media, they do reflect a public ambivalence about involving the authorities in one's, or another's, affairs.
"People do a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to reporting crime," says criminologist Dr Paul O'Mahony. "They will ask how costly it will be for them if, for instance, they have go to trial, or perhaps testify against someone they know."
At present, he notes, only a small fraction of crime is reported, and there is little evidence of that changing - a fact which makes the proliferation of "snitch-lines" a puzzling phenomenon.
"The idea has been imported from America to a large extent," says O'Mahony, who believes the trend originated with freight companies in the US, which started labelling their vehicles with slogans along the lines of: "If you don't like my driving call 1800-RAT-A-CAB."
"There is a Big Brother element to it," he remarks, "and this State is getting more and more into that. It also involves a cultural shift. Before, people were more wary of the State and its interference in individual freedoms. Now they're more willing to ignore it."
Referring to the recent creation of "home security" and anti-terrorism hotlines in the US and elsewhere, he adds: "These things are creeping up without people researching their value or discussing them. I think they can be damaging to the fabric of society because they create paranoia and suspicion, and they inevitably undermine people's trust for each other. They separate people rather than bring them together."
And then there is the possibility of abuse, with schemes being used for the making of vexatious or erroneous claims.
"It's important these things are kept specific," says Ivana Bacik, Reid Professor of Law at Trinity College, Dublin. "Reporting people for 'acting suspiciously', as in the US, is a recipe for abuse. One person's suspicious activity is another's normal activity."
Others are more gung-ho about greater "snitching", however, seeing it as a sign of a maturing citizenry. An argument runs that people didn't used to report crimes such as tax evasion or drink-driving before, firstly because they weren't truly regarded as serious crimes, and secondly because enforcement was so poor it was considered almost unfair to be caught. But now, the argument runs, perceptions have changed and enforcement has improved, making people more willing to snitch - not least because they reason that "if I'm not breaking the law any more, neither should anyone else".
Conor Faughnan, public affairs spokesman for the AA, agrees that tolerance of drink-driving has all but evaporated but says the same is not true of speeding. This inconsistency, he believes, stems partly from bad, or uneven, enforcement. By heavily policing dual carriageways, where cruising speeds sometimes marginally breach the speed limit, rather than posting more patrols at notorious accident black-spots, gardaí are sparking "a lot of hard-luck stories" among generally law-abiding drivers, and "holding back the development of a new consensus on road safety", according to Faughnan.
Whether such lingering resentment against Garda "speed traps" - as policing methods are emotively called - will stop drivers from phoning Traffic Watch is anyone's guess. But no one doubts the worthiness of the scheme, dubbed "Neighbourhood Watch on wheels" by Faughnan.
Apart from its enforcement role, he says, "it has a cathartic value for people making a complaint. It gives them a way out of frustration if they have been bullied on the road".
A safety aid and an anecdote to road rage? Now who could argue with that?
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