The killing of Donna Cleary on Sunday morning was an abomination, but Michael McDowell wants us to regard it as a "watershed". He said: "I believe that everybody in Ireland, be they an elected politician, an ordinary citizen, a member of the judiciary, members of law enforcement agencies, anybody who reflects on what happened last night must realise this is a watershed point."
For the family and friends of Donna Cleary, her murder is certainly a watershed. For society it is another terrible crime, but a watershed? Would that it were.
Michael McDowell seems to think this is a watershed because illegal firearms were used to murder Donna Cleary, because of the gratuitousness of the killing (murdered apparently because a few men were refused entry to a birthday party), because one of those arrested in connection with her murder had been convicted of possession of a large quantity of drugs and instead of being sentenced to a mandatory 10-year sentence was sentenced to only six years imprisonment - or so it is alleged.
How do these factors make her murder a watershed? In what way is this murder worse than the murder of a housewife in south Dublin last week or any of the other murders? All are heinous. Why then are all not a watershed, aside from the absurdity of the idea of serial watersheds? If it is true that illegal firearms were used, that the murder was as gratuitous as suggested, that there is a background of drugs and alleged inadequate sentencing involved, then it might be possible to extrapolate from this significances which could make it a watershed.
A great deal of what passes for criminality in this society is connected with drugs: the importation or manufacture, sale and possession of substances that people choose to consume and that society deems illicit.
Michael McDowell professes to be a liberal or a libertarian. Does it ever cross his mind that there is an irrationality in society deciding for adult individuals what is good for them to consume and what is not good for them to consume? Why do we decide for others what they want to do with their own selves, irrespective of the harm they may do to themselves?
But aside from that, have we not learnt that the main problems arising from drug abuse relate primarily to the abuse of heroin, which is almost exclusively a phenomenon confined to disadvantaged communities, and that report after report has made it clear that the way of dealing with this phenomenon is to deal with deprivation? In what way would our society be endangered by the removal of all criminal sanctions to do with what we now regard as illicit drugs?
We could deal openly with the heath problems that arise through the healthcare system, not the criminal justice system. We would put the criminal gangs out of business at a stroke. We would free up Garda resources to deal with far more serious criminality, with which I will deal in a moment (and, no, I am not referring to "white-collar" crime).
Gardaí claim the criminal gangs would turn their attentions to other forms of criminality if the drugs business were taken away from them.
What other forms of criminality? The importation of cigarettes. Oh, shock horror! Trafficking in prostitution - but don't we have that already and surely there is a limited demand for that?
Anyway, if we dealt with the problem of deprivation, if we removed poverty from the communities currently afflicted by it and thereby ended alienation and marginalisation, isn't it likely that those currently attracted to gangland criminality would find something else and licit to do?
We have a major crime problem here, aside from the drugs business, even aside from corporate and tax fraud. It is sex crime. We know through an authoritative survey (the Sex and Violence in Ireland report), that sex criminality is running at epidemic proportions and has done terrible harm. It seems to me this is by far our gravest crime problem and yet it is largely ignored.
More than one in 20 women (5.6 per cent) reported being subjected to penetrative or oral sex in their childhood and more than one in 50 men (2.7 per cent) reported being subjected to penetrative or oral sex in their childhood. Nearly one in five women (19.2 per cent) reported being subjected to contact sexual abuse in their lifetime. One in six men reported being subjected to contact sexual abuse in their lifetime.
The numbers involved here are horrific; the numbers of crimes must run into the hundreds of thousands - and yet almost no attention. When last or at all did you hear Michael McDowell fulminate about this?
Yes, of course murder is worse, much worse, and I am not suggesting otherwise. But I am saying that the major crime problem we have here has to do with sex crime and the Minister with responsibility for dealing with this issue, whose garrulousness on almost every other topical issue is renowned, never, in my recollection, has focused on the main issue.
Were he to do so, that would be a watershed.