Is all the talk about reforming the justice system missing the heart of the issue - a drug problem that's out of control, asks Conor Lally.
In 30 minutes of madness in the early hours of Sunday morning, the life of a young woman was snuffed out. Three men from Finglas called to a house at Adare Green, Coolock, at 2am where a 40th birthday party was in full swing. The men tried to get into the house to see a friend of theirs. They were turned away. Incensed at this, they left the scene in a car after a brief scuffle only to return half an hour later. One of them, 24-year-old Dwayne Foster, got out of the vehicle brandishing a 9mm pistol. Still raging at his earlier treatment, he opened fire indiscriminately. Five shots were discharged, one of which fatally wounded Donna Cleary, a 22-year-old mother of one. Foster was later arrested with two of his associates but died while in Garda custody.
A picture of the shooter was quick to emerge. He was a dangerous armed criminal who was heavily involved in organised crime. He was a member of a gang, based in Finglas and Blanchardstown, which was implicated in a string of armed robberies on cash-in-transit vans in recent years. In just two of those attacks, a total of €1.5 million was robbed. He and his associates were regarded as some of Dublin's most dangerous criminals.
A number of criminals with whom he was involved have died recently. Finglas man Declan Curran (24) died from drug-related complications in his cell at Cloverhill Prison, Dublin, in November 2004, while awaiting trial for armed robbery.
ANOTHER ASSOCIATE, PAUL Cunningham (23), from Mulhuddart, was shot dead at his family home just over a week after Curran's death. A third criminal associate of Foster, Anthony Spratt (32), also from Finglas, hanged himself in Mountjoy Prison a year ago as he neared the end of a 12-month sentence for minor offences. Like these men, Foster was a chronic abuser of drugs, predominantly heroin and cocaine. He was under the influence of the latter when he shot up the house party in Coolock.
He should have been in prison for a three-month sentence for minor motoring offences but a bench warrant was never executed. One of his alleged accomplices could have been sentenced to a mandatory 10-year sentence in 2000 for dealing in commercial quantities of drugs, but a six-year sentence was handed down instead.
Much was made this week of the fact that these two men could have been in jail when Donna Cleary was killed if our criminal justice ship had been run a little tighter. But does this debate miss the point? What is it about our society that produces so many drug-addicted men, such as Foster, Curran, Spratt and Cunningham, with a propensity for extreme violence?
As the director of the Merchant's Quay project in Dublin, Tony Geoghegan tries to help drug addicts into recovery. Geoghegan never met Foster but he believes he knows a lot about the underclass in our society from which drug dealers and addicts are being churned out with such alarming frequency.
"If you've no stake in society, no place in education or in the jobs market, how do you get a stake? Some people take to crime. Even among the drug users we see, we hear them say: 'so and so is a good dipper ' or 'he's a good little thief'. Even at that level there's status to be gained in these things. People deal drugs to gain that status and then the greed kicks in.
"And I think reaching for a gun is also probably part of a macho culture that has emerged; they can't allow themselves to lose face. People say: 'your man is a bit of a hard man, don't mess with him'. So they reach for a gun to get the respect. It's one way of dealing with the world, isn't it?"
Geoghegan accepts that a great deal of gun crime is linked to the drugs trade. He sees little merit in this week's debate about longer or mandatory sentencing. He says it serves to distract from the fundamental problem of Irish society trying to address social problems with criminal justice legislation. Much of the investment in fighting crime should be diverted into addressing the causes of crime - such as drug addiction.
'FOR EXAMPLE, WE have 8,000 people on methadone [the heroin replacement drug], but only 20 residential detox beds for all these people," Geoghegan notes.
The director of Addiction Response Crumlin, Susan Collins, tells a similar story. When her agency was established, 10 years ago, it was voluntary. Now it has 28 staff providing services to drug users in Dublin 12. Its funding comes from the National Drugs Strategy, which is the State's response to the illicit drugs trade. She is thankful for it but says the Government is failing to keep apace with the exponential increase in the drugs trade, which is worth close to €1 billion.
"The drugs problem in Ireland is absolutely out of control," Collins says. "The Government seems to think that if you ignore a problem like drugs for long enough it will go away." She insists that in addition to Dublin's cocaine and crack cocaine problem, crystal methamphetamine, or "meth", has also begun to appear on the streets. This results in a 10-hour "buzz" with the same intensity as that of cocaine. Users often have no recollection of their actions while under the influence of the drug.
"[The Government] needs to invest in tackling drugs in tandem with hiring more gardaí and spending money on the justice system," says Collins. "The money needs to be spent on services for drug users and their families."
The Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs is responsible for the National Drugs Strategy. A spokeswoman for the department said total Government spending on drugs treatment and preventive initiatives will reach €43 million this year, compared with €13.4 million in 2002. However, increases in the value of drugs seized in recent years have been more impressive.
The value of drugs seized in the State has increase five-fold since 2000 to around €100 million last year. It is accepted internationally that the authorities seize around 10 per cent of all illicit drugs. This values our drugs trade at around €1 billion.
Between 2000 and 2005 the seizures of cocaine, consumption of which is increasing much faster than any other type of drug, rose 16-fold - from 18kg to 300kg . Much of it is being imported from Spain and the Netherlands. Many of the guns now on the streets are those routinely included as "sweeteners" when Irish gangs import large consignments of drugs.
THE SHEER AVAILABILITY of these weapons is evidenced by the frequency with which they are being used. Last year, the Garda recorded 424 cases of illegal possession of firearms - 16 per cent up on 2004. In the same period it also logged 313 cases of firearms being illegally discharged, an increase of 7 per cent on 2004. Last year there were 20 gun homicides in the State compared with eight in 2004.
One man with strong views relating to the influence of the growing cocaine trade on violent crime is Dr Chris Luke, an A&E consultant in Mercy University Hospital, Cork.
Speaking after Donna Cleary's murder this week, Dr Luke said that in his 20 years working in A&E departments in Dublin, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Cork, he had seen a "relentless" rise in the numbers of cocaine users presenting with acute agitation, anxiety and very violent tendencies.
" can trigger an intense violence. It creates a kind of omnipotent, all-knowing, all-powerful kind of cruelty which revels in gratuitous violence combined with the capacity to stay awake for many, many hours," Dr Luke commented.
This picture of gratuitous violence is one that gardaí in Dublin recognise. They say many of the drug dealers in their 20s and early 30s now established in the capital's underworld are cocaine users who exhibit violent tendencies rarely witnessed in previous years. The increased rate in gun murders and non-fatal shooting incidents are attributed by gardaí to two things: the availability of firearms and the quantity of cocaine being consumed by dealers.
"They are definitely more paranoid than the old school fellas we would have come across," says one garda of the younger generation of criminals such as Foster.
"Some of the people who have been shot in the last few years were killed because serious criminals thought they had turned informers - pure paranoia. It's very hard to say how much of that you can put down to cocaine because a lot of these guys are heavy drinkers as well and their brains are probably fried anyway. But I would blame cocaine for a lot of it."