Fine Gael were at it again in the Dáil last week, this time aided and abetted by Pat Rabbitte. Enda Kenny was fulminating: "The rule of criminal gangs is worse than ever . . . We see trials collapsing because of the intimidation of witnesses and young men being brutally murdered as a warning to others."He went on to announce a new Fine Gael policy insight: "Organised crime must not rule in this country", writes Vincent Brown.
There was more stuff about pushing back "the crime wave", the "highest-ever number of homicides". A colleague of Mr Kenny, Bernard Allen, said: "One is not even safe in the Four Courts now - one is intimidated".
Pat Rabbitte waded in. "There are many areas of our cities under the reign of young thugs who are being directed by new criminal gangs." He spoke of the aftermath of the murder of Veronica Guerin when the government of the day introduced legislative changes to break up the gangs that "dominated" Dublin at that time.
He said: "The same is required here. If we could bring in an amendment to the Offences Against the State Act in 1998, following the atrocity in Omagh, that created the crime of directing terrorist crime, why can we not create a similar offence in terms of those who direct criminal conspiracies and combinations." (Equivalence between the crime phenomenon of the last few weeks and the atrocity in Omagh, which slaughtered 38 people?)
Bertie Ahern defended himself in part by referring to his record on crime from the mid-1980s and how he was tough on crime then, which didn't please the "do-gooders". In a radio interview in April 1983 he conveyed to listeners that he was not opposed to knee-capping as a crime deterrent. I have come across a speech he gave in the Dáil on April 20th, 1983. It was a bit all over the place (the Ceann Comhairle intervened to say he was "wandering"). He was a bit against "do-gooders" then, too, believing that muggers, robbers and car thieves got more sympathy than the victims.
But then he said (and remember he was in opposition then): "Crime is one of the areas in which people tend to get overemotional and to say the problem is worse than it is." He then went on to adopt the "do-gooder" mantle himself, referring to the socio-economic background to most crime.
Twenty years later that is not on the agenda. Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte might like to look at a report of a few years ago. It said: "The link between crime and social disadvantage is real and is . . . an issue that has to be faced up to by all sections of society." It acknowledged: "A comprehensive approach towards tackling crime requires cross-agency co-operation between the Department of Justice [and the Garda Síochána] and the Departments of Education, Health, Social Welfare, Environment, Local Authorities and other bodies."
It continued: "It is important that progress towards the development of a more broadly-based crime strategy be accelerated and particularly important that there would be clarity about the implications of fully accepting the link between crime levels and social disadvantage."
It went on about the media a bit, just vaguely critical. In the context of the public not being hyped-up over crime, it said: "It is reasonable to suggest that at least some reporting merits the 'sensationalist' tag".
The pedigree of this report was not a left-wing think-tank, or a do-gooder NGO. It was the Department of Justice in its report Tackling Crime: Discussion Paper. And it was published in May 1997, introduced by a woman whose photograph appears prominently on page 5, Mrs Nora Owen, who was the Fine Gael minister for justice at the time in a government that included Enda Kenny and half-included Pat Rabbitte.
That report borrowed heavily from another report, which also went on about the linkage between crime and social disadvantage. It said that factors such as unemployment, lack of educational opportunity, poor social amenities in new single-class housing estates, a sense of alienation on the part of young people, hunger, deprivation and lack of self-esteem were all factors in causing crime.
And before Bertie fulminates about do-gooders, he should know that this was a report of an Inter-Departmental Group on Urban Crime and Disorder, undertaken at the behest of another woman, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, then minister for justice.
Don't we know from the profile of the typical inmate of Mountjoy that crime emanates primarily from poor communities, and haven't we appreciated for decades that any effective anti-crime strategy must involve, centrally, a socio-economic response; one that targets the areas and communities of deprivation from where crime emanates?
Successive governments haven't even deployed the preliminary strategy proposed in Nora Owen's report: cross-agency co-operation between government Departments and local authorities to deal with the issue.