MANY crime victims felt the suffering they experienced met an inadequate and insensitive response from the criminal justice system, Bishop Jim Moriarty, auxiliary bishop of Dublin, said yesterday.
"We find this expressed most recently in the anger of those communities who have taken to the streets to protest against the drug culture and who feel that the institutions of society have not done enough for them," the bishop said at a Mass in St Michan's Church, Halston Street, Dublin, to mark the opening of the new law year.
On the other hand, Bishop Moriarty said, a truly wise system of justice would "uphold the principle of innocent until proven guilty and will seek to rehabilitate those who are convicted of crime rather than just mete out, punishment and exact retribution."
Bishop Moriarty said the society we lived in made the challenge even greater. Many would agree with Dr Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth Nations, when in a letter to the Times he wrote about "a teflon society on whose surface moral judgments do not stick".
Dr Sacks described a society in which people "rely on the government to heal all ills, litigation to resolve disputes, consumption to supply happiness and therapy where all else fails".
It was also a society in which many showed a blatant disregard for justice and scant reverence for law and order. We had seen this during the past year in a spate of contract killings in Dublin and elsewhere. "In this context and against this tide, the dispensing of justice is, of course, a difficult and delicate task," the bishop said.
But it was all the more important and vital. It is about upholding the rights and dignity of the weakest, the meekest, the most invisible, in the face of pressures.
At a service in St Michan's Church, Church Street, Dublin, the Rev Mary Hunter, Moderator of the Presbytery of Dublin and Munster and Minister of Christ Church Presbyterian Church, Rathgar, said the wrangling and arguing in the North over the peace process seemed to ignore the burning desire of ordinary people to live ordinary lives without the constant threat of violence. The tongue was indeed an unbridled and dangerous weapon, Ms Hunter said. We lived in an age of "sound bites" and astute politicians had mastered the art of saying something in a very short sentence with punch and with apparently unchallengeable reason and meaning.
It was not only in public life than the tongue took its toll. Lawyers involved in the family courts would know how damaging the tongue could be when used as a weapon to challenge and hurt and damage a spouse when love had grown cold.
Ms Hunter said the legal code, by which lawyers made their living and on which the rest of us depended for order and justice, had two elements in it. It was made up of the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.
"If our words fulfilled the letter of the law and yet did not fulfil the spirit of the law, the law is not served, " she said. "The half truths, innuendo and misrepresentation may be clever legal practice but they fail the law."
To the lawyers, she said that as this new term opened in the legal year, she would ask them to remember that the words they used would reflect the attitudes they carried in life and this in turn would reflect the quality of their work.
Lawyers from Northern Ireland and England attended both services.