Editorial / Spring 2006

Our feeling of insecurity begins with our own neighbourhood, but immediately extends to our country and its future. We could interpret security as having good relationships with foreign and, indeed, very distant countries, but we prefer to see it as freedom from threats. Closed borders and restrictions on immigration are recommended and popular solutions, particularly for the EU. Nationally and internationally, such attitudes increase paranoia and, in fact, encourage human trafficking, particularly of women and children for sexual and other exploitation.

Border controls, like anti-social behaviour orders, treat a wound rather than a disease. Both fail to address the problem of social or national segregation, so poor neighbourhoods will benefit nobody who has to live in them and rich countries or continents will attract the world’s poor, no matter how many barriers are erected against them.

In 1958, the population of Ireland’s mental hospitals was 21,000 (the highest it has ever been). Many of those confined in such hospitals, like those placed in Magdalen homes, were victims, not, as is so often said, of Catholic clerical domination, but of a purely civic religion based on the cult of respectability. It is no coincidence that the 1950s was also the decade of the highest emigration. Security for those at home came from ensuring that the population did not increase (thereby putting pressure on scarce resources in a poor country) and that those unfit for emigration were removed from society into institutions.

Security and respectability (based on a fear of what others might think) are forms of social control. Opinion formers and political leaders benefit from encouraging such controls and, whilst proclaiming themselves are liberals, are tempted to play to the chauvinist gallery and/or jump on a bandwagon, whenever media coverage is to be gained.

Our sense of security is deepened when we have a police force on which we can rely. The lack of formal structures for overseeing policing in the Republic, which compares very unfavourably with the structures in place in Northern Ireland, is based on a tradition of trusting the Gardai. Recent events have damaged the relationship that our police had with the public, so the necessary reforms should be aimed at restoring and reinforcing a valuable and impressive tradition, rather than designed to preserve the police force’s amour propre.

The policing role given to social workers when dealing with child asylum seekers is very disturbing, because it casts professionals in roles for which they have no training. Our asylum process is very hard on unaccompanied children and does not meet their emotional needs.

Disabled Irish people, be they children or adults, often find themselves fighting for services. This means that those who most need a sense of security have to fight hardest, often against official obstruction, to attain it. Why is this so, in a country which has so much money? Even when much poorer, we could do some things very well and, in housing alone, 25% of our population relocated between 1940 and 1995. The struggles of such families, which have resulted in highly publicised court cases, are the result of reliance, by some civil servants, on “economic factors” rather than a commitment to rights.

Central to a real sense of security is a commitment to the rights of the individual, whether born in Ireland or elsewhere. Communities, be they local or national, are healthier when both individual and communal rights are respected and the “other” is not seen as a perpetual threat. Diagnosis of problems rather than the shouting of slogans will produce a more secure, self-assured society.