CRIME in Ireland seems to have a new viciousness an American style randomness that many of us find disturbing. We are seeing a new, more brutal Ireland, where humanity is dissolving: a woman heinously defiled, her naked body disgarded a few minutes - from her own front door... thugs roaming the country torturing old people for . . . a Hallowe'en night that turns into an orgy of violence on a Dublin housing estate.
We are no longer defined by our green fields, but by urban ghetto areas which gardai call "hostile territory", where children run wild in the streets, helping to attack cars. We have eight year olds shop lifting, 10 year olds joy riding, 12 year olds injecting drugs and 14 year olds trying to support expensive drug habits by mugging elderly women in the streets.
Many of us feel instinctively, that some sinister change is happening in Irish society. What are the roots of it? Who do we blame? Politicians like to clamber onto their soapboxes to give the answers: they talk about drug abuse, unemployment, moral anarchy, absent fathers, bad parenting and a lack of discipline in the schools. Many blame crime on our loose bail laws and revolving door prison system, in which criminals serve fractions of their sentences and commit crimes while on temporary or early release. There is a growing feeling in the Republic that we need to become more punitive, to impose harsher sentences and build more prison cell.
BUT should we be talking, about punishment - or compassion? Some experts say that the middle classes themselves are to blame for tolerating the existence of the poverty and social deprivation that lead to crime. Others say no crime is a moral issue; that animals make a choice to do bad things.
One thing we can be certain about, however, is that criminal behaviour usually starts in childhood. People working with anti social children and juveniles, in the Republic and internationally, are telling us that we need to understand the minds and motivation of the vulnerable, troubled children and young people for whom crime is a lifestyle.
Are the roots of their behaviour social, moral, biological? These questions have to be answered if we want to stop the crimewave.
Compassion can be as expensive as building more prison cells but it is not nearly as fashionable. Nobody wants to be seen to be soft on crime". Providing psychological assessment in the schools and outreach programmes to vulnerable families in the community is not as politically attractive as opening up more detention centres for 12 year olds. But there area compelling reasons why punishment alone is not the answer - and why tackling the social and psychological roots of crime may be the only thing that will save our society from the staggering trend towards greater viciousness and violence.
WHEN animals have been abused in Limerick Marian Fitzgibbon is called in to collect the singed corpses. She used to feel safe enough driving alone onto the housing estates to gather up the sickening remains of decapitated dogs and tortured kittens, animals with their eyes cut out and female donkeys with nails driven up their backsides. Since being stoned and badly beaten by a gang of children a few years ago, however, she dares not go into such unfriendly territory without an escort.
"Ten years ago I could go into the worst areas in Limerick and never be afraid but you can't do that now," says Ms Fitzgibbon, who is national chairperson of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "The kids are too dangerous. They're high on drugs. Some of them look as young as eight, nine, 10 although you wouldn't know. They could be small due to malnutrition.
These children seem to spend their time thinking up new ways to torture animals and bonfires particularly seem to drive them crazy. One of the favourite entertainments is to throw kittens into the fire, then wait for the mother cat to walk pathetically into the flames in an attempt to rescue them. The mother will always give up her own life in vain.
They have also tied dogs up in barbed wire and hung them from low bridges, then waited to see lorries drive beneath, decapitating the animals. Ms Fitzgibbon finds the remnants the next day.
"I am terrified for the future when these latest graduates of schools for torture grow up and start practising their terrorism on other people," she says.
If you want to get some measure of the level of disturbance among young people today, look at the statistics for cruelty to animals, suggests Dr Nuala Healy, a psychiatrist with St Joseph's Adolescent Centre at St Vincent's Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin.
Reported cases of cruelty to animals have increased four fold in four years, from 106 in 1991 to 407 (including 54 badger baiting and dog fighting) in 1994, according to the Garda Siochana Annual Report 1994.
These statistics may be an omen of what is to come. Children who torture animals may be rehearsing for the real performance, some experts fear.
