Fine Gael councillor and general election candidate for Cork South-Central Shane O’Callaghan recently submitted a motion to Cork City Council regarding policing in the city.
The motion blames increased anti-social behaviour and crime in the city on a lack of resources for Gardaí and lenient sentencing, and calls on the council to write a letter to Minister for Justice Helen McEntee recommending, among other things, raising the maximum sentences for public intoxication and aggressive begging to one year and mandatory minimum sentencing for repeat offenders.
These policies will overwhelmingly target working class and homeless people and destroy their lives over petty crimes.
Punishing homeless people for ‘aggressively begging’ will not stop them from needing to beg to survive. In an interview with NewsTalk, O’Callaghan alleged that criminal gangs are organising people to beg in the city. Whether or not this is a common occurrence, the framing is obvious: the homeless people you see around Cork are actually lying criminals living comfy off of benefits. It is purely a pretext for O’Callaghan and the guards to criminalise and persecute the most vulnerable members of society during a housing crisis created by government housing policies.
Ireland’s “War on Drugs” approach to drug policy has been an absolute disaster.
We have the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe, entirely as a result of drug users being treated as criminals and our inadequate addiction services. In this context, to bang on about “personal responsibility” and suggest that drug users aren’t being punished harshly enough is incredibly callous.
Policies like this will only lead to people with drug addiction having less opportunities and being driven further into addiction.
Perhaps the only nice thing that could be said about O’Callaghan is that he is quite open about his motivations.
Explaining the rationale for the motion he said: “People are being driven away from town, and businesses are struggling because the perception is out there that the city centre is not safe.”
Rather than any sort of genuine concern for people’s safety, he is more interested in assuring business owners and tourists that they won’t have to be subjected to seeing a homeless person while shopping. This is what all the talk by Irish politicians and journalists about under-resourced guards, overly lenient sentencing and restoring law and order amounts to: keep working class suffering out of sight.
Begging and drug use are not the cause of Cork’s decline. Like dereliction, low wages and faltering public services, they are only symptoms of the Free State’s brutal austerity policies.
They can only be ended by eliminating the poverty, misery and inequality that leads to them in the first place, not by further punishing working-class people. Whether or not this particular motion passes, it is clearly part of a larger campaign by the Irish ruling classes to justify and implement more repressive policing targeting the working class under the banner of “Law and Order”. This must be vigorously opposed and countered by all young Irish communists.