Áilín Quinlan: Our streets will never be safe if thugs keep getting away with it

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing, according to Katie Melua. There are also an estimated 1.1 million security cameras in that city.

Beijing’s extensive surveillance network – backed up by a very visible police presence - is one of the strategies used by the city for deterring crime.

General crime and anti-social behaviour (as we experience it here in Ireland) is reportedly very low there, and the incidence of violent crime is even lower.

Spitting in public, littering, and dogs being walked without leads appear to be some of the main concerns. These are, enviably, categorised as “black-listed behaviours”.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d hate to live my life under such micro-surveillance, but is that what it takes to get people to behave these days?

Seriously?

Most of us would like to live in a society which does not feature constant knifings or the anti-social behaviour and casual vandalism that has become the norm.

In towns and cities, random, unprovoked, vicious assaults are frequently carried out by perpetrators who fail to demonstrate any fear of consequences. Once you’re down, the first thing they’ll aim their boots at is your head.

Most of us could also do without the open drug dealing, the drinking, and the public brawling.

We could happily live without the atmosphere of unease, which is often exacerbated by the lack of a visible police presence on the streets.

Pedestrians would love to walk without fear of being mown down by people flying along pavements on bicycles and e-cycles, some of them, believe it or not, now even wearing protective headgear.

There’s no attempt to stop it - local authorities haven’t even put up signs aimed at stopping it!

Added to all of this are growing concerns that the perceived leniency of the judicial system is failing to make people think twice before committing a crime.

Take the widespread distress and horror felt by many people at the vicious assault by a soldier on 24-year-old Natasha O’Brien on O’Connell Street in Limerick three years ago. The perpetrator got a suspended sentence, which sparked a series of public protests. Later, the Court of Appeal handed down a two-year jail sentence.

A court in New York recently jailed Marcin Pieciak for 24 years for stabbing Longford woman Sarah McNally to death in a pub in the city last year.

If that same crime had happened in Ireland, someone complained to me, Pieciak would probably have gotten off with 18 months in prison, six months of which were suspended.

For God knows how many reasons, violence in Irish society has shot up and very little appears to be being done to stop it.

Our police force is under-resourced, our government appears complacent, our courts are often perceived to be too lenient.

Nothing effective is being done to stem the surge of unprovoked, random street attacks, often featuring incredible brutality like weapons and head-kickings.

Violence appears to be the norm, now.

Furthermore, the aggression and the breaches of traffic speed limits demonstrated by drivers on all of our roads has coincided with a litany of injuries and fatalities.

In a recent case, a motorist convicted of careless driving was fined €500 for going the wrong way down a one-way street.

The driver, who refused to stop for gardaí - and who had other convictions for road traffic issues - was given four months to pay the fine.

What does all that say about how the judicial system views the potential injury posed to either the gardaí who tried to stop him, or to any unfortunate other motorist who happened to be driving the right way along that one-way street?

Then there’s Irish society’s ongoing, notoriously strange attitude to alcohol.

Some of the long queues of students outside pubs in Cork city last Thursday started as early as 7am in the quest to secure a ‘seat’ for an annual drinking binge, popularly known as the College Christmas Day Celebrations.

One media outlet described the students as ‘brave’, while a business person was quoted as saying the students queued for hours and took it like a “badge of honour”.

Why it could be considered either ‘brave’ or a ‘badge of honour’ to willingly queue for hours in the freezing bite of early morning to secure a pub-stool for a day’s drinking is a puzzle to me.

The laudatory language used in some of the reportage graphically underscored Ireland’s dysfunctional attitude to alcohol.

At the same time, members of the city’s police force – significantly under-resourced and visibly thin on the ground – had to be out on duty at these queues to keep order.

Cork city, it has been recently and publicly acknowledged, is experiencing a significant shortage of gardaí.

More than 200 have left the force in Cork since 2021. Just last month, it was revealed that in the past 10 years, garda numbers have dropped by 9% in the city and 3% in the county. Growing concerns are being expressed about public safety.

We can only hope that this month’s graduation ceremony at the Garda Training College in Templemore that saw the assignment of 36 new garda recruits to the Cork city garda division will help address this.

Yet, despite this pressure on garda resources, last Thursday, members of the city’s under-staffed police force were deployed to walk around taking drinks from queuing students and putting them into bin-bags, while God knows what emergencies were happening elsewhere around the city and its suburbs.

I mean, seriously, where do you go from there?