Have decisions of the courts and the actions of lawyers pushed us to the extreme where their interpretation of the constitutional rights and protections to be afforded to alleged defendants now far outweighs the legitimate rights of crime victims as well as those of the wider citizenry?
It was the late Liverpool FC manager, Bill Shankly, who asserted in 1981 that football was not just a matter of life and death to him – it was more important than that, An Fear Rua recalls…

Now that he’s been dead for a several years, we can only speculate on whether or not Bill has revised that view. And, so far as we know, he has not been in contact with anyone since then to offer an updated opinion. Neither on death nor on the fortunes of Liverpool FC.

We beg to dissent from the starkness of the Shankly proposition. There are times, albeit perhaps few in number, when the issues and concerns of ordinary people, or of the collective citizenry, must impinge on the consciousness of even the most fanatical and self-absorbed sports fan.

We have reached such a juncture in Ireland. Six murderous deaths in five days, an almost trebling of the number of murders in two years, is something none of us may ignore. It is a crisis for our polity and our civil society. The casual, cold-blooded murder of a hardworking, innocent young man like Anthony Campbell, merely to ensure his silence in death as a potential witness, has shocked people into despair. As it happens, Anthony was a sports fan and a player. His teams were Arsenal FC and the local, inner city soccer team he helped to set up.

We do not reach for the fig leaf of Anthony’s sports involvement to justify making our comments on this topic today. Ordinary life and death may jostle with sport in the pantheon of importance. Murder does not. Murder, preventing murder – and punishing murderers – is more important than sport.

It would be unfair not to acknowledge that much has been done in recent years to tackle this issue of crime – especially drugs related crime and murder. There have been extensive changes made in the law, new crimes created, new and longer sentences put into law, more personnel and money poured into the police, prosecution offices, criminal assets bureau and prison services. Yet, the situation today seems worse than it ever was?

Why should this be? In most circumstances, if you pour more time, money, people and attention at a problem eventually things start to improve. Indeed, you almost have the feeling now that – rather like a narcotics addiction itself – all this extra taxpayers’ money being spent tackling crime is feeding the issue, not fighting it.

One insight into this paradoxical outcome may be that criminals are not deterred by things like longer sentences nor increased police resources if they believe their chances of being put away are slight and decreasing. What matters is not merely the length of sentence for, say, possession of illegal drugs with intent to supply, but the chances of whether they’ll ever serve a sentence of any length if caught.

In this respect, having looked at and tightened up on so many other aspects of criminal justice system, the spotlight must finally fall on what happens in our courts if and when serious criminals are arraigned before them. Why are so many criminals walking free … why are so many on bail and continuing to offend on bail … why are sentences often too little, too late and so inconsistent? Our be-wigged, learned friends of bench and Bar have many serious questions to answer.

The most fundamental one is: Have decisions of the courts and the actions of lawyers pushed us to the extreme where their interpretation of the constitutional rights and protections to be afforded to alleged defendants now far outweighs the legitimate rights of crime victims as well as those of the wider citizenry?

Is it now time to severely curtail or even suspend completely, if temporarily, these normal constitutional rights and protections in the case of certain clearly defined and delimited crimes?

When it was enacted in 1937, the Constitution set out a limited number of personal rights that were constitutionally protected and guaranteed. These included the right to fair procedures. The Supreme Court was given the job of interpreting the Constitution. In the stagnant Ireland of the forties, fifties and early sixties there were few enough such constitutional cases and most of them involved challenges to Garda searches, validity of warrants and ‘tainting’ of evidence.

In a landmark High Court decision in 1963, Mr Justice Kenny held that the personal rights guaranteed and protected by the Constitution were not fully set out in the written provisions of the 1937 text. It was open to the courts to interpret the constitution to see if further – implied or unwritten – personal rights existed. In 1965, the Supreme Court endorsed that view.

In subsequent years, the concept really took off that there were unstated personal rights protected by the Constitution if only the lawyers and the judges had enough time to root around in it for you. In 1973, for example, the Supreme Court found a protected right to marital privacy. Later, they found a right to equality of treatment of women in the selection of juries.

Many of these rights arose from worthwhile decisions that the legislature might never have got around to and a number of necessary reforms in Irish life ensued. There was confidence, too, in knowing that the constitutional interpretation was in the hands of stellar legal minds like Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, Brian Walshe, Seán Gannon and Séamus Henchy - lawyers who had grown up in the broad De Valera ethos, were not bound by it but were not afraid to challenge it either in a measured and informed way.

Sometime in the eighties this process gathered speed, new faces appeared on the superior court benches and the wheels started to come off the criminal justice wagon. Cute country solicitors and whipper snapper young barristers alike in criminal cases seemed to vie with each other in the invention of new and ever more outlandish ‘personal rights guaranteed and protected by the constitution’.

This development was particularly noticeable in drunk driving and tax cases. Many of these prosecutions became ‘cat and mouse’ games to see who could come up with the latest wheeze to get the defendant off scot-free. In more upmarket areas of the law, the judges stumbled into the controversial minefields of life itself and the right to life. In recent years, they have involved themselves in the area of immigration, citizenship and migratory rights. Often, their decisions spark off costly referendums and / or hasty and flawed legislative responses. Nothing is solved and the merry legal round about revs up again on the same issue.

Much of this contradictory and wasteful activity, by the way, was funded by the victims of these crimes in their capacity as taxpayers. A considerable amount of the legal costs and fees involved was picked by the Free Legal Aid scheme. While the people generously and properly funded free legal aid in annual increments of taxation and trusted the lawyers to behave in a common sense and rational way on a day-to-day basis, the latter responded by diligently skewing legal protection towards alleged defendants and away from the people's interests - security and protection of their everyday lives.

It has taken twenty years of failed prosecutions and thousands of road deaths for most lawyers and judges finally to acknowledge that a drunken driver is a criminal of the lowest order. They finally seem to accept, too, that a tax dodger is just a criminal in a good suit and not some kind of picturesque village ‘cute hoor who’s agin de Governmint beyant in Dubbelin’.

How long will it take before they get a similar