When parents fret about their teenage or pre-teen children having unrestricted and unfettered access to the internet, the fear that comes most often to mind is that their children will be exposed to pornography, or sexual predators. Understandably, this is the stuff that captures the public imagination, presumably because we are well used in Irish society to crimes of sexual violence, or even the consequences of teenaged sexual activity.
To put it in slightly cruder terms, people can probably imagine a teenager getting seduced by online porn or an online groomer, because while this is something we should wish to avoid happening, there are hormonal and developmental reasons why teenagers tend to be at risk from it.
But we should not be fooled into thinking that porn and sex-related content is the worst thing on the internet. It does not even come close.
In the last few weeks, we have had two incidents of utterly horrific violence about which the Gardai have briefed various journalists that they believe involved a connection to gangland violence connected to drugs. First, an innocent woman had an accelerant thrown on her inside her own front door, and was set alight. Second, a woman and a small child were burned to death in a house in Edenderry on foot of an arson attack. None of the three people killed or greviously wounded in those attacks were, we are told, involved in crime or criminality in any way. Instead, it appears, Gardai believe they were targeted either accidentally or deliberately to intimidate relatives or people close to them who had crossed the wrong set of druglords.
This brings me back to the internet. Over the past thirty years or so, the worst people on earth – by which I mean the drug cartels based out of central and south America – have used the internet to showcase the most brutal and debased crimes against human beings imaginable, all in the name of intimidating their opponents, or indeed their own members who might be tempted to co-operate with law enforcement. I will not describe these acts in detail out of decency, but I will note that there are websites out there which over the years have made a living showcasing live-action videos of horrific murders, tortures, and much worse under the broad heading of “gore”. Clips of such brutality circulate freely in the darker parts of the internet. To my mind, they have a vastly more corrosive effect on the human soul than watching other people have sex does. We do not know how many young people over the years have witnessed such violence online, but the traffic on those sites suggests it is in the hundreds of millions worldwide.
Gangland violence in Ireland is not new. For most of my life, young men and women (though mostly men) have been losing their lives to assassin’s bullets in the name of resolving one petty feud or another. Yet it seems to me that simple murder is no longer enough, in some cases, to satisfy the need to instill terror in the enemies of some of this country’s cocaine-fuelled gangster class. They have learned, or are learning, from the cartels with which they do business. If the present trend continues, murder will no longer be enough. We should prepare ourselves for more performatively depraved acts of violence.
Which brings me back to something I have written about before: The vast majority of these gangsters exist in, and terrorise, working class estates and communities. Yet their activities are almost always on foot of a wealth transfer from the prosperous and comfortable middle and upper classes in Ireland for whom cocaine and other drugs are still seen as a harmless weekend activity to which the Gardai are expected to turn a blind eye.
The hypocrisy is darkly funny, in one way: There exist people in this country who, in their college days, boycotted Nike and Nestle and other major brands for their alleged crimes against people in third world countries, whether those amounted to the use of child labour in factories or habitat destruction in Africa. Ireland’s middle classes are terribly socially conscious, on balance, about that sort of thing.
Yet the drug industry – and it is an industry – in Ireland is fuelled largely by the same people. Decapitations, amputations, rapes, slavery, eye-gouging, torture, and more carried out by the cartels in Mexico and Colombia is paid for almost entirely by the surplus incomes of bored well off westerners who think a line or two of coke at the weekend is the least they deserve after a long week toiling away in their big four firm or chipping away at the coalface in their multinational employer. They do this knowing that the consequences are essentially non-existent for them. The costs are paid by some poor Mexican who is suspected of snitching.
Or, increasingly, by somebody in an estate somewhere in Ireland who gets burned alive.
We’re now at a point, it seems to me, where cartel culture is arriving on our own shores. So valuable to our gangland thugs are these distribution lines to middle Ireland, that there are young men willing to slowly but surely ape the horrors inflicted on victims in Mexico and engage in their own reign of terror here at home.
And of course, the state will deploy all the resources in its power to stop these gangs. Their members, mainly warped young men, will be hunted down and jailed. They will be given nicknames by the red-top press. Their exploits will be recounted on crime podcasts and we’ll have features on the life of luxury some of them live in Spain or Dubai. Some of them will even become celebrities.
But the people fueling all of this will never be punished. If I was Minister for Justice in the morning, I would introduce widespread random raids of nightclubs and other venues by the Gardai. And I would make possession of cocaine an offence punishable in creative ways: For example, I would make conviction of possession of cocaine punishable by ineligibility ever to be employed by the state. I would encourage other jurisdictions to deny visas to those with such convictions. I would ensure that they had a permanent and indelible criminal record.
Cocaine ruins lives. The problem is that at home and overseas, it mostly ruins the wrong ones.