SENATOR Sean Maloney told the Patrick McGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, last night that 1996 will be remembered as "the year when gangsterism killed Jerry McCabe and Veronica Guerin."
Their murders have placed our "criminal justice system under renewed and sustained examination, particularly in relation to issues such as prison space, bail, sequestering criminal assets and combatting crime, he said.
Drawing a direct parallel between the rise in crime and the soaring drug problem, Senator Maloney said. "It is a fact that increase in violence and crime over the last 15 years is due to the sudden arrival of heroin in the early 80s."
Although he admitted that most drug abuse was concentrated in the capital, Senator Maloney maintained that it was nonetheless a nationwide problem. He felt that the "drugs menace" should be dealt with by introducing tough legislation cushioned by a three pronged approach supply reduction, demand reduction and treatment.
On Monday evening Ms Olive Braiden, director of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, concentrated on victims of "both the rapist and our patriarchal judicial system".
"In the area of violence against women with which I am most involved, that of rape and sexual abuse, the legal system continues to victimise the victims, to make them feel that they are the ones on trial," Ms Olive Braiden said.
Ms Braiden described Ireland's adversarial legal system as one inherited from our former colonial masters", and said that once in court a rape victim was forced to assume the role of "victim to her own misfortune".
This did not stop the defence from treating her with a level of legal bullying, trying to prove "she is a liar and his client is innocent", she said. Ms Braiden also criticised judicial sentencing which, she said, often bore "no understandable relation", to the seriousness of the crime.
An increasing number of rapes is being carried out on middle aged women and on men, she said. The level of violence associated with these attacks was also increasing. The official response "has been the predictable one of attempting to lock the stable door after the horse has bolted, tightening bail laws and building more prisons."
While welcoming both initiatives, Ms Braiden asserted that they did not "address the root causes of violence."
One of the Rape Crisis Centre's main aims, she said, was to push for a comprehensive reform not only of the system itself but of the attitudes and prejudices of those whose duty it is to administer it".
While emphasising that there were caring individuals in both the judiciary and the Government who were anxious to improve the situation, she concluded by calling on Irish society in general to address the "reality of what is happening, and particularly happening to women".