MARTIN BELL has had more most to feel angry during his years as a foreign correspondent for the BBC. So it was a surprise - to Prof Anthony Clare and no doubt to many Radio 4 listeners - to hear Bell say this week that even the war in Bosnia, which he has covered from the start, had not angered him.
Martin Bell is not an insensitive man. Far from it. And he likes to get closer to the action than many of his colleagues; for taking the trouble, he was once hit by sniper fire as he broadcast from Sarajevo.
But anger, as he explained to Prof Clare, closes minds. And he plainly believes that, to convey the peculiarly intimate cruelty of Bosnia, he needs an uncluttered mind.
Anthony Clare did not say, as he might have done, that he came from a country where anger and closed minds now make it difficult to have a serious discussion about urgent current issues without running the risk of a row.
Anger is not solely responsible for the absence of clear thinking since the murders of Jerry McCabe and Veronica Guerin, but it has helped to prevent the development of what ought to become an important public debate.
What we've had to date is a shouting match, not between the supporters of a tough approach to crime and those who favour more considered action, but between politicians and commentators competing to demonstrate just how angry they feel.
Indeed, to judge by radio and television programmes broadcast of late, there are some among the public, and one or two commentators, who don't appear to be convinced that any debate is necessary.
It's almost as if their preferred model for the administration of justice is the direct action of paramilitaries, who take the roles of judge, jury and executioner in cases where such frustrating legal niceties as evidence and proof are dispensed with.
At a time when vigilante groups are likely to be on the lookout for recruits, this is dangerous stuff.
GIVING vent to public opinion is a function of politics and the media, though for some in both areas the purpose is not so much to examine or learn from these attitudes as to profit from them.
With some radio programmes it's all in a day's work. The trick is to get listeners involved, preferably on the phone; and the more voluble and excited their reactions the better.
These who don't join in listen to the crackle and fizz of opinions which at least, have the merit of being home grown: the random thoughts of people like themselves, who don't have much time for thought and none at all for experts.
If today's issue doesn't grab their attention, there is always tomorrow and the promise of something completely different.
George Bernard Shaw said the popular press was incapable of distinguishing between someone falling off a bicycle and the end of civilisation as we know it.
Where the worlds of journalism and show business merge, all distinctions are blurred. What matters is that attention is held, at least until the end of the programme or the page, with luck until the end of the week.
Of course, no one who hopes to gauge public reaction to events should dismiss the radio phone in any more than they should ignore the letters page in a newspaper.
The trouble starts when politicians and journalists abandon their roles as leaders and commentators to join the shouting match - in this case play on minds already closed by anger at the murders of the garda and the reporter.
It's a time when we to be opening the public debate to what now, seems possible, both in the immediate and in the longer terms; what might be done, now that the Government and the State agencies have felt the breath of public anger.
Proinsias De Rossa said yesterday that the most irresponsible thing would be to declare a fatwa on organised crime and in so "doing trample all over the painfully acquired civil rights of ordinary citizens; it must also protect the citizen from the exercise of undue powers by the State.
This is not a popular view these days. In fact it has hardly been heard among the macho declarations of the past week.
When Vincent Browne, James Nugent of the Bar Council or the law lecturer Caroline Fennell attempted to have civil liberties discussed they found themselves under attack by the angry brigade.
As for Mr De Rossa's insistence on the need for treatment centres, early intervention for those at risk, education programmes and a systematic approach to demand, he will have to fight hard for the means to pay for them in a hostile climate.
And even as he spoke at a European Union seminar in Dublin Castle, the latest unemployment figures reminded us of the growth of poverty side by side with the most startling prosperity that this State has witnessed.
ON THE closely related drugs problem, the Coalition at least acknowledges its share of responsibility for a predicament that has been a long time growing, though it cannot be forgotten that a year old promise of concerted action by the State agencies - gardai, Revenue Commissioners and Customs and Excise - came to nothing.
Some members of the Opposition seem to have forgotten their own or their parties' periods in Office: Nora Gwen after all is the eighth Minister for Justice in 14 years; all of the parties - with the exception of the Green Party - have held office in the 1990s.
This doesn't excuse the Coalition's lamentable failings. But it makes nonsense of the Opposition's pretence to have forgotten how illegal gains may have been shielded by the tax amnesty. Or how long it takes to get a £40 million building project under way.
And how easily politicians and commentators forget that the most expensive skulduggery to have been inflicted on this State was that combination of public deception and private profiteering investigated by the beef tribunal.
Yet the fines imposed by the European Union for those fraudulent activities amount to little less than the cost of all of the Coalition's security measures, give or take a million or two.
The security measures in turn will affect spending on housing, health and schools, if the warnings given by Ruairi Quinn this week come to pass. And whose housing, health and schools, do you imagine, will bear the brunt of the loss?