Journalism has changed here in the last 30 years. If in 1975 gardaí had killed two people, one of them unarmed, the media would have been in hot pursuit, writes Vincent Browne.
It would not have mattered that the two persons killed were engaged in a serious criminal act. Neither would it have mattered that one or both of these persons had been convicted previously of serious offences.
The taking of human life would have been regarded as serious and the circumstances would have been investigated. But now, who cares? Gardaí have eliminated two "scumbags" and society is all the better for having two fewer on the streets.
There was always an element of society that thought like this, mainly associated with the extreme wing of Fine Gael. The law and order brigade, although what they approved of was, in some instances at least, neither lawful nor orderly. But at least in the media there were people who thought this was an outrage, that human life deserved a modicum of respect and that when life was taken, especially by those charged with protecting life, then it was obligatory to inquire into the circumstances surrounding that.
Journalists, at one stage, regarded themselves as "adversarial". That is, adversarial to the institutions of power and those who exercised power. It wasn't that there was a belief that all who exercised power were corrupt or that the institutions of power were corrupt, but that a function of journalism was to hold those people and institutions accountable to the people and that the exercise of holding them accountable involved an adversarial stance, a critical stance, a sceptical stance.
And this was particularly appropriate in relation to the police force. Everywhere in the world police forces are invested with considerable powers vis-à-vis the ordinary citizens for reasons largely necessary and acceptable. But precisely because police forces are invested with such enormous powers, the requirement of accountability is all the more pressing.
However, as is also true for police forces around the world, the institutional accountability mechanisms are invariably lax, which imposes a special responsibility on the media to hold police forces accountable.
Therefore there is a special need for an adversarial relationship between the media and the police.
Where this applies, this is very often perceived by the police force in question as evidence of subversion on the part of the media. The media is regarded as the "enemy" and sometimes the journalists involved in such reporting are subjected to police surveillance.
Unfortunately, the media here have become largely the handmaidens of the police force, entirely co-opted by the police force, or almost entirely co-opted. The RTÉ television news, for instance, on the night of the Lusk killings could have been a promotional video for the Garda. The obvious questions were not raised and certainly not pursued.
The most obvious one being: why did the gardaí kill two people, when only one was armed? I am not saying there is not a reasonable answer to this question, perhaps there is. But if there is I have not heard it so far .
On Friday's Morning Ireland some of the obvious questions were approached, but timorously approached. The Irish Times did raise some of the critical questions in its lead story and in its editorial (perhaps the advantage of not having a full time "security" correspondent) but the Irish Independent exulted. "A job well done" it proclaimed and its security correspondent poured scorn on the "usual suspects" who demanded an inquiry. Now, the issue seems dead.
To be fair to RTÉ, however, let me acknowledge a brilliant piece of reporting by Philip Boucher Hayes on Five-Seven-Live on Thursday evening.
He reported on the extraordinary Garda conduct at the post office in Lusk - failing to notice there was a back as well as a front entrance to the post office, failing to remove innocent bystanders from the scene, and then the central question: how was it that two people were shot dead when only one was armed? Others raised these questions subsequently but Philip Boucher Hayes raised them on the day of the killings.
There is a market explanation for the media's failure to investigate these matters. It is that the public mind is now so set in the belief that "scumbags" deserve what is coming to them that to take an opposite line is to invite marked rejection.
When The Irish Times carried the "heavy gang" stories by Peter Murtagh and Joe Joyce in 1976 the paper suffered a decline in sales. Some advertisements also may have been withdrawn. That's the way it is in our free-market media world.
Another reality of the media world is that if a media outlet publishes material critical or questioning of the gardaí stories dry up from the gardaí.
This is the reality for "security correspondents" or "crime correspondents" - they can't bite the hand that feeds them.