Madam, - I note that the alphabet soup of pressure groups that wield such disproportionate influence in Irish public life has been thickened by the addition of an entity styling itself as "The Coalition Against ASBOs" (The Irish Times, March 12th).
Your readers could be forgiven for believing Asbos to be one of the lesser Greek islands, but an ASBO is in fact an anti-social behaviour order, the use of which was pioneered here in Britain in the late 1990s in an effort to put manners on the hooded youths who make life hell for so many people in the towns and cities of this once orderly country.
With grim inevitability Mr McDowell's attempts to do likewise in Ireland have drawn the ire of a human rights industry whose raison d'être is the perpetuation of a Marxist definition of criminality which roughly states that the criminal is a victim of, rather than a menace to, unfair capitalist society (as a member of the reactionary bourgeoisie my grasp of detail is poor; no doubt a helpful sociology professor will write in to correct me).
ASBOs have not returned Britain to the prelapsarian innocence of the 1950s, that now discredited decade when murder was headline news and needle sharing something done by gramophone enthusiasts; nor have they deterred the hardened core of career gangsters whose work is just too lucrative to retire from.
Yet they have reduced the kind of abuse the law-abiding suffer daily at the hands of feral gangs - foul language, drunkenness, vandalism and thieving - which many experts insist is a natural and quite incurable symptom of modern life to be palliated by therapy and extra welfare payments.
The acknowledgment inherent in ASBOs is that government is prepared to honour its contract with the governed and takes seriously the damage inflicted on the fabric of communal and national life by a minority of amoral yobs.
It is wrong for unelected activists to counsel cowardice in the face of bullies while they wring their hands over injustice and inequality. It is this false and wicked doctrine, handed down in tablets of stone from the 1960s, that has eroded values vital to civilised existence and mired us in moral and social chaos. - Yours, etc.,
PHILIP DONNELLY, St Alban's, Hertfordshire, England.