In a society which declares total war on terrorism, economics and business cannot be left out. One needs a long memory to recall all the anti-terrorist measures taken by this State. But popular memory is sufficient to recall perhaps the most effective measure taken against drug criminals.

That was the Proceeds of Crime Act, 1996, which effectively allows the Criminal Assets Bureau to seize the assets of those who are suspected of being drug traffickers. It worked for drug criminals and the similar approach now being taken in the case of recalcitrant IRA factions will surely contribute to the aim of "crushing" them.

Terrorism plays to the primeval emotion of fear of a random, insatiable force. It is the "madman theory of war", espoused by the United States in Vietnam, whose premise was that you should behave so irrationally and destructively in war that your enemy could never predict your actions and would therefore be terrorised into submission.

Faced with the same ploy, the Government is right not to get angry, or fearful, but to get even, and in doing so, to win. One coldly, rational thing is to strike at the businesses of those who perpetrate and perpetuate terrorism.

In the case of drug criminals, it was easy to see that their considerable assets were the proceeds of crime. The Anti-Money Laundering provisions of the Criminal Justice Act, 1994, made it an offence for anyone involved in money transmission to permit, even through carelessness, the proceeds of crime to be laundered through the financial system. This is a burden on financial services businesses, but the principle is accepted in most countries, that business assets or business systems cannot be allowed facilitate criminal deeds.

The same must go for a farm or any premises used to assist, or further, terrorism. We must insist that we no longer tolerate those who allow their farms to be used as secret arsenals. We can decide that we abhor so much the uses to which these weapons are put that we are going to raise the stakes enormously for those who carry out, or aid and abet, murder through bombing or shooting.

Raising the stakes used to mean heavier fines and longer sentences, even culminating with the death penalty. But that's not necessary. The possible loss of a farm in our culture should raise the stakes so much that many arms dumps will be flushed out. Zero tolerance as applied to trivial offences has been discredited. But if we really have zero tolerance for every link in the chain which set off Omagh's horror, we will not baulk at seeing a farmer lose his land, or businessman lose his business, as the price for visiting terror on our fellow human beings and countrymen.

There are, as ever, fine points of constitutional law about the seizure of land and business assets.

But to this layman, a principle seems to have been established in the case of drug criminals and the Proceeds of Crime Act.

Perhaps one could argue that there are no proceeds of crime to confiscate in the case of a farm or business premises that is used for terrorist planning.

So, is it constitutional to confiscate assets as a punishment for a crime when those assets were not the proceeds of the crime?

In some ways, it doesn't matter. Ultimately, society decides its own rules. It is a matter of procedure as to how its views are given effect, through an Act of the Oireachtas or through the prior stage of a constitutional amendment. We managed to have a constitutional amendment on what we were told was the critical issue of the bail laws, and yet, ironically, it is only now that change is being put into effect.

We must work out what a total intolerance of continued terrorism means at the level of our own actions and at the level of our laws. Are we content to be customers or suppliers of the business run by a former leading member of the IRA and member of the political wing of the Real IRA? Why should our laws permit a farmer to continue to own his farm if he used that land to aid the business of bombing?

If we see subversion of our society and State as occurring in more circumstances than when the institutions of State are under threat, then every instrument of State should be brought to bear on the objective of removing this threat. The regulation of property rights is but one of the powers of the State and it is proper that it, too, is directed towards crushing the terrorists among us.

Oliver O'Connor is an investment funds specialist