There are genuine victims of anti-social behaviour, and they should not be forgotten in the arguments over Asbos, writes Enda O'Doherty
Like an early morning whiskey to an alcoholic or a fix to a strung-out addict, the law and order gambit exerts an irresistible attraction for the struggling politician in search of votes.
The promise to clean up the streets and come down hard on the scum who are making ordinary people's lives a misery has long been a proven election winner, it's only serious rival the equally popular pledge to slash income tax and "let hard-working families spend their money the way they see fit".
Before the Clintonite and New Labour revolutions, this kind of talk was the preserve of the political right, but it is now part of the armoury of all mainstream parties.
For what remains of the once proud liberal left such populist recipes are anathema, and distaste for the tough rhetoric of former British home secretary David Blunkett on a variety of crime and security issues was at least one of the factors which kept many traditional Labour voters at home on May 5th this year or induced them to switch to the more gentlemanly Liberal Democrats.
Much British media comment, and liberal wrath, have focused on the issue of Asbos (anti-social behaviour orders), a mechanism introduced to control delinquency by legally circumscribing the behaviour of known repeat offenders through prohibitions on specified acts of nuisance or threatening behaviour.
Writers in the Guardian have had enormous fun finding examples of Asbos which appear vindictive, arbitrary or just plain silly, while the civil liberties lobby has been particularly - and perhaps predictably - hostile, portraying the orders as a deliberate "attack on the human rights of marginalised communities".
"We must not become an Asbo land," warned Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, "where it is a crime to be irritating and a crime to be a child." But do Asbos in fact seek to penalise the merely irritating? And will they make it a crime to be a child? The question takes on more urgency since it has emerged that, following their apparent success and huge popularity in Britain, similar measures are shortly to be introduced here.
In a State where our Taoiseach's response to concern about the Garda's shooting dead of two criminals in what seemed to be questionable circumstances was to tell the public not to go "weak-kneed" on crime, it is legitimate to highlight politicians' cynical exploitation of public fears to boost their political machismo.
And indeed Dr Paul O'Mahony, the most articulate Irish critic of Asbos, sees the measures as primarily a cheap political stroke, but also, and more worryingly, a significant threat to civil liberties and due process.
Delinquency in adolescence is common, O'Mahony argues, "the product of normative and quite normal experimentation with rebellious and risky behaviours". Furthermore, such "adolescence limited anti-social behaviour" is normally short-lived; troublesome youths, for the most part, grow up to be relatively normal adults. And while the effects of such conduct "urgently need to be addressed", recourse to punishment or the threat of it, we are told, derives from "an exaggerated and unrealistic assessment of the misdemeanours of youth".
But we all know that "bad lads" grow up; we also unfortunately know that they are then immediately replaced by other bad lads. But what is the practical effect of this "badness" on other people? To some, anti-social behaviour summons up the image of public drunkenness, and its associated phenomena of public urination, vomiting and on a bad night even fornication.
And this is indeed the form such behaviour takes in Dublin city centre. In some working class suburbs, however, it has another face, that of gangs of "feral youth" on a mission to bully and intimidate, beyond the control of impotent or uncaring parents. Its victims, isolated and miserable, are chiefly the vulnerable and unconnected: the elderly, the odd or inadequate, even the merely unprotected, like single mothers and their children.
It is simply irresponsible to minimise the enormous damage these adolescents perpetrate and leave behind them, either by "contextualising" their behaviour with sociological theory or euphemising it as nuisance, irritation or mere "misdemeanour".
Louise Carey, Britain's so-called "Asbos tsar", has accused her ideological critics of "not living in the real world", but that is perhaps harsh, for there is indeed more than one real world: in Dublin, for example, if your house is worth more than €500,000 you are unlikely to have had much experience of extreme anti-social behaviour; if it's worth less than €300,000 the chances are you have.
Into which category, I wonder, do most civil liberties campaigners fall? The pity is that Asbos, on their own and without a proper supporting structure, may indeed achieve nothing, as their opponents insist. The debate we should be having is one about Garda reform and renewal and the accountability of law enforcement agencies, not just to the Dáil but to councils and local communities. The one we are actually having, between civil liberties ideologues and bluff populists, is calculated to generate heat but sadly little light.
Liberals and left-wingers have enjoyed a long and broadly satisfactory political cohabitation, but it is not an indissoluble one. It is being argued that Asbos are not just a bad idea but the latest of a whole series of bad ideas to emerge from an interfering, "censorious" and overweening State, which clamps illegally parked cars, bans smoking in pubs and persecutes tax evaders.
This language and sentiment, which is of course increasingly audible in the best tigerish circles, is not in fact liberal but libertarian. And let us be quite clear: libertarianism has nothing to do with the cherished values of the left, old or new.