Sir, Scaremongering with "zero tolerance" policies has the effect of diminishing the quality of life for many people who imagine that the crime rate is soaring and that they themselves are at serious personal risk. Local figures provide a microcosm of the whole, city. In Santry during 1996, 86 burglaries were reported to the Gardai and a person was arrested in 51 of these cases. Burglaries have since stopped.
The Gardai claim that if eight people were taken out of circulation, then crime in Santry would virtually disappear. Therefore a sense of proportion must be kept on this issue. How to deal with families who supervise their underage children housebreaking remains an unresolved problem, but the new legislation on juvenile offending may provide some solutions.
Fianna Fail has little to say on the recent Eastern Health Board £14 million plan to tackle drug abuse. The detail published in The Irish Times suggests that the promise of the ministerial task force to eliminate waiting lists for methadone maintenance by the end of 1997 will not be met. Eight new addiction centres are promised, each of which will provide up to 140 addicts with maintenance and detoxification programmes. Thus they will deal with a total of 1,129 people.
Published figures claim that following detoxification, about 40 per cent of addicts are refusing heroin within six months, so the problem will prove intractable. New satellite clinics will treat 600 clients, with local pharmacies dispensing the chemical substitute. If, there are, as claimed 2,500 already being treated in Health Board facilities and there are really 8,000 addicts, then the potential queue will remain in the thousands. This is ignoring altogether the numbers "graduating" from heroin smoking to injecting.
If 70 per cent of the "zero tolerance" crime is due to the desperation of addicts financing a habit, then Fianna Fail would have better served the community by demanding a greater investment in addressing the causes and consequences of drug addiction in the areas of the city graphically described by John Lonergan, the governor of Mountjoy Prison, during the recent television series. The Garda Commissioner, Pat Byrne, is correct we want our Gardai to exercise their common sense. Imagine the outcry if "zero tolerance" was applied to the vigorous detection and pursuit of "venial" white collar crime! - Yours, etc.,
Glasnevin Avenue,
Dublin 11.