Ulster Said No!

1. Welcome to Croke Park.
It was an interesting fortnight, all told. To begin on a positive note, congratulations to the GAA are in order, following the decision at national congress to allow the use of Croke Park for soccer and rugby matches, while Lansdowne Road is being redeveloped. It has been described as a momentous decision by the association and it is. A victory for democracy, it reflects the wishes of people at grass roots level in Gaelic games.

It is also a reflection of the greater sense of self confidence that flows through the organisation nowadays. The bunker mentality has been jettisoned. There has been considerable, potentially influential, opposition to the move, especially from the committee of past Presidents – who successfully scuppered the debate on the issue last year. But in the end, in 2005, the hand of ecumenism was extended in a way that will win respect for the GAA, across the spectrum of public opinion in Ireland.
Predictably, the six counties of Northern Ireland all voted in favour of maintaining the ban. One representative from Tyrone expressed the view in the run-up to the vote that to allow soccer into Croke Park might well result in a descendant of the black and tans playing on the hallowed turf. It would be hard to find a more telling example of someone locked into a warped, and increasingly outmoded, view of the world. I’d be inclined to hope that descendants of the black and tans have already played at Croke Park (probably for the Dubs). Either way, the assumption that you can blame the descendants for the actions of their forebears is part of what makes progress so difficult in the North. But at least that kind of black prejudice has now been marginalised within the GAA. Hopefully it can be extirpated from the association in Ulster now, because others involved in sport in that part of the world have begun to move on.
I was struck by a picture in one of the national newspapers the day after Linfield took on Longford Town in the Setanta Cup in Longford recently. The game took place shortly after the death of Pope John Paul 2. Now, historically, Linfield , loyalist and anti-Catholic to the core it was thought, would have been identified with the sectarianism rife in soccer in Northern Ireland. But as they lined up, at the start of the Longford game, it became apparent that the Linfield players were wearing yellow bands on their wrists as a tribute to the deceased Pontiff. Now, I’m as sceptical of the bona fides of the Vatican as Ian Paisley, but it was a decent and touching gesture all the same. A clear statement that the club wanted to consign the poison of sectarianism, tribalism and irrational hatred to the past, one hoped that it might have been paralleled by the Ulster counties in the vote on Croke Park.
It really is time to move on.

2 Criminal Justice, How Are You?
The Minister for Justice has been attempting to push new Criminal Justice legislation through parliament with the minimum of debate. During the week, however, there were exchanges in the Dail on the topic, that attracted belated attention to the excesses of at least some of what is being proposed.
There are a number of highly questionable elements to the new bill, many of which have been criticised by the Human Rights Commission. These include allowing search warrants to be issued by the Gardai rather than the courts; giving to the Gardai the ability to take saliva and mouth swabs from suspects, by force if necessary; increasing the maximum period during which a person, suspected of having committed an arrestable offence, can be detained from the existing limit of 12 hours to 24 hours; providing a fixed penalty procedure in relation to so called public order offences – for example, intoxication, or disorderly conduct, in a public place; and the provision for the tagging of offenders.
We have written in Hot Press about this before. There is an intent, at the heart of the provisions on anti-social behaviour in particular, which suggests a contempt for young people that was clearly exposed in the comments of the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, in the Dail last week. Bertie admitted that the measures might be seen as Draconian – as indeed, in many respects, they are. But this observation did not seem to give him pause for thought. “The reality,” he said, “is that if young people do not get a bit of a rough time from the police, we will never address these issues.”
This is an astonishing comment for the leader of any country to make – not least a country with one of the lowest crime rates in Europe. I suspect that the Taoiseach had not given too much thought to what he would say and that it is not something he would stand over. But maybe I’m wrong. On the face of it, his statement condones what would amount to bad behaviour on the part of the Gardai. The police are in a position of power. Any suggestion that they are entitled to abuse that power, by giving any group of people ‘a hard time’ is doubly dangerous.
It is dangerous to society because it implies that the Gardai are above the law. And it is dangerous for the Gardai themselves. More than anything else, what they need is to command the respect of people, and of young people in particular. The idea that they will earn this by hassling them on the streets, hauling them down to the station on the flimsiest of pretexts and generally messing with their heads is fatuous in the extreme. Far from helping to reduce the likelihood of crime, this policy can only exacerbate the resentment of authority figures that is a widespread and understandable feature of teenage life. If you give ‘young people’ a hard time, then they become hardened. The more hardened they become the more likely they are to engage in anti-social behaviour.
And – here’s where it gets particularly messy – under the provisions of the new bill, if they engage in anti-social behaviour, they will be criminalised far quicker than in the past.
The introduction, in the bill, of fixed-penalty offences is especially pernicious. This provision effectively gives to the Gardai the powers to act as judge, jury and executioner. Of course in an entirely benign regime, or one run by extremely well-programmed automatons, there is just a possibility that this might work fairly. But in a system run by people, it can and inevitably will be abused. The Human Rights Commission – a statutory Government agency – has pointed out that such powers are likely to be used disproportionately against certain groups in society such as members of the Traveller community, other ethnic minorities and protesters. They’re right. As sure as shootin’ heroin leads to addiction, individuals will be singled out and picked on. In some cases it will be because of local prejudice. In others the motivation will be political. And in others again, it will be just because a particular Garda enjoys getting it up for people.
Isn’t that being a bit unfair on the Gardai as a force? Listen, there are lots of decent skins who become gardai. Anyone who fails to recognise that is plain wrong. But you need do no more than to read about the extraordinary shenanagins in Donegal, which are currently being investigated by the Morris Tribunal, to conclude that, no, this is not being unfair at all. Not only are Gardai capable of doing wrong – but if and when they do, there is a reluctance to testify against one another that makes it very hard for a legitimate complainant to get justice.
Here’s a forecast. In due course, Gardai will be given quotas, in the way that the likes of clampers are now, to ratchet up the number of fixed penalties imposed under this piece of legislation. It happens already in relation to speeding – which explains why the police spend their time farcically on dual carriageways, doing drivers for exceeding, often by small amounts, speed limits that are in some instances patently absurd. It will become a way of generating revenue for the Government or even for the Gardai themselves. And young people, to a greater extent than anyone else, will be victimised in this money making regime; they will be used and abused by Gardai because they are easy targets.
The way in which the Minister proposes to use electronic tagging is also deeply insidious. The stated intention is to introduce tagging as an alternative to prison sentences. However, the far greater likelihood is that tagging will be used in cases in which the Probation Act has been applied in the past, thereby increasing the number of convictions – good optics for the Gardai and the Minister – but in the process attaching the stigma of a criminal record to individuals who in the past would have not been thus burdened or alienated.
And that is without getting into the issue of the personal invasiveness of tagging.
What sort of a society are we trying to create here? No one in his or her right mind would condone violent crime or oppose sanctions that are genuinely likely to reduce it. But the idea that someone can be hit with an on-the-spot criminal penalty for something as subjective as making a nuisance of themselves or as potentially trivial as being ‘disorderly’ represents a descent into the realm of Big Brother policing.
The emphasis of current thinking in the Department of Justice, and in the Gardai, is utterly skewed away from the preventive or remedial approach towards which any civilised society aspires. There is an onus on those who are privileged to think positively and constructively. To put the work into bringing disadvantaged kids back into education. To give them responsibility. To provide better facilities for sports clubs. To work with people on the ground to encourage participation in communities. This sort of action is about the long haul. It may be difficult. But it works. Quick fixes, of the kind that the Minister is proposing, are a recipe for discontent – and just possibly for disaster.
Beating up on kids and tagging them and generally treating them like pariahs – well, it’s obvious where that’s heading. It is lazy, elitist and philosophically poisonous, a recipe for the perversion of justice that will come back to haunt Irish society if we allow it to go ahead.
I think Bertie Ahern has enough common decency in him to think about much of this again. The question is: will the PDs let him?

