By Gary Gannon
Gareth Hutch was violently killed on May 24 in the Avondale House Flat Complex in Dublin’s North Inner City. Unless you have just returned from the moon, you will be aware that this was the seventh fatality in what the media are describing as a feud between two rival criminal factions.
Of these seven murders, five took place within a one mile square radius of my family home. I knew some of the victims of these murders. Not in any matter that could be described as being particularly close but I travelled in their taxis; I had at times frequented the same pubs and I had nodded my head as I passed them by in neighbourhoods where our respective families have maintained long established roots.
In the morning following Gareth Hutch’s brutal death, I walked right passed one of his grieving relatives. The look of sadness in her eye was matched only by the obvious awkwardness and shame in mine. A CCTV video capturing the full horror of Gareth’s brutal murder had appeared in a number of different online media websites and I had not one hour previously watched footage of of this woman’s relative being executed in cold blood.
As I arrived into my mother’s house that awkward feeling I was experiencing was morphing into anger the more the distance between me and that grieving woman grew. Despite what they may tell you in the media, life in the North Inner City is not cheap and no person has a right to decide if another’s last moments should be broadcast to the nation. That this man’s young son will forever more be able to relive his father’s death not only in his dreams but with the click of a mouse appeared to play no part in the decision made by the various editors who chose to utilise this footage. As to how this footage was leaked in the first instance will presumably be a matter for the Gardaí as its release has seen a further erosion of trust between the local community and those who tasked with protecting their best interest.
There are many people, myself included, who feel that the North Inner City is one of a number of marginalised communities in this State who have been neglected over the course of several decades. I believe this attitude of indifference was prevalent in all those who took the decision that the actual footage of a man’s murder was to become the topic of dinnertime conversations throughout Ireland that evening. It is not often that I can quote Tupac Shakur but last week I could not help but remember a poignant line from one of his songs, “step back, watch em’ kill each other”.
However, it really isn’t just each other that they are killing and while the number of casualties in this particular feud has reached an unprecedented seven in very quick succession, the collateral death toll that results in the drug trade from which this conflict has originated, each year takes the lives of hundreds of people within Ireland. Figures from the health research board show that in 2013 alone, 679 people lost their lives to drug related deaths. There are very few families in the North Inner City or I would imagine other marginalised communities throughout Ireland whose lives have not been blighted by the scourge of addiction in some form or another.
I remember reading once that in the absence of publicity, that a terrible thing happens, nothing. My community has not been short of publicity but I am firmly of the belief that the media frenzy which has descended upon the North Inner City in recent months is causing an even worse fate to befall upon us; we are repeating the same mistakes and sowing the seeds for future gang related feuds that will be more intense as we become more desensitised to violence and continue to seek short term solutions to what is an exceptionally complex problem.
There is no policing solution to this problem. No young person has ever filled out a CAO form and decided that they would rather be a drug dealer that an engineer. In much the same instance, not one person has ever looked at a drug addict stumbling throughout the city in search of his next fix of the very substance that is quite evidently killing him and thought, ‘I want to be like that guy!’.
It is poverty. Poverty is the true enemy of our State and it is killing people in their hundreds every year. The Gardaí must of course be resourced adequately to catch criminals but by then they will already have done much damage to the lives of their victims. There is a clear and long established correlation between deprivation and criminality. To truly stop these gangs we must have a war on poverty in this country. That is a winnable battle.
Gary Gannon is a Social Democrats’ representative for Dublin Central.
