The stench of a police state

There has been a lot of bickering over the past couple of weeks about 1916, what it means and how we might be best to remember it 90 years on. All well and good – but is it not much more important to ask what kind of a country are we living in now? And is it the kind of place you’d be happy to bring young children up in.

For all of the good things that have happened over the past thirty years, and the extent to which we have consigned the awful legacy of the grim, narrow-minded Irish Catholic nationalism that held sway after the Easter Rising and the War of Independence to the past, I am feeling increasingly uneasy. Because there is an insidious, creeping, restrictive intolerance, bullying and aggression that is becoming a hallmark of the way the new Ireland treats its citizens.
I was on my way back from Amsterdam a few weeks back. We went through passport control in the normal way in Dublin airport, and up the escalator that takes you towards the baggage collection area. There was a sudden flurry ahead. Two customs officers, dressed like combat troops, appeared at the far end with a dog on a leash. They ordered passengers in, to one side of the passageway, and the dog was given enough leash to rush down the line, sniffing aggressively at the bags people were carrying. It was a distinctly unpleasant introduction to Ireland, the likes of which I had never encountered before.
A few weeks later, I was dropping someone to the airport, who was off to the US for a short holiday. Three of us were approaching the check-in desk, when we were stopped by a man in a suit. He asked us were we travelling to the United States from Dublin. Two of us were. “I’d like to examine your baggage before you check it in,” he said. As it happened, the two were travelling as part of a much bigger party – and the security checker would have had to go through everyone in the group’s bag if he went through one. He beat a chastened retreat – which of course begged the question: what was the purpose of the approach in the first place? Surely if we looked like people who needed their bags checked, they should have been checked?
I know that there are people who applaud this sort of shit. The old line is that if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear. Well, bollox to that. I have nothing to hide. But it still strikes me as utterly unpleasant for every passenger off a plane to be greeted at Dublin Airport by a sniffer dog and a couple of police who look ready for a scrap, pressurising everyone up against a wall.
I’m not bothered by the fact that there are security checks. No one could claim that they are completely unnecessary. But there is a low key way of approaching these things that still allows the job to be done. It had been thus in the past. Why not stick to it? Besides, bags that are being deposited on a plane already go through security checks. By all means if they want to open a certain proportion of bags behind the scenes, let them do it. But taking people aside and hauling them away to a room to go through a routine that they can do anyway without that inconvenience smacks of doing stuff to be seen to do it.
In a way these are small issues. But they are part of a bigger picture, where the snooping and the prying is being institutionalised to an increasing extent. The Government recently succeeded in adding amendments relating to data retention into the Criminal Justice Bill. The amendments (a) provide that information on customers’ calls must be retained by telecommunications companies for a period of three years and (b) give the Gardai powers in relation to accessing that information in the course of their enquiries, even into relatively low level crime.
Of course there are arguments in favour of this. But there are also serious arguments against – and yet the amendments were rushed through by the Minister for Justice without proper notice and, as a result, without any real consultation or debate.
“My office never received the amendments and on inquiry was initially told that they would be published only this morning,” the Sinn Fein TD, Aengus O’Snodaigh said in the Dail on the day the amendments were passed. “That was misinformation. They were not available electronically. They were not in the internal mail this morning and the General Office informed me they were not circulated at all. They had got stuck in that office whose staff did not seem to be aware they had them. I cannot speak for other Deputies but I had only two hours in which to peruse these proposals. Human error or not, this is not acceptable. The debate should at the very least have been postponed on that basis.”
But this is the way things are done in Ireland now. Public representatives are ambushed with legislation. Important bills are read out in Irish to stifle debate. Cranks are given free reign to look for Anti Social Behaviour Orders against their neighbours. Crazy new shopping lists of motoring offences are introduced to the penalty points regime. Important elements of law enforcement are handed over to amateurs and private companies. The law is abused as a means of generating revenue for the State. More and more provisions are put in place that involve the imposition of a Big Brother culture – and no one in Government thinks it’s even worthy of a debate.
And do things get better where they matter, in the working class estates that have been ravaged by drug addiction? Or on the roads, where as many people have been killed so far in 2006 as in the comparable period in 2005, the introduction of the much trumpeted penalty points system notwithstanding?
Until relatively recently, in the public domain, broadly speaking there was sense of decency and tolerance about the way in which we related to each other. There was an absence of the heavy-handedness that Irish people travelling abroad were often struck by, even in parts of the continent of Europe. Irish citizens didn’t feel queasy at the sight of soldiers or police in uniform. Ireland never had the threatening stench of a police state.
Well, that’s changing and I, for one, don’t like it. Somehow, I don’t think James Connolly would much fancy it either…