Recent remarks by the Garda Commissioner, Mr Pat Byrne, about the failure of successful drug busts to make a dent in the street price of drugs may have been rather more telling than he intended. Mr Byrne, speaking at the prize-giving ceremony of a Garda-sponsored anti-drugs art competition for school-goers, expressed concern at the fact that recent drug seizures had made "no impression" on the street price of the drugs concerned.

One might expect, he said, that such hauls would be followed by increased street prices due to reduced supply. "When you have seizures and the price remains level," he observed, "it would cause you to wonder how much drugs there are out there". It would indeed. But it would make you wonder about one or two other things as well, such as crime figures, for instance, or more precisely, the reliability of crime figures as an indicator of societal well-being.

Earlier this year, the Garda published figures which indicated that, during 1997, for the second year in succession, there was a significant decrease in the level of crime in this society. Overall crime, we were told, had decreased by 10 per cent during 1997.

Of themselves the figures were above reproach. There may be some minor issues of statistical seepage arising from changes in criteria or methodology but broadly speaking the figures arrive in the form of a neutral statement of statistical reality.

However, as with so many things, it was the spin these figures received that rendered them questionable. They were released in a mood of self-congratulation and no little triumphalism on the part of Garda authorities and political leaders. They were presented to us as evidence that our society, after a period of some cause for concern, was becoming healthier again.

They were jumped upon by a number of commentators who suggest that anyone who raises issues of a disintegrating social fabric is at odds with the facts. The message was clear: there was not, after all, a serious or escalating crime problem in Ireland, and to suggest there was amounted to "hysteria".

This, I believe, has had a number of important but invisible disorientating effects on the public mind. It has, above all, suggested to people that they cannot trust their own sense of reality. In truth, most people, in their hearts, do not believe the statistics. It is not so much that they are capable of suggesting where the figures are wrong, as that they cannot find themselves in agreement with the meaning attributed to such figures.

For more than 20 years now there has been a growing sense of slipping into the morass of violence and social decay, and a sense also that this impression is neither entirely the consequence of media hype nor a figment of anyone's imagination. Generally speaking, the feeling people have about crime being on a steady increase is borne out by statistics going right back to the 1950s. Crime in Ireland has more or less doubled with each decade since the 1950s. The 1960s brought to an end the era of low crime levels; in particular the period from 1966 to 1971, when crime levels doubled. The 1970s saw an increase of a further 150 per cent. By 1981, the level of crime was five times what it had been just 20 years before and this figure has since grown by 15 per cent, following a minor dip in the mid-1980s.

Any way you measure it, Ireland is now far more dangerous than half a lifetime ago - three times more dangerous for the citizen and five times more dangerous for the citizen's property. These statistics also conceal the fact that patterns of crime have in recent years had an increasing connection with drugs and in particular with the street price of drugs. There are two very important points to be made about this development. The first relates to the nature of crime and its relationship to the quality of our society, to the distinction between crimes which are aggressive and crimes of, ostensibly, a more passive nature.

Most of the crimes which end up in Garda statistics are of a visibly offensive/aggressive nature. Something has been done to somebody and they have reported it, or something has been done and the perpetrator has been caught. Drug-pushing, for all the misery it creates, is not like this. It is neither offensive nor aggressive in the sense that, say, a mugging might be so described.

It is a crime in which the victim colludes and is therefore rarely reported. The drugs culture, therefore, shows up in crime statistics only when a seizure is made and a perpetrator caught. Firstly, therefore, statistics which exclude so much of our crime-related misery, by virtue of the intangible nature of this form of crime, are not reliable indicators of the health of our society and should not be welcomed as though they were.

The second point relates more specifically to the observations of the Garda Commissioner, quoted above. It is generally agreed that perhaps a majority of crimes are now drug-related in the sense that they are carried out by people seeking the price of a fix. Generally, this takes the form of theft of money or consumer durables which can be sold or exchanged for drugs. As the Commissioner stated, street prices for all illegal drugs have not increased for several years. In fact, there is considerable anecdotal evidence that drugs are now much better "value for money" than they were five years ago - a time of relative scarcity - with some addicts reporting that prices for certain substances have halved in that time. During this time, the prices of most other goods have increased.

In the past five years, for example, cumulative inflation in respect of both wages and consumer goods has amounted to, in round figures, 20 per cent. This being so, it follows that a drug addict setting out this morning in search of the wherewithal for a fix requires only somewhere between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of the funds or goods he or she would have required for the same purpose five years ago. This means that, for example, just three or four stolen video recorders are necessary to achieve the end which required five video recorders five years ago.

How are we to know that this is not the main determinant of our fluctuating crime levels? In a drug-saturated society, decreases in drug-related thefts can mean one of two things: either there are fewer addicts consuming fewer drugs or there are more pushers pushing more drugs and thereby keeping the price down.

The Garda Commissioner's remarks leave us in no doubt as to which of these applies here. The reason for our diminishing crime figures is that we have more drug pushers selling more and relatively cheaper drugs. By the simple operation of supply and demand, therefore, reduced crime figures may be an indicator of more crime, rather than less.