3 Licenses For Nightclubs Good.
Finally, this fortnight saw the unveiling of the new Liquor Bill. To confirm that we are not of a mindset to insist that the Minister for Justice is always wrong, there are good things in the bill. Quite clearly, the provision of a separate license for nightclubs makes sense. No previous Minister had the guts to introduce this – but Michael McDowell has done it in the Heads of the Bill. He deserves credit for that.
The proposed new license for café bars is also potentially a positive development. In the end, Irish people will vote with their feet in relation to this, but it is a good idea at least to attempt to shift the emphasis away from the dedicated drinking establishments that dominate the scene in Ireland. The Heads of the Bill indicate that ‘drink-only’ licenses will be a lot dearer than those with a real food dimension. It might just provide sufficient incentive for a significant number of pubs to opt for the food-drink route. And if they do, it might just have the effect of reducing the extent of wholesale drunkenness. Drinking with food is a different thing entirely to binge-drinking on an empty stomach.
But there are other aspects of the bill that are far less positive. The provision that planning permission and fire safety conditions will have to be proved in District Courts to get licenses, for example, has the potential to hit live music. There is a genuine question as to whether or not the emphasis on fire safety in Ireland has passed the limits of what is reasonable. It is a subject for another day, but with this Bill, the noose may be tightening.
In a similar vein, there is a possibility that the provision that the Gardai and the public can object to licenses for public order and other reasons will be abused. Let’s just say that one person’s idea of a good time is another’s definition of a nuisance.
And finally, the introduction of a new offense of having a forged Garda age card represents another attack on young people. It is not in any way to condone the deceit involved in forging a card to say that it is likely to be severely disproportionate, for the State to haul kids up before the court for this sort of stuff. Or even to hit them with a fixed penalty offense.
There are offences that merit criminal sanction – and especially so if there is an habitual element involved. Youthful high spirits do not come into that category. It is natural to want to experiment. It is no more than human to want to act like you’re a few years older than you are. The job of parents is to stay as close as possible to their children, so that if and when the time comes, they can encourage them to take it steady and to avoid putting themselves in harm’s way. But the policy of targeting with criminal sanctions those children who do push the outside of the envelope seems to be disproportionate, misplaced and wrong.
In general, we need more focus on prevention than on punishment. As has been pointed out by Michael Clifford in the Sunday Tribune, amongst others, newspapers hype the extent of crime because it sells. As a result, it plays well with populist sentiment to hang tough on law and order. This is what the Minister is at. But the effect will almost certainly be hopelessly negative, with the young people Bertie Ahern referred to suffering an even greater degree of alienation.
It is a failure of the imagination. A failure of to understand. A failure to empathise.
In short, it is a failure. Is that the legacy the Government wants?