The murder of Joseph Dwyer, the alleged drug dealer beaten to death by a frenzied mob in the Dolphin's Barn area of Dublin, marks a disturbing return to the kind of vigilante violence which marked the battle against heroin a decade ago. It appears that Mr Dwyer was beaten to death by a mob, wielding baseball bats and iron bars.
Their pent up anger and frustration is understandable: the pernicious influence of the drugs traffickers" may now reach into every town and village in the State but it is still the people in deprived areas alike Fatima Mansions who suffer most. They have seen families, indeed entire communities, destroyed by the drugs epidemic.
And there must be a great resentment in many of, the inner city flat complexes that whole communities" have been virtually written off and left to their fate by the political establishment. Certainly, there are few signs of urgency in the State's response to the drugs problems, especially in the north and south inner city areas of Dublin. The PD spokeswoman on justice, MS Liz O'Donnell, made a telling contribution yesterday; when she contrasted the Government's speedy mobilisation of Garda resources to combat the BSE threat on the border with its slow response to the drugs problem. Some 350 gardai were despatched to the border recently in response to the BSE crisis: it is difficult to recall when any recent Government responded to the drugs crisis with anything like the same urgency.
All of this serves to explain, if not to excuse, the brutal murder of Joseph Dwyer. It is a fundamental tenet of our democracy that no citizen is entitled to take the law into one's own hands: the rule of law must be obeyed and respected. The kind of mob rule exhibited in Dublin on Tuesday represents an affront to democracy and has been rightly condemned.
From what one can glean, Mr Dwyer, was as much a victim of the drugs problem as many of his neighbours. He was an AIDS victim, a widower and a father of three children, who lived in squalor at Basin Street in Dublin. He was hardly a big time drugs dealer but someone who appears to have sold drugs to feed his own habit. And yet he was singled out by a mob who acted as his judge, jury and executioner.
That said the evident lack of sympathy for Mr Dwyer among local people interviewed yesterday underlined the tacit support for this kind of "direct action". Indeed there must now be a danger that his murder will strengthen the hand of vigilante groups intent on their own form of retributive "justice".
In these circumstances, there is a clear onus on the Garda authorities to build much stronger links with local communities in inner city areas, Some individual gardai are making great efforts to build a rapport with inner city communities but the Garda authorities and the Department of Justice have been slow in putting in place the kind of community policing that is required. But the Garda cannot be expected to tackle the drugs problem at one remove from those communities affected by it: the need for a strong presence on the ground, within the communities in the inner city has rarely been more urgent.