Crime has come to an extraordinary pass. Two young men, Eddie and Kieran Ryan, are allegedly abducted by armed and masked men late at night in Limerick city. Their friend flees the scene with pellet fragments in his jacket.
A week later, Kieran Keane is found dead in the middle of the night, his companion is stabbed but comfortable in hospital. The abducted Ryan brothers return home alive. A major criminal investigation is now under way into these frightening events.
The unfolding saga of gang warfare and family feuding on the streets of Limerick is as strange as the slayings, kidnappings and threats to kill which, apparently, have been part of the ongoing behaviour between rival factions for a couple of years. It is impossible to believe that an exchange between two children in a school playground could fully explain this descent into violent disorder. Similarly, it is difficult to understand why such criminal feuding could only have come to the surface nationally in the last seven days.
The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr McDowell, was called to account for the breakdown of law and order by Opposition parties in the Dáil yesterday. The scale of open and armed hostility which has emerged in Limerick in the past week puts the litany of violent, though isolated, incidents in the capital city in recent times in the shade.
The Minister maintains that the deployment of the Garda's Emergency Response Unit to Limerick was not an indication that numbers were below strength there. It was facile to suggest that the problem related to Garda numbers. He also holds that the Criminal Assets Bureau, which has been active in Limerick, is not the answer either. " It is hostility and hatred that has welled up. The tackling of assets is not going to tackle this particular problem".
The Government's immediate solution is to transfer some Central Criminal Court murder trials to Limerick to ease pressure on detectives who will spend large amounts of time travelling to Dublin this year and next to give evidence in trials following earlier killings.
Sittings of the Central Criminal Court outside the capital may go some way towards easing the current pressure on Garda resources in Limerick. But it will confront only one aspect of the underlying problem. The outbreak of gang wars in Limerick is a direct consequence of the drug and criminal culture and it will take more than the criminal justice system to tackle it at its roots.