The Garda Commissioner Pat Byrne is worried that the "Blue Flu" business has "brought the law into public disrepute". Oh, I don't know. I heard Brendan from Rialto on The Last Word saying that the public should treat the striking gardai the way gardai sometimes treat strikers. If they demonstrate, kick the fuck out of them, and don't worry if they complain, they'll be denounced in the O'Reilly press as troublemakers who weren't hit half hard enough.

But to get back to the point. Why is there disrespect for the law? Because it's not rationally possible to take any other view.
Government ministers and newspaper commentators never give over about a "crime wave" and the need for more resources, tougher laws and a generally harsher approach to law-breaking. But none of them is seriously concerned about serious crime. If they were, Charlie Haughey would be slopping out and hundreds of rich people would be on the run.
Haughey committed perjury at the McCracken Tribunal. He has confessed. No further evidence or investigation is needed in order to charge him. But he hasn't been charged. That proves that none of the political and legal establishment is speaking the truth when they say they respect the law. So why should we?
On June 8th 1989 Ray Burke went into a bank in Swords, Co. Dublin, and cashed a cheque for £30,000 made out to "cash" by one of Tony O'Reilly's companies. Later the same day, two men from Joseph Murphy Structural Engineers called at Burke's home and gave him another £30,000 in cash in a brown envelope. Burke wants us to believe that no favour or service of any kind was asked for or expected in return, indeed, that the idea that some favour or service might be expected simply never entered his head.
Do they take the people for cretins?
Yes, they do. So why should we regard them in return with anything other than anger?
Companies owned by Larry Goodman, a henchman of Haughey, Burke, Ahern and the rest of the FF rabble, defrauded the Irish people of huge sums of money. They've admitted it. Has anybody served a day in jail as a result? No. Is Larry Goodman a pariah in polite society? Of course not.
Respect the law? Get real.
In The Godfather we saw a character based on Meyer Lansky telling Michael Corleone that if they played their cards right they could win political power in the US. They've done it already in Ireland. The gangsters have dupes at the heart of government.
We know that at one point Allied Irish Banks operated 53,000 bogus non-resident accounts containing more than £600 million hidden from the revenue commissioners. The Bank of Ireland ran a similar scam. There's the Irish National's neat double-whammy, ripping off the poorer class of customer while helping the rich to rip off the revenue. And the Ansbacher accounts set up by Guinness and Mahon, which up to a hundred wealthy shysters paid into to defraud the tax-payer, and which Haughey had his snout in for decades.
It's no problem to the gardai to muster a small regiment of armed men to ambush a Continuity IRA gang out to hijack a security van and kill one of them in circumstances in which they appeared to have had every opportunity to apprehend him unharmed. But it's as if they are struck down on the instant by the deadly "Blue Flu" when confronted by far bigger bank-robberies happening all the time under their noses in the clear light of day.
Any working-class person who has respect for the law is a fool.