Ms Nora Owen wonders aloud on Morning Ireland what is The Irish Times "agenda" on criminal justice and her stewardship at the Department of Justice. Here goes.
The Irish Times believes that the criminal justice system ought to have clarity in its objectives and coordination in its operations. It believes its policies and activities should be informed by authoritative research as to the causes, scale, and possible solutions to crime in Ireland and by experience in comparable administrations abroad. It believes that in a relatively small and compact country such as this, professional crime should be a non paying proposition. And it believes that the growing phenomena of social alienation and emotional dysfunction have to be tackled at community level, through co ordinated programmes agreed between environmental, law enforcement, health care and educational professionals.
If there is any of this which Ms Owen disagrees with or if she believes it needs to be amplified she, or an officer of her Department, may take whatever space is necessary in the columns of this newspaper to set out their case. If on the other hand, the Minister accepts that these should be the guiding principles of our criminal justice system, we are entitled to ask why they are honoured in the breach rather than the observance.
The question is laid at Nora Owen's door because she is currently the Minister for Justice. But the point has been consistently made here that she has inherited, not created, the shambles that passes for criminal justice policy. Indeed, the term is a misnomer. There is no policy and never has been. Rather is there a stumbling from one crisis to the next with responses being made up along the way. This month the problem is violence against the elderly. Next month it may be another spectacular cash robbery. After that it may be a new wave of drugs deaths. Then, perhaps, fraud. The cycle will go on.
Nora Owen is a practical, tough, woman. But she faces huge, entrenched interests among the gardai, the prison service and the legal profession, not to mention the indifference of many of her parliamentary and Cabinet colleagues. Will she have her new regional Garda commanders root out the widespread problem of double jobbing among the force? Will they reverse the trend to closure of rural Garda stations, in no small part driven by the unwillingness of gardai to live away from the larger towns? Will she ensure that gardai of all ranks - starting with the new commanders reside in the areas for which they have responsibility?
Can she free the prisons from the grip of the drugs rings and overcome the antipathy of a prison service now in some instances gone beyond the control of its supervisors? Can she overcome the resistance of the legal profession - whose members' earnings too often depend on the vagaries of a ludicrous bail regime and a fragmented and slow prosecution system?
The point is being made by some academics and commentators that Ireland's crime figures are well behind those elsewhere. But much of the empirical evidence contradicts the official statistics on that. A middle class person living in south Dublin may not have any experience of crime beyond the theft of a video. People in business, in remote rural areas, or in the working class districts, may see it very differently. The relative figures, in a sense, are beside the point. What is not deniable is that Ireland is moving steadily away from a quality of life which was characterised by a sense of security, by peacefulness in our streets and cities and by freedom from anything but occasionally serious crime. If that quality of life is to be lost, as Commandant Ray Quinn asked, what benefit is our economic progress?