Good to know the gardai believe in law and order
Sunday May 12 2002
I KIND of enjoyed watching the gardai beating the reclaim-the-streeters to a pulp last week. In a month that has seen so much election artifice, the sight of truncheon upon head or if you believe the gardai, head upon truncheon was almost refreshing. Seeing the boys in blue lay it on with a will made me realise that beneath all the spin some people really do care about law and order.
Of course what actually made it funny was the fact that the guards who were tucking in had forgotten one of the most inflexible laws of Dublin society: You do not beat up your social superiors.
To be fair to the police, they may not have known that they were beating up their social betters.
Cooped up in Templemore during their formative years, they may never have realised that the angry Trotskyist/Maoist/Anti-Globalisation chap shouting "Death to Capitalists" is participating in his last protest before knuckling down for his computers finals. When the parents of South Dublin opened their newspapers to see the photograph of that tough, rural-looking officer wearing an unmarked garda shirt and carrying only a baton in one hand and a protestor whose "resisting" days were clearly behind him in the other, they will stop believing that "fine job with limited resources" orthodoxy very quickly indeed if it turns out that the fellow in the anorak was young Fiachra.
Ironically though, the grungey upper classes may have actually achieved something for their underprivileged colleagues for a change this week. At the start of the week, Alan Shatter was calling for mandatory prison sentences for assault, this despite the fact that the dogs in the street are aware that some gardai have been known to beef-up public order charges or protect themselves from allegations of wrongdoing by throwing in a Section 2 (relatively minor) assault charge against an accused.
They are almost impossible to defend, particularly if you had been drunk and are poor and possibly not very pleasant anyway. It's unfair and probably unreformable but at least until now nobody had attempted to add to the unfairness by adding the words "mandatory imprisonment" to the mix.
It is doubtful whether an electorate which witnessed the videoed scenes on Dame Street will be as supportive of the plan as it might otherwise have been. And that's not some sort of anti-garda stance, it's an acknowledgement of human nature. The chap who'll give the wife a slap in the pub will do a lot worse back at the house.
