On Wednesday evening, footage emerged on the “Dubs Life” twitter account – which tends to chronicle the various acts of lawlessness in Ireland’s capital – of two balaclava-sporting thieves stealing a motorcycle in broad daylight:
This came two days after a brutal assault on a Ukrainian Actor, allegedly as a result of a dispute over cigarettes:
https://twitter.com/MattShanahanTD/status/1673330148333047815
On Wednesday, when a pro-life group called the Gardai to report the vandalism, in broad daylight, of posters it had erected for an event this weekend, its representative was allegedly told by Gardai that they were too busy to act. Just as they were, presumably, in the case of the Ukrainian man being assaulted, and the case of the stolen motorbike.
But it is easy to blame the Gardai, and in many cases mostly unfair – they are only one element of the problem, and they suffer from under staffing and low morale. How could their morale be high? It is a matter of record that the Irish prisons are full to bursting and that, consequently, the penalty for almost all crime in Dublin or elsewhere seems to be a suspended sentence. It is not uncommon for people with hundreds of previous convictions to be allowed straight back onto the streets, to offend again.
The best that can be said for Minister McEntee, and her Government at large, is that they do occasionally get interested in crime – but only if the victim of the crime is a member of some politically trendy minority class. A common or garden act of assault or thievery will not warrant public comment from them – but should the victim be gay, or a migrant, then we get a five-alarm fire of national commentary about the need to clamp down on hate in society.
But what about the rest of us? Crimes against minorities are despicable, to be sure – but all cases of assault and robbery and intimidation are equally so. And yet, the Government seems relatively content to abandon the capital city – and indeed most large regional towns – to the criminals, so long as the criminals only assault those without any special claim to state protection.
This situation speaks to a Government which has, largely, embraced an ideology which says that crime is not their responsibility, or even the responsibility of the criminals. Instead, there is a hierarchy of victimhood, and being a victim of a crime does not qualify you for protection, it seems, unless you also fit within that hierarchy.
What do I mean? I mean this: The Government seems to believe that working class criminal gangs have been let down by society, in which case their crimes against people better off than them can be forgiven and tolerated, until such time as the instance of crime is reduced by tackling inequality. The only cases in which crime is not tolerated is in cases where working class criminals target those who are bigger victims than themselves – middle class gay people, or immigrants. For those crimes, we need national conversations about bigotry and prejudice. For any other crimes, our national conversation must be about disadvantage and that old chestnut, “deprived communities”.
Many centrists in Ireland, who tear their hair out at footage like that at the top of this piece, seem to be under the mistaken impression that the failure to police crime in Ireland is a competence issue, when it is in truth an ideological issue. The state has largely embraced American liberal ideas, such as those seen in San Francisco and Los Angeles, about policing: In this telling, the police force are an oppressive force which singles out and targets members of oppressed communities, and should instead be re-focused onto the real crimes in society, which are the structural oppressions of minorities.
Hence, we have the hate crime bill. And the re-direction of Garda resources into investigating tweets, and protests, and “radicalisation”, because those are seen as structural crimes targeting vulnerable communities.
All the while, the actual crime which infests vulnerable communities is left unpunished, or dealt with via community service or a suspended sentence.
Until such time as we recognise that policing in Ireland has been subsumed by these – for want of a better word – “woke” ideas, we will continue to see this double standard in place. That is one reason why, when centrists pull their hair out about why no party in the Dáil is raising the crime issue, they are missing the point: Every Irish political party has bought into this ideology. Not one of them thinks that policing is the answer to anti-social behaviour. Every one of them think that social interventions are more important, because they have subscribed to the notion that crime is not really crime – just a call for help from the oppressed.
It will not be long, mark my words, until the full consequences of this are seen: The American cities I mentioned above have, in effect, legalised shoplifting and declared it a misdemeanour, not a crime. The result is capital flight, as businesses leave.
If crime continues to make Dublin uninhabitable for law-abiding citizens, the same will happen here.