The disclosure that Tony Felloni, one of Dublin's most notorious heroin dealers, was repeatedly granted bail in the past three years, has justifiably stirred political and public controversy. Felloni was jailed for 20 years this week, but for the past three years he appears to have viewed this State's very liberal bail laws as an invitation to commit further crimes.
During this period Felloni was, perhaps, the most significant heroin dealer in the city. His name was known to virtually every public representative and every garda in the North Inner City. Felloni was not fussy about his customers; he would sell directly to addicts on O'Connell Street; he forged contacts in the international underworld and he would arrange heroin deliveries across the Dublin suburbs from Ballymun to Tallaght. And yet during this period he was granted" bail on no fewer than four occasions and released back into the community where his activities inflicted such misery. When he was charged with further drugs offences, no account was taken of his long criminal history (Felloni has never worked in the normal sense) or his previous 10 year sentence for supplying heroin.
The judiciary should not be blamed for this: the thrust of the Supreme Court's 1966 O'Callaghan judgment is that bail can only be refused when the court is convinced that a defendant might interfere with witnesses or abscond. In the main, this kind of regime is sensible: most of those before the court are not hardened, professional criminals like Felloni. They should not be remanded in custody on the basis of anticipated crime.
But the general public also has a right to expect that it is protected from the activities of Felloni and people like him. It is now well established that Felloni, like Martin Cahill and members of the Dunne criminal family before him, planned and executed some of their more notorious crimes whilst on bail. Clearly this is intolerable for any society, much less one where the growth in crime represents a serious threat to the quality of life.
A referendum on bail would give the public an opportunity to assess the issue. The Minister for Justice, Mrs Owen, is thought to favour a referendum but she appears to have backed away from it because of civil liberty concerns among Labour and Democratic Left deputies. Mrs Owen should not be dissuaded. It is surely not beyond the competence of Government to frame an amendment on bail which would protect society from criminals like Felloni without infringing the civil liberties of those before the courts.
The drugs problem was one of the main issues under discussion at this week's International Crime Conference in Dublin, an initiative organised jointly by the Garda, the Department of Justice and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The conference underlined the complexity of many criminal justice problems and the dearth of easy solutions. It presented an impressive array of international research on crime and the criminal and cogently made the case for a criminal justice system with clearly defined goals and objectives.
The irony of the conference taking place in a State where there is very little research and no coherent policy on crime was presumably not lost on the participants. Mrs Owen's short term challenge, meanwhile, remains that of formulating a policy on crime that strikes the correct balance between the rights of the citizen and the needs of society: her support for more sensible bail laws would be a good start. But we still lack any long term perspective.