Michael McDowell spoke about the crime figures released on Monday as though none of the recent insight into criminality here had penetrated the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.
We do have serious crime problems but they are not the problems that exercise Michael McDowell much or at all. The most serious of the problems do not concern drunken youths on the streets in the early hours or even, for the most part, the doings of the so-called "organised crime gangs" (are there disorganised crime gangs?) or even (again, for the most part) the antics of the paramilitaries.
The most serious crime problems have to do with sexual offences and domestic violence, and there are the further problems of corporative and tax fraud (not even alluded to in the official crime reports) and pretty serious incidences of criminality within An Garda Síochána itself.
In a comment on these recent crime figures Michael McDowell noted "rape of female, down 26 per cent". In a further comment, he said: "In the first half of 2005, in the category of sexual offences, decreases were noted in the categories of sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault and rape of a female, down 12 per cent, 73 per cent and 26 per cent respectively".
After everything we have learnt about sexual offences in the last few years, you would think there would be someone in the Department of Justice who would urge caution, who would say don't we know by now that official figures on sexual offences are largely meaningless, that reported falls in sexual offences may be a worrying trend rather than a welcome one, that it might be better to say nothing about the official Garda figures on sexual offences.
Remember the SAVI (Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland) report published a few years ago by the College of Surgeons? It reported:
• One in five women (20.4 per cent) reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood and one in 10 reported non-contact sexual abuse.
• More than one in 20 women (5.6 per cent), over 110,000 in all, were raped as children.
• One in six men (16.2 per cent) reported experiencing sexual abuse in childhood, with one in 14 reporting non-contact abuse.
• 2.7 per cent of all men were subjected to penetrative sex (anal or oral sex) in childhood.
That is about 12,000 men raped as children.
And the vast majority of these people sexually abused as children and as adults never reported the crimes committed on them at the time to anyone, not to their parents, not to doctors or social workers and certainly not to the Garda. So there is a huge epidemic of criminality that has gone on and there is no reason to think it is not still going on and remains unreflected in the crime figures.
On several occasions over the last few years there were significant increases in the incidence of reported sexual offences. This caused the usual unthinking outcry in sections of the media and among the political class, whereas in fact such increases might have reflected an improvement, an improvement in the willingness of victims of sexual offences to report these crimes.
Rhetorically we are outraged by the incidence of sexual crime but what practical measures are enacted to deal with the problem?
There is a television campaign running, it seems, incessantly, warning people of the iniquity of not having a television licence. How is it there is no ongoing campaign encouraging people to report sexual offences and secure mechanisms provided to enable people to do that?
How is it that this criminality hardly ever features in the periodic hysteria over "crime waves"? How is there not a national campaign to deal with this issue, to deal with the victims of sexual offences, to deal with the perpetrators, to deal with the phenomenon?
We have Operation Anvil and Operation Freeflow and Operation Whatever You Are Having Yourself, but no initiative to deal with perhaps the most prevalent of all serious crimes in society? Just two weeks ago the National Crime Council published a survey conducted for it by the ESRI on domestic violence.
It showed that 15 per cent of women (about one in seven) and 6 per cent of men (about one in 16) have experienced severely abusive behaviour of a physical, sexual or emotional nature from a partner at some time in their lives.
One woman in 11 has experienced severe physical abuse in a relationship, one in 12 has experienced sexual abuse. One man in 25 has experienced severe physical abuse and one in 90 sexual abuse.
These are shocking statistics but, apparently, as far as the Department of Justice is concerned, of no consequence. If it were otherwise, wouldn't you think there would be some reference in Michael McDowell's comments on the crime statistics about the unreliability of the statistics on the most prevalent and some of the most serious crime phenomena?