Shocked and grieving families of Limerick need our support

It is wrong to expect people in the most deprived areas to stand up against violence, writes Breda O'Brien

It is wrong to expect people in the most deprived areas to stand up against violence, writes Breda O'Brien

THE SENSE of grief and shock on the streets of Limerick is palpable. It is as if the dark, sordid aspects of Limerick have managed to reach maliciously into the very heart of the rugby community, one of the greatest sources of Limerick's pride and identity.

It is no wonder that people demand draconian solutions when a "gentle giant" like Shane Geoghegan is murdered. Even internment has been mooted. The reaction is understandable, but there is no evidence that measures like internment work. In Northern Ireland, it merely served to increase the numbers of recruits for violence.

However, the problem of crime in Limerick is so multifaceted that many other frameworks of thought on crime also fall short. Take what might be loosely termed as the "poverty causes everything" school. Poverty is not to be lightly dismissed, particularly by those who have never experienced the constant grinding struggle and daily petty humiliations that attend being poor. It certainly provides part of the conditions in which crime is more likely to flourish. However, it does not explain why some become savage criminals while others never offend. Neither does it adequately acknowledge that it is poor people who are most terrorised by criminals.

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In general, it is the poor who live on the same estates as the crime bosses and their families. While attempting to do their best for their families, decent people's prospects are severely damaged by the stigma attached to their local area, to the extent that it is often difficult even to obtain employment.

Yet we expect these poor and marginalised people to be the ones who "stand up" and expose these criminals.

This exasperates Dr Niamh Hourigan, lecturer in sociology in UCC, who is conducting research on Limerick and editing a forthcoming book, Understanding Limerick: People, place and power. As she says, "People who live in the most deprived areas of the Republic of Ireland are the ones we expect to stand up against violence, intimidation and harassment, without any understanding of the enormity of the consequences that they will face if they do."

The reality is that only someone with a death wish would incur the wrath of these ruthless criminals. Our current criminal justice system is based on an individualised model. If one individual harms another, it makes sense to report him and have him charged. However, if reporting someone and even having that person put behind bars means incurring the wrath of 20 or 30 family members, each of whom has evolved bearing grudges to a macabre art, the system is doomed to failure.

Crime in Limerick is heavily family-based and this is something which our system based on individuals has totally failed to come to grips with. They display a warped sense of values, and are highly dysfunctional, but they are families, nonetheless.

In their world marriage is highly important, not for any worthwhile reasons like providing stability for children, but as a means of delineating who is an ally and who is an enemy.

If a twisted vision of family informs the inner circle, father absence is a major factor that explains why teenagers accept these criminals as role models. The petty criminals on the fringes of the powerful crime families are usually drawn from homes where fathers are completely absent or in prison themselves. The only masculine role models they have think nothing of torture.

There is an additional factor. Feuding has been a part of Irish history for generations. However, the Limerick feuds have become so vicious because organised crime has colonised traditional family feuds. Not only alleged family honour is at stake, but so are obscene levels of profit generated by drugs.

It is eerie how these criminals follow the logic of the market. There is a growing demand for their product, illegal drugs. This is a vicious kind of entrepreneurial spirit, where those who take risks are rewarded.

President Mary McAleese said something prescient two years ago on the Marian Finucane Show. "The same people, for example, who will give out about it and who will be terrified of what is happening on our streets, may also themselves be the very people who socially think it is acceptable to use so-called recreational drugs. And if they are doing that, then I think they are the people who are going to have to accept a fair degree of responsibility for what happens further up the line in the pyramid."

Her point was that those who do drugs in very nice environments where they don't have to meet nasty people are the market that sustains the kind of savage behaviour they deplore. We are extraordinarily tolerant of recreational drug-taking in Ireland. It is more respectable to do a line of coke than to drive having drunk five pints. While neither behaviour is laudable, an over-the-limit driver may be lucky enough not to kill someone, but anyone doing drugs in Ireland is acting as a paymaster to conscience-less criminals.

It is not for lack of personal heroism on the part of many gardaí, but our justice system is failing, because it is based on an individual rather than a family-based crime model. The Mafia are the closest parallel to what we have in Limerick. People have shrunk from using the term Mafia, for fear of glamorising their activities. However, they are highly disciplined and tightly connected, and an understanding of their warped family dynamics is essential to combating them.

The immediate problem will be greatly helped by surveillance, intelligence, phone-tapping and recruitment of disaffected members as informers. All of this will take vast amounts of time and resources. In the long term, we need to support the positive family and community initiatives in Limerick.