Madam, - The recent debate over the increased levels of gun crime and lawlessness is being conducted in a vacuum. While commentators rue the lack of tougher sentencing and demand more direct action to be taken, the real causes of the problem are being completely overlooked. We as a society are the masters of our own misfortune.
While I totally condemn any act of violence and am loath to find justification for any such action, words of condemnation alone are just not enough.
We have allowed the gap between rich and poor in our society to widen and widen and in so doing encouraged a generation of alienated, undervalued, angry young people to emerge. We have failed absolutely in empowering them and therefore many of them seek empowerment in the all-too-attractive world of crime and drug-trading.
What have we offered them instead? Our most disadvantaged areas have large housing lists, poor community infrastructure and a prevailing sense of hopelessness.
Our education system is failing the most vulnerable in our society by refusing to meet the needs of those who need it most. Even schools with the most acute disadvantage are being stripped of special needs resources because the department know that it'll get away with it.
Yet the majority of youth offenders cannot read their own charge-sheets. Where is the pubic outcry about that? Our media consistently disregard any positive or uplifting story that emanates from working-class areas because the status-quo is what we know and that is what we are most comfortable with.
Poverty is only noticed when it begins to scream and shout and even then we blame it on itself. We get the country that we deserve and we certainly get the Government that we deserve.
Will we vote for policies that will teach all our children to read, to house our people and to strive for a more equal distribution of wealth?
Or are we happy as long as somebody promises that they'll lock the problem up for now?
We need to be realistic and to realise that collectively everyone has a part to play in ridding our society of social inequality which underlines much of what we have witnessed recently. - Yours, etc,
Cllr AODHÁN Ó RÍORDÁIN, (Labour Party), Clonliffe Ave, Dublin 3.