Certain people in public life consider themselves to have a proprietorial duty of care towards the modernising project, to the extent that they will go to any lengths to protect it from the truth.
About three years ago, for example, I took part, along with a sociologist and an economist from the ESRI, in what I thought would be a television discussion about crime. My plan was to point out that crime was irrefutably on the increase. But suddenly I found myself in the thick of a debate about whether Ireland in the 1990s was better or worse than Ireland of the 1950s, when the man from the ESRI began talking about recent revelations about abuse of children in a Dublin orphanage in the 1950s.
His logic was that any deterioration in the quality of life resulting from an increase in crime could be offset against the fact that we no longer had corporal punishment in our schools.
Here we had a classic instance of how anyone who attempts to make even rather obvious and objectively uncontroversial observations about the dark underbelly of progress is destined to be forced either to defend the indefensible or accept the analysis of the modernisers. In this way, any criticism of the modernising project is discouraged and contained.
What was clear from the subtext, of course, was that the modernisers are fully aware that their project has deeply injurious consequences for society, to the extent that they will embark on pre-emptive defences of this project even when the context for such an argument is not apparent. The notion of comparing the 1990s with the 1950s would never have occurred to me had I not been provoked by such attempts to discredit criticisms of life in the 1990s as the product of a reactionary romanticism.
Crime statistics have for several years now been used to vindicate the modernising project by insinuating two things: that crime is on the decrease, and that decreasing crime is a function of progress, in particular of increasing economic wealth. I have always regarded both propositions as deeply improbable, but there has been an absence of forensics to offset the modernising propaganda.
UNTIL last week, the sole source of information about crime was the annual Garda statistics. These figures showed the graph of indictable crime rising inexorably since the 1950s, dipping briefly in the 1980s, rising again and then starting to decline in the mid-90s. This, if accurate, would suggest that crime increased with the urbanisation and industrialisation of the 1960s and 1970s, but began to settle down as the present plateau of prosperity was attained.
I have several times pointed out that these statistics ignore two important phenomena: the increasing relationship between crime and drugs, which makes crime levels significantly dependent on the street price of drugs; and the underreporting of certain types of crime.
Obviously, the Garda has a clear vested interest in having its figures accepted at face value, since they suggest a high degree of success in fighting crime. But there are others who have sought to embrace these statistics whose motivation is less clear. There has, for example, been a marked media failure over recent years to question the Garda figures, or to seek an explanation for the disparity between the positive picture presented by such statistics and on the other the growing public worries about crime.
Irish media, in addressing such matters, labour under two conflicting interests. They are happy to report crime on the basis that it sells newspapers and engages listeners and viewers; but, because the idea that crime is increasing is not one the modernising elite - of which the media are a central element - is anxious to foster, there is a secondary, somewhat contradictory consideration to be examined.
While most of the main media organisations promote their coverage of crime with shock-horror headlines which tap into the subliminal public fear about the true consequences of change, there is a countervailing effort to dampen any suggestion that the crime situation is serious enough to necessitate fundamental reappraisal of the drift of the society. As with our economist friend there is a strong media view that any attempts to link the changing crime situation with the downside of economic prosperity should be discouraged.
My colleague Vincent Browne is one media person who has for some years been attempting to promote the idea that public fears about crime are unfounded. "Statistics show little sign of rise in serious crime", declared the headline over one column of his in August 1996, just a month after a series of gangland killings in Dublin had culminated in the assassination of Veronica Guerin. Vincent noted that in 1995, 102,484 such crimes were recorded by the Garda, as against 101,036 in 1994. "A rise of 1 per cent," he remarked in his inimitably dry fashion. "Some crime wave".
A COUPLE of months ago, on Vincent's evening radio show, I attempted to suggest that crime figures are far higher than the official Garda statistics suggest. Cast adrift on a phone line I was given about a minute of airtime to argue that there was considerable, and growing, under-reporting of certain forms of crime. Vincent cut me short, saying that he found my points "unconvincing".
I trust he is more persuaded by last week's report of the Central Statistics Office, which shows true crime figures in most categories running at roughly twice what the Garda figures suggest. This, the first independent survey of crime and victimisation, indicated that 12 per cent of households overall, and 20 per cent of those in Dublin, had experienced crime in the 12 months to September 1998. The major factor identified as accounting for the disparity between this survey and Garda statistics is underreporting of crime, much of it arising from a lack of belief that the Garda can do anything.
We did not need a survey to tell us this. For more than 20 years there had been a growing collective awareness of our society slipping further into the morass of violence and moral decay, in tandem with a growing belief that the authorities are utterly helpless to prevent this. The Vincent Browne approach serves also to bury the reality that, notwithstanding constant attempts to discredit the past whence we came, we have now arrived at a less desirable kind of society.
John Waters can be contacted at jwaters@irish-times.ie