VERONICA Guerin's death has brought a wave of demands for an instant response to one of the most serious murders in the history of the State.
Following the equally cold-blooded murder of a garda in Limerick there is the sudden realisation that one small part of society may be almost an alien culture, feeding off the rest and caring nothing for its morals or its laws.
The repeated calls for "task forces", the "targeting" of drug gangs and other initiatives are made as if the State's criminal justice system was fundamentally sound.
Yet people working in every part of that system point to flaws so significant that far from being a deterrent, the justice system can operate as an encouragement to criminals.
We have had only one Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr Eamonn Barnes, and he has been in the job for the 21 years since the office was established.
If anyone is qualified to recommend changes which might make the system more effective, it is surely Mr Barnes. And yet his repeated appeals for reform have fallen on deaf ears.
Balancing the rights of defendants with the need to pursue and convict criminals is a challenging business.
The safeguards built for the innocent will inevitably help free some of the guilty. But for years Mr Barnes has publicly questioned whether the system has swung too far in favour of the criminal.
He has urged a change in the "right to silence" rules under which suspects may say nothing when being questioned. Should judges and juries be allowed to consider a suspect's silence counts against him or her?
And Mr Barnes has gone further: he has wondered at the adversarial system in the courts, asking whether an inquisitorial system might not produce better results.
"All too often, and I mean very frequently indeed, cases stop dead at a desk in my office which would in another system proceed to a judicial investigation designed to seek and keep seeking for the truth," he said in 1990.
Has the time come to do something radical to reduce the cases stopping at that desk?
Meanwhile, the Garda's most urgent need is more prison space, a senior officer said yesterday.
How can a system act as a genuine deterrent when people serve only a portion, perhaps even half, of their sentences because there isn't any room for them?
In the long term, no society can take pride in a system which demands constant increases in prison space. But the shortage is now so great, relative to the State's needs, that much of the Garda's work is simply not worthwhile.
So long as the shortage existed, there was no sense in altering the bail laws, the Garda Commissioner, Mr Patrick Culligan, pointed out last year.
If there are too few cells for those already convicted, there is hardly space for the extra hundreds of prisoners which could result annually from amended bail laws. Yet the Government's prison building programme has been nothing if not modest.
Against this, the Garda has had a conspicuously poor record in the area of "contract" or "gangland" killings, where a hired gun has no connection to his victim and may not even know his paymaster.
If the Garda and DPP could convict a few of these "hitmen", cells for them would surely be found.
The Garda response is that these men did not become killers overnight. They grew up in a State where the criminal justice system did little to deter crime. Most major suspects in the Guerin murder investigation have a string of convictions and those are only the known and verified offences - which show how they graduated from petty theft to assault and then to more serious crime.
Had the system been more successful, at least some of the "hitmen" might not have reached that stage in their careers, while others would be in jail rather than on the streets.
More recently, it has become apparent that the State has made a minimal effort to target the profits of major drug dealers, allowing them to enjoy, almost unhindered, the proceeds of their business. Here the State has failed in two ways: it has enacted relatively weak laws and then failed to ensure their enforcement.
For instance, when queried on criminals' assets, Revenue officials respond: "What are we to do if they have registered the house in someone else's name?"
It surely cannot be beyond the competence of the State to overcome such a basic device.
For instance, French legislation requires drug traffickers' partners to explain their wealth. Would that be so difficult to introduce in this State?
One suggestion is the establishment of a unit of anonymous Revenue officials and gardai who would target the assets of the major drug criminals estimated to be no more than 40. The Revenue says its officials are not deterred by the prospect of intimidation. Yet, not one person considered a major drug dealer has been prosecuted for tax reasons over the past five years.
How are these two statements to be reconciled? Either the law doesn't work or nobody is making it work.
As the Bill published by Fianna Fail yesterday shows, there is no shortage of ideas for reform, or people to propose them.
There is, however, a lack of motivation. The Independent TD Mr Tony Gregory predicted only three weeks ago at a Dail committee that "contract killing" would spread outside criminal circles and members of the wider public would become victims.
His prediction has come to pass. Politicians in positions of power - including those who have previously been hostile to the media - have rightly condemned Veronica Guerin's murder as an attack on the freedom of the press.
Isn't it time now for them to move against the freedom of the criminal?