Three weeks ago 14-year-old Ben Smyth was stabbed to death outside his house in Killinarden, Dublin. Ben's father, Peter, a photographer and part-time lecturer at the Dun Laoghaire College of Art, had just put his two younger children to bed and was about to call Ben and his older brother David (16) into the house when it happened.

Peter is still trying to come to terms with it. The killing of Ben is the kind of tragedy which is not supposed to happen in Ireland, where community has traditionally been strong and protective.

"Irish culture is being Americanised; the rank materialism of American culture seems bent on creeping into Ireland," says Peter. "This was a Third World, post-colonial country 10 years ago and before it had a chance to get a grip on itself it entered the post-modern age. It's in a crazy state of flux and we've lost our sense of identity.

"We've become parodies of ourselves and of paddywhackery. There's a new pub near where we live called Grumpy McLafferty's. We have Irish people drinking in Irish theme pubs. It's like you take the danger and the passion out of society and reduce it to a level where everything is passive. The only value a thing has today is as a performance, which means that everyone is an observer or a spectator. Any kind of idealism is seen as foolish and hedonism is the order of the day."

With the demise of the Catholic Church's influence, he believes children have lost any sense of ritual around growing up and so create their own reckless and hedonistic rituals. "We've replaced everything with the Leaving Cert and if you can't aspire to that, you're out of it. So we've got babies having babies and nobody cares a thing about it. I know a lot of kids - joyriders and so on - who have no concern for themselves because they have no sense of themselves, so they create their own rituals like joy-riding and drug-taking," says Peter.

He has been a leader of a community anti-drugs campaign and feels that, as a result, he has been regarded with resentment and suspicion by those in power. He stresses his opposition to vigilantism, rejects accusations that he belongs to Sinn Fein and denies using the anti-drugs campaign as a vehicle to enter politics, which he claims he has no interest in whatsoever. "We are far stronger outside the system," he believes.