THE recent hysteria over crime in Ireland was located somewhere between reality and fantasy and was driven by the vested interests of the media and politicians, according to a criminologist, Dr Paul O'Mahony.
"In the case of the media, the vested interest is in a ceaseless search for an edifying, attention and emotion grabbing story. For politicians, the vested interest is in projecting an effective image and selling a righteous seeming, vote winning moral rearmament agenda.
"Both media and politicians can only consult a plausible platform by relying on partial, narrow or exaggerated versions of the truth," he said.
Dr O'Mahony was on "Crime in Ireland Today - A Disturbing Reality" in one of the Lenten Talks at Merchant's Quay church. He said a frenetic but futile and rudderless, debate had already begun before the horrific coincidence of three ghastly killings discovered in two days in January.
"In the wake of the killings, the debate was brought to new depths until it was suddenly and utterly killed off - if only in the time being because local crime is always the number one Stadbury for all the media - by the breaking of the ceasefire."
Official figures, popular perceptions and impressions told us; that crime was at the highest level of modern times in Ireland. Growth in crime was an almost universal phenomenon, and the Irish experience was reflected in all other western industrialised democracies.
"Some of the major influences are the fragmentation of a hitherto self validating consensus on community and personal values, including but not entirely identifiable with a new scepticism about religious world views and religious moral instruction; the growth of the market driven consumerist, materialist, individualist ethos; the continuing and increasing presence of a form to internal exile within society for a very large minority of impoverished, disempowered and alienated people; the disintegration off the traditional extended system and the movement wards isolated nuclear families and the pervasive presence of the Anglo American entertainment monoculture which beams in vast amounts of sometimes liberating information, but also powerful models for interpersonal behaviour".
These changes have created a Irish society in which many experience a deep sense of loss and disaffection, many turn to drugs for excitement and relief, many are justifiably confused about distinctions between reality and fantasy."