The Long And the Short Of It
The Mayor of Limerick, Jim Long, has been embroiled in a number of controversies recently. So who is he? What does he represent? And is he really a racist, as his accusers claim?
Olaf Tyaransen, 18 Apr 2012
From an industrial perspective, it is a city in decline…
If you only go back 30 or 40 years ago, Limerick had huge industries. They had four baking factories, they had two shoe factories. They had sweet factories, tanneries, cigarette factories. When they built O’Malley Park, a huge housing estate… I worked in Shannon and what people fail to remember is that every morning at seven o’clock, two double decker buses would leave O’Malley Park for Shannon. There’d be one at three o’clock and one at 12 o’clock, and 90% of the people they moved in to O’Malley Park and the other areas were actually working. Then the jobs went, and then we had a second generation of no jobs, and now we have four generations of no jobs. The jobs went, and the areas came down.
Given Limerick’s problems with gangs and drug-related violence, what’s your opinion on the legalisation of drugs?
I would be dead against legalising drugs because you have that minimum one, what’s it called? The one that they smoke?
Cannabis.
Yeah. We turned a blind eye to that and that led to ecstasy and other drugs. And our big fear in Limerick was the heroin. We flagged it 12 or 15 years ago, that if we don’t start stopping the heavier drugs, they will lead to heroin. Heroin is a big problem. Drugs kill people anyway, but heroin brings violence with it. It’s a consignment problem. Take a consignment of heroin, nine times out of ten there will be a gun accompanying a consignment. Now, if you take 100 consignments into a city like Limerick, that’s 100 guns. That’s a lot of guns. Those 100 guns will probably be in the hands of no more than 30 people, and this is where these guns were hired out, not only in Limerick but everywhere else.
So what can you do?
The problem that we didn’t address with drugs stepped up to a kind of intimidation control area – and what controls areas with intimidation is the gun. So if we take the drugs out, we probably take the guns out, but where do we start and where do we finish? A huge problem for me as a public representative is – and I don’t want to be disingenuous to the Gardaí – but the way I see the problem at the moment is, we are trying to address the problem at the bottom. I would like to see us address the problem at the top.
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Olaf Tyaransen
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