LAST Friday the Evening Herald carried a front page headline "A City in Fear". A sub headline read "97pc do not feel safe poll". The first three paragraphs read
"Dubliners are living under the shadow of fear, a Herald poll reveals today.
"A massive 97pc of people quizzed say they no longer feel safe on their own and that crime is out of control.
"The poll came in the wake of an explosion of violence which has terrified those most at risk elderly people and women.
The story ran on for another 25 paragraphs but there was no further mention of the poll no reference to who had conducted the poll, what the sample was, what the questions were, when it was conducted. Nothing
It emerges that the "poll" referred to was a telepoll, which had been canvassed the previous day at the bottom of page 8 in two lines of 12 point bold type which ran across the page. It read "Tell us how you feel about crime. With the murder rate up 60pc, do YOU feel safe in Ireland today. If your answer is yes, then phone 1550131091. If you do not, phone 1550131092. Calls cost 12p from anywhere in Ireland."
Questioned about this poll, the editor of the Evening Herald claimed it was just as valid a barometer of public opinion as any other kind of poll. He went on to acknowledge that those who felt apprehensive about crime would be more likely to participate than those who did not feel apprehensive.
The poll of course is utterly worthless as an indicator of public opinion, quite apart from the ludicrous bias of the question and the reckless inaccuracy of the contention that the murder rate is up by 60 per cent. Yet this became the basis of the front page report for the only surviving evening newspaper in Dublin, and the headline which must have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people.
TAKE, for instance the presentation of the front page of The Irish Times last Thursday. It carried a photograph of Ray Quinn, the widower of Joyce Quinn, who had been murdered on Tuesday night in Kildare. Alongside the photograph in 16 point type or larger a quote was printed from comments made by Mr Quinn. The quote included the sentences "It seems to be that we're losing the battle against crime. That's just it.
Mr Quinn had appeared in the main item on RTE television news the night before (Wednesday). This showed a clip of him speaking movingly for over a minute, and in the course of this he said the words quoted above and also the following comments "Now we are not talking about prison spaces. We've not talking about tinkering around with Castlerea or Mickey Mouse things in the Curragh or Portlaoise. We need big American style prisons these things with a thousand prisoners plus, that are heavy on prisoner space and less on warden activity ...
"Look, I'm sure Mrs Owen is very sympathetic to my plight and the other families but that's no use. We want those people put off the streets
Ray Quinn is clearly an intelligent, articulate man but surely last Wednesday he was uniquely disqualified from giving a considered and dispassionate view of the crime phenomenon because of his grief. And yet his understandably partisan views on the crime phenomenon were given the most prominent possible billing on prime television by RTE and quoted in large type on the front page of The Irish Times.
RTE's most prominent broadcasters, Gay Byrne and Pat Kenny, have pushed a tendentious line on crime as well. For instance, on Monday cast Pat Kenny interviewed a criminologist, Paul O'Mahony, who said there had been no significant escalation of crime here and, specifically, that murder rates (in this State) had risen by only marginal levels over the last 20 years an increase of three murders per year. In the question immediately following this observation Pat Kenny asked about the "inexorable" rise in the murder rate.
YESTERDAY, in an interview about the bail laws with Liz O'Donnell of the Progressive Democrats, Pat Kenny failed to raise a single one of the objections to bail recently identified by the Law Reform Commission and repeatedly made manifest his own support for preventative detention.
This predisposition on the part of the two prime broadcasters would not be significant were it balanced by other views but this is not the case. RTE is firmly now in the "hanging and flogging" camp and this is best illustrated in the programme devoted specifically to crime, Crimeline.
The presentation of this programme is consciously alarmist, almost frenzied from the sound effects, to the enumeration of crimes, to the reconstructions. All conveying the impression that crime is out of control and that fear does, or ought to, stalk the land.
Crimeline is sponsored by an insurance company, Hibernian Insurance, that has an obvious vested interest in public alarm over crime. Nobody in RTE seems even a little bit concerned by this unhappy conjuncture.
As 1 am writing this column at lunchtime on Tuesday there is an item on the News at One on RTE Radio which is dealing in part with the problem of crime in rural areas and the attacks on old people. No mention has been made in the course of this item that there has been a huge decrease in attacks on old people in rural areas in the last decade, thanks largely to neighbourhood watch programmes and the arrest of gangs involved in such attacks in the mid 1980s. There was, however, an interview on RTE's This Week programme last Sunday with Pat Doyle of Muintir na Tire, who made a point about the huge decrease in this kind of crime.
As a result of this we seem propelled into policies which will do great damage to our society. Political opposition to changes in the bail laws is disappearing, although, objectively, this measure is at best grossly premature. We are headed towards a hugely costly prison building programme although alternatives to this are available and were proposed by the Whitaker Commission on the prison system a decade ago but then ignored. And we are determinedly refusing to face up to the real causes of the crime phenomenon drugs and alienation. Indeed, even mention of these factors nowadays, in the climate of crime hysteria, is likely to evoke contemptuous dismissal.
And, apparently, it is now politically correct or acceptable for the gardai to identity an entire community as a source of crime without public censure.