Sir, - I hear with disgust Of "outrage" in the Dail in response to the murder of Veronica Guerin today (June 26th). Successive governments over the last two decades have by neglect or incompetence fostered the development of the kind of society in which such atrocities are inevitable. Cries of outrage now cannot absolve them from their (considerable) share of the blame.
Democratic governments are elected primarily to provide a framework in which decent law abiding people can live together without fear of imminent savagery. Our governments do not seem to know or care about this.
The slide towards anarchy will not be reversed by throwing more gardai or, worse still, more lawyers at the problem. It is grossly unfair to expect the gardai in particular to have more than a minor impact on crime levels while violent professional criminals and terrorists are regularly released to resume their murderous careers after serving a small fraction of already inadequate sentences.
We must keep terror off our streets. If we cannot change the behaviour of those who cause it then we must lock them away. If this is too expensive then we must remove their capacity to offend. If that means a return to capital punishment, then why not?
Why on earth should we even consider preserving the life of a convicted professional killer so that he can be released to kill more innocent victims? What qualities does a repeat rapist have that render him more cherishable than even one of his numerous future innocent law abiding victims?
Veronica's death was heroic. She died because she had the courage, in the face of huge and well demonstrated dangers, to continue to do what our political masters have for so long shirked, namely fight the advance of lawless savagery in our society rather than pay lip service to tinkering with a justice system that, through no fault of the gardai or judiciary, has become an expensive and almost toothless sham. If that shirking of responsibility continues, then Veronica Guerin's ultimate sacrifice will have been in vain.
That is the real outrage! - Yours, etc.,
Templeogue, Dublin 6W.