| ASBOs will not solve the problems
facing Ireland By Joe Horgan
JUST when of all things a rugby match was supposed to denote just how mature
this country had become whatever that is supposed to mean it seems that
we have not really changed that much at all.
Just because Britain has the much-criticised ASBO system we now have them.
Just because The Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Sun are working themselves
into their usual lather about youth crime and youth drunkenness and just
being a youth in general the great minds of Irish politics have responded
by slavishly copying a much-derided system brought in first across the water.
In their version of Ireland the true test of our maturity is how much like
Britain we can become.
Like the eternal younger sibling we just can’t stop aping our big
brother.
In this strange world we then have the most jingoistic, xenophobic and often
blatantly-racist elements of the British press transposed on to Irish streets
merely by inserting Irish in the title.
If ever there was a paper that stood for a Little England mentality and
all that goes with that it is the Daily Mail.
Perhaps only the Daily Express and the ludicrously-haughty Telegraph would
have competed with the Mail over the years for anti-Irishness.
Yet here it is in Ireland trumpeting family values and common sense as a
cover for the usual anti-refugee, anti-gay, anti-anyone-who-isn’t-quite-like-me
guff.
The Sun the standard bearer for all that is British and proud, up the
Union Jack, stick out your belly at the foreigners’ stuff is here
as the Irish Sun and blares out the same values wrapped in a Tricolour.
It is honestly kind of scary.
Yet somehow these strange enterprises seem to be those that are setting
the political agenda.
If we accept and any honest observer would have to that Fianna Fail
is a catch-all party, an ideology free zone then we can see that as they
claim themselves the minority party in government, the PDs, is the tail
that wags the dog.
It is the Progressive Democrats with their aggressively free market conservatism
that sets the tone for the governance of this country whatever the miniscule
amount of support they have in the polls.
Combine this with an imported press running amok across the Irish media
because it has the backing of money from the much bigger English market
and you get both problems and solutions which seem strangely imposed from
another, different society.
But for both the PDs and the English-press-with-Irish-in-the-title this
all serves a set political agenda.
The forces of reactionary, repressive politics can forge ahead with setting
and implementing actual government policy even though they have no substantial
electoral support or are in fact the voices of a different society altogether.
That doesn’t really sound as if we are therefore in a mature Republic.
More that we are in a stupidly gullible one.
No doubt there are troublesome, dangerous youths out there on our streets.
No doubt drink and drugs are used. No doubt there are heartbroken families
destroyed by criminality.
But the introduction of ASBOs like the talk of zero tolerance just a
short while back is just more tough-guy posturing by politicians bereft
of anything approaching an idea or principle.
All of those working with young people whether it be care workers or
gardaí say ASBOs will bring nothing to the system at all. It is
empty, vain posturing.
The truth is that just as in England the legislation is already in place
to combat criminal and socially-disruptive behaviour.
ASBOs will merely mean more paperwork. And what individual so lost as to
be continually in these situations is truly going to be redirected by the
imposition of these letters after their name?
That is not to say that there are not problems in Irish society.
The youth suicide figures display the much more tragic truth of loss than
that of the misbehaviour that so suits the purposes of press and politicians.
But no English-with-Irish-in-the-title-newspaper or no government politician
is going to confront the excessive materialism and accompanying emptiness
that really confronts Irish society.
They are not going to talk up fractured community and family units as long
as those communities and families are fractured in the cause of feeding
the economy.
They are not going to talk about global warming and local flooding and local
storms and record sales in new cars and SUVs as long as they so need us
to be the endless consumers this whole house of cards rests on.
Far easier for the voices of the few to set the social agenda and far, far
easier for the friends of the powerful and wealthy to convince us that the
threat to our social fabric is not in those long commuter tailbacks or those
shining 24-hour supermarkets but is in fact underneath the hood of a few
spotty kids.
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