Middle-class drug users are directly responsible for gangland killings as they are creating the market for greedy and powerful dealers, President Mary McAleese has said.
Describing the increase in gun crime and gangland killings as a "hideous and ugly development", the President said well-off people with jobs who buy drugs have a level of culpability much more broadly based than people are prepared to face up to.
In an interview with Marian Finucane broadcast on RTÉ Radio One on Christmas Eve, Mrs McAleese said we have to ask where the problem of gangland killings starts, and suggested it was pyramidical in its structures.
She said gangland killings were pretty much the top part and the most visible surface of the pyramid. Taking the problem down to its roots, you have people who are selling and dealing in drugs and in big, big, money.
"Big enough that they will kill for it; big enough that they will take lives capriciously for it."
Mrs McAleese said we have to then ask who creates the market that allows these people get so greedy and powerful.
"It is the people with good jobs, it is the people with a great social life and a fancy car out the door, who are probably out tonight or last night, who were doing cocaine, who think it is a really smart thing to do, who are smoking hash or using cannabis or who are using E tablets and think it is a perfectly acceptable part of their life."
The President added: "They know it is unlawful but they again have a careless and tolerant attitude of it, and unfortunately that is the biggest and broadest part of the platform that supports the whole thing."
She said if these people were more responsible and turned away from drugs they would not create the market and we would not have the gangland killings.
"The level of culpability for all of this is much more broadly based than many people are prepared to face up to . . . the same people by the way who will give out about it and who are terrified at what is happening out there . . . they are going to have to accept a fair deal of responsibility up the line for what happens in the pyramid."
Mrs McAleese said gangland killings were built on a solid, broad base. "But the people who do drugs in a nice environment who are not meeting bad or nasty people . . . they are going to have to stop and say to themselves every time they do that they are implicated directly in what happens further up the line."