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| Hands up, you're in the South now |
As we drove back across the Border at Lenamore, my friend
seemed to exhale a sigh of relief. The once-forbidding outer reaches of the Steelstown
and Galliagh suburbs of Derry city were a welcoming haven now, he said.
He was joking, of course, but with more than a hint of
ironic truth
‘I’ve told friends in the South that I’m getting too nervous
to visit them now,’ he said, 'because all I seem to read about is violence and
murder.
‘At least when that was happening up here, we sort of saw
the reason for it. We could even avoid it and live our lives in relative
safety. Down there, it just seems senseless and random and it’s as bad as ever
it was up here.'
I decided to keep a tally. Today (12 March), it includes the
following:
• A decomposing body – thought to be that of a young man who
was murdered last summer – unearthed from a bog in north Kerry;
• A member of a military bomb disposal squad injured while making
safe an improvised explosive device (IED) fixed to the underside of a car in
Cork;
• A warning by a local politician that the proliferation of
knives has led to a wave of seemingly random attacks in Dundalk.
The body from the bog was a chilling reminder of the
continuing search for the ‘disappeared’ victims of the Troubles. Combined with
the under-car bomb, it harked back to the legacy of a 30-year conflict in Northern
Ireland, an era we are still working to put behind us forever.
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| Gardaí gather at another crime scene |
But on my trawl for news of violent crime south of the
Border, I could have gone back for the past month and compiled daily incidents
of violent crime, a recurring catalogue that matches some of the worst of the
Troubles.
It would include the shooting of four men, two of them fatally,
near a GAA clubhouse in Kildare; a drive-by shooting in suburban Dublin when
stray bullets narrowly missed a group of innocent teenage girls; the discovery
of two bodies, both with fatal gunshots, in separate cars in rural Roscommon;
and the corpses of two men, both shot, in a burnt-out car dumped in isolated Ravensdale
Forest just south of the Border.
It is a chilling reminder of former times, yet such wanton
violence seems to have become almost an accepted aspect of life south of the
Border. When it was happening up north, there was natural alarm that it could
spiral out of control and even infect the south in its mindless mayhem.
Back then, people from Dublin and points south visibly
quaked at the prospect of crossing the Border. Truth to be told, some still do.
Yet the fact is that the recorded level of violent crime in
Northern Ireland last year was the lowest since the start of 1969. Let me say that again,
the violence has dropped to the level it was before the real onset of the
Troubles and the start of the IRA campaigns.
That was back in the relatively innocent days when Dublin
and all of Ireland was agog at the grisly case of medical student Shan
Mohangi convicted of killing his 16-year-old girlfriend in a botched home abortion.
That notorious story began in 1963 and rolled on for years. Today, it would be
a mere blip on the screen of public consciousness, kept alive only by the True
Crime industry.
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| Living in the dark Underworld of 'Jerry Lynch' |
For it is a relatively new feature of journalism south of
the border that Crime Reporters are top of the heap. They churn out a seemingly
endless diet of murder and more, salivating over the details, weaving it into
the fabric of ‘what readers want’ and conveying it with all the self-serving certitude
of their police informants. It’s like an endless reel of the cult movie Intermission, with Colm Meaney’s over-the-top detective character ‘Jerry Lynch’
directing all the action.
Twenty-five years ago, Dublin newsrooms had ‘Security
Correspondents’ whose main job was to monitor and report on the spill-over of
violence from the North. ‘Indigenous’ violent crime, not connected to the
North, was rare and largely played down by the police because it happened in
marginalised and impoverished working-class communities.
Yet the onset of the peace process brought a commensurate
rise in the level of ‘crime reporting’. Today, Dublin’s coterie of ‘Crime
Reporters’ form a new hierarchy in the industry. They combine into a new breed
of reporter that specialises in bated breath, in-your-face eyewitness accounts,
delivered with all the brashness of Hollywood goodfellas. The violent murder of
their role model, Veronica Guerin, hardly brought a pause in their early gallop
and they have now become the self-fulfilling prophets of our age.
Today, many of them even double as writers of churned-out popular
crime fiction eagerly sought by publishers to supplement the diet of voracious
readers and whet their appetite for the next instalment of reality. It is also
noteworthy that among the new flush of crime novelists, the talented teacher
from Derry Brian McGilloway focuses his fiction across the frontier in Donegal,
an otherworldly Underworld of the imagination that is increasingly styled
‘Borderlands’, as if it was one actual place removed from the real Ireland.
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| Rupert Murdoch |
Meanwhile, other crime reporters specialise in cut-and-paste
books of their most salacious offerings for a regurgitated feast of sickening
stand-out stories. And just in case you missed it all, there are ‘dot.ie’
websites dedicated to listing news of crime.
It is an endless carousel of crime that begets crime and we
can’t even blame the evil empire of Rupert Murdoch who has little control over
Dublin’s media machine.
So do I propose censoring news of crime?
Certainly not, but I can’t help feeling that the ascendancy
of these Underworld overlords in our news industry has been at the expense of
real news gathering, of competent hard-slog journalism that would focus on more
than the sensationalised symptoms of a sick society.
Let’s disregard the endless repetition of that police
lexicon of ‘thugs’ and ‘villains’, blaming them alone for spiralling violent
crime.
Focus instead on the overwhelming majority of people in
these marginalised communities who know themselves what can and cannot be done
to improve their lives and the prospects of their children.
Let’s step back and resist ‘shock and horror’ for what many
news editors would deem ‘boring angles’.
Let’s conduct a reasonable debate about the
‘criminalisation’ of drug addiction that feeds the twin maws of criminals and a
‘law and order’ cult.
Who knows, we might even reverse the seeming inevitable
slide into crime as normal.
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| Non-political crime was once largely in the realm of TV drama |
It happened up here with a lot more baggage to carry along
and it can happen down there if society resists the dark world of ‘law and
order’ doomsayers, and reassesses its values from a fixation with crime to a real
focus on caring for ‘all the children of the nation’.
Meanwhile, I’ll probably be watching my back when I cross
the Border. For as they used to say on Hill Street Blues, back in those halcyon
days of the early 1980s when non-political crime was mostly the fare of American
TV soap operas, ‘Let’s be careful out there.’