It would be reassuring to think that the 400 per cent increase was due to greater awareness of the problem and a better detection rate, but this is only partly responsible, according to Ms Fitzgibbon. She is convinced that something sinister is happening within the very character of Irish youth. She thinks of her friend - a frail, crippled elderly woman, who was terrorised by youths who broke into her home. They beat her up and tied her by the neck to her own toilet for the sake of £17. She lost all her confidence and died not long after.
Is it unreasonable to make such a connection between the bodies of dead kittens and an old woman tied to a toilet and left for dead?
Dr Healy, who has more than 20 years' experience of working with severely troubled children and teenagers, describes these children as being utterly devoid of the ability to comprehend other people's feelings. There is no doubt that many of the troubled children and teenagers being seen by professionals working in the area lack empathy and have a complete inability to comprehend the fact that their victims have feelings.
When Dr Healy asks these young teenagers why they do what they do, the answer she hears is always the same: "for the buzz", as though the "buzz" was justification in itself.
Was the mob violence in the Dublin suburb of Gallanstown last Hallowe'en "for the buzz"? When youths went on the rampage and stoned Garda cars, were they doing it "for the buzz"? Meanwhile a mile away a young woman, like the kittens of Limerick, was being killed near a bonfire in the woods. Was that also "for the buzz"?
These were only some of the events in recent months which whatever the experts may think - have ordinary people feeling worried, and not a little frightened.
"We are reaping the whirlwind," believes Noel Howard of the Irish Association of Careworkers. He says that he and his colleagues were warning us 10 years ago that increasingly vicious children in the care system were going to grow up to become dangerous criminals but nobody did anything.
"Some of these children do vicious things and yet they come here and they are just young children whose childhood has passed them by. If a child has no childhood what sort of adult will he be?"
Today we are beginning to discover what sort of adults they turn into. And the victims are paying with their trauma and sometimes their lives.
All the various experts have many theories to explain why children grow up to be criminals. Sociopathy is surely a factor, with between three and five per cent of all criminals suffering from this personality disorder which inclines them towards impulsive, destructive, manipulative behaviour with no regard for the feelings of others. It cannot account for all crime, however.
"The problem is multi faceted," says Paul O'Mahony, formerly a forensic psychologist in the prison service and author of Crime and Punishment in Ireland. There may be a biological element, such as a brain disorder, along with poor nutrition, poverty, broken families and bad parenting. He claims that 80 per cent of crime, is drug related, although alcohol abuse is also a major factor.
We also have a chaotic revolving door prison system, as Mr O'Mahony has described it, in which criminals commit crimes with impunity while on bail or so called "temporary release", a means of easing pressure on the prison system while risking the well being of citizens.
However, poverty and deprivation are by far the most important factors in Mr O'Mahony's view. He cites Farrington and West's British study which has shown that most criminals are from poor, deprived, larger families doomed to educational failure and unemployment - in short, the "under class".
This is also the view espoused by John Lonergan, governor of Mountjoy prison who points out that 75 per cent of the inmates come from five postal districts in Dublin. He sees most of the 6,000 offenders who go through the prison system annually as suffering from poor self image and low self esteem and as being "more sinned against than sinning themselves".
These are people "damned almost from the moment they were conceived", who are born into ghettoes rife with drug abuse and 90 per cent unemployment, in some cases. Today's offenders were children who, if they didn't learn about drug abuse in their own homes, soon picked it up at the doorstep where drug dealing, overdosing and sickness was going on around them as they played.
And there are still children who are growing up in a sub culture which involves an ethos where crime is the normal way of life, Mr Lonergan says. In Mountjoy, where you are as likely to see visitors' prams as Garda cars parked outside, whole families of sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers are incarcerated, making inter prison family visits routine.
These "people feel justified in stealing or in filling their homes with stolen goods because they are excluded from consumer based society. They see others possessing so much - cars, holidays - while they are expected to live on £61 a week and have to feed a £700 a day drug habit at the same time. This is at the root of crime."
