It has been common knowledge that members of Sinn Fein have been involved in some of the anti drugs groups which began to spring up in Dublin over recent years. Sinn Fein members are known to have been involved, in particular, in the Concerned Parents Against Drugs movement.
Such involvement is not illegal. Nor, in so far as it applies to individuals who happen also to be members of Sinn Fein, is it necessarily improper. But it has been a cause of concern to many ordinary parents who believe that the community has to be mobilised against the drugs trade but who are repelled by any thought of association with Sinn Fein and its IRA friends.
Those links, however, must appear relatively benign when set against the facts outlined in a report today by the Security Correspondent of this newspaper. IRA activists are now believed by the gardai to be involved in vigilante campaigns in several areas of the city. They have been responsible for a series of violent assaults on alleged drug dealers and users. The gardai believe that the IRA was involved in the beating to death of Mr Josey Dwyer. And there are reports that potential witnesses in the case have been threatened at gunpoint by IRA men.
It would be difficult to envisage a more sinister development on the streets of the capital. The forces of the State the Garda, the courts and the prisons have failed to halt the flood of drugs. Distraught parents and whole communities have watched helplessly while their children are seduced into lives of misery, disease and imprisonment. Enter the IRA with guns, baseball bats and iron bars and offering a far greater probability of effecting a solution. It is not difficult to understand why there is a tolerance - indeed a welcome for the Provos.
What is happening in these few areas - and it is, admittedly, at this stage, a localised phenomenon should send shivers down the nervous system of a society which values the rule of law. Organised, professional crime has already created a state within a state for itself in Dublin. It runs its own businesses, follows its own rules and administers its own justice. Fifteen dead men in the streets in as many months, with not a single arrest, testify to the impotence of the gardai in dealing with the issue. Now, in the areas described in this morning's report, the law's writ is supplanted with that of the gun and the club. And the presiding authority is that of an IRA kangaroo court.
Will today's children, in time to come, look back to try to identify where it all started to go wrong? Let us hope it will not be so. But if they do, what will they make of the fact that while men in balaclavas were supplanting the Garda Siochana on certain streets in Dublin, and as the criminal justice system daily became an object of derision, the people's representatives in Dail Eireann spent two weeks trying to garner political capital over the shredding of a warrant in the Phoenix Park?