AT Oberstown Boys' Centre in Lusk, Co Dublin, where 30 boys aged 11-16 are detained by order of the court either on remand or commital, "we've never had a referral from Foxrock", says Ann Wall, the centre's deputy director. Her boys come from the criminal sub cultures based in the urban "ghettoes" of Dublin, Limerick and Cork where "they perceive stealing as a way of life". They see themselves as failures from the moment they start school and suffer low self esteem as a consequence. They see no role for themselves in society other than a criminal career, which typically: starts at age eight or nine.
However, not everyone agrees that economic anger and social exclusion are at the roots of crime. This socio economic explanation is "out of date", according to Dr Art O'Connor, consultant forensic psychiatrist at the Central Mental Hospital, Dundrum. Many of the violent offenders he sees have good parents and come from stable economic backgrounds. He sees something more sinister at work: a world wide shift towards brutality of which the Republic is only a part.
Dr O'Connor is among those who are suggesting that crime may be a moral issue after all and that we need to put less emphasis on protecting the rights of the criminal and more on protecting the rights of the innocent citizen. There are many criminals - psychopaths and sexual offenders, for example - who are incapable of empathy and self control and who will almost certainly reoffend if released and we need to think about locking them away from society permanently.
He believes that we are seeing more sadistic offenders whose "humanity has evaporated". When they weep after being caught and say that they are filled with remorse, their only feelings of pity are for themselves because they are locked up, not for their victims.
Ten years ago criminals had "more sense of humanity". The criminal "was less likely to gratuitously torture his victims in the process of taking money. Acts of wanton violence are more frequent than they were," he believes. Today, a house breaker is more likely to have a knife than in the past and with more guns on the streets, who knows what will happen?
"A number of these offenders - you see it more and more give themselves a licence to go berserk into careers of violence. It used to be they were more interested in the money but now they will go to any lengths and it does not stop with just getting the money.
"Crime is changing and becoming more vicious. There is more violence and aggression coming into criminal acts. More and more one comes across the person in late teens and early 20s who could not give a damn and has no concern for his victim and what he may be doing to them."
Is this sympathy or human nature? Dr O'Connor believes that we are being fooled by the "gloss of civilisation" which overlays the deeper animal instincts of people. Look at the former Yugoslavia, for example, and how within weeks - days even - civilised people turned into brutal rapists and murderers. It can happen so easily once people give themselves permission to surrender their humanity in favour of their basest urges, he believes.
The collapse of the Catholic Church's authority and the lack of social opprobrium for anti social acts has made those with criminal tendencies feel less inhibited in giving in to their urges.
DRUG and alcohol abuse are crucial features of such wanton acts as sexual attacks and beating people up. Drugs and alcohol lower inhibitions, with alcoholism by far the greater problem than drug abuse despite what people believe, according to Dr O'Connor. Alcoholism is a major factor in acts of sexual violence - of which there were 645 cases in 1994, the most ever recorded.
Another psychiatrist who doubts that unemployment and poverty are at the root of crime is Dr Patricia Casey, Professor of Clynical Psychiatry at UCD. She also believes that more people are choosing to do bad things because moral beliefs and authority are no longer important in their lives.
"I certainly believe very strongly that the moral sense of people has shifted," she says. "There's some evidence that personality disorders (such as sociopathy) are increasing as our society becomes more tolerant and open; and less judgmental, so people who function on the fringes are less well controlled. People whose behaviour was once barely contained by society are now given free reign. The sadistic killer who may not have acted before due to moral opprobrium is now given reign to express his desires."
The cult of individualism has also contributed to this shift away from people taking cognisance of others' emotional, psychological and personal needs. It has also made parents "less diligent" about instilling moral values in their children. In Dr Casey's view, "the lone man living in a society whose sense of what is right and wrong is shifting from the absolute to the relative, combined with a sense that he himself is the centre of the universe, presents a pretty frightening prospect".
