DUBLIN’S FAIR CITY was anything but fair 30 years ago, it seems.
Papers released under the 30-year rule by the National Archives show that Ireland’s government was concerned at the rampant levels of crime being seen in the capital.
According to the garda crime report for 1984, Dublin had almost twice the crime rate of any other area of the country at that time, including Cork city, with a rate of 56.7 crimes per 1,000 population.
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Unfortunately 30 years ago government funds were at a premium (the recessionary nature of the times is a recurring trait of almost every entry of the released state papers). So the immediate response from the gardaí was to call on people to join the neighbourhood watch and be on the lookout for ne’er-do-wells as that was the cheapest option:
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An Irish Post editorial from 1983 gave a damning verdict on the crime apparently plaguing Dublin’s streets, in which the city was described as being the “most blighted and most dangerous of Europe’s small capitals”:
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Over a year following the publication of that editorial the International Welfare Association wrote a letter to Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald in response to that editorial stating their intention to advise all their international members “to take their holidays in safer places” given the “uncontrolled crime on your streets”.
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The problem of crime in the capital doesn’t seem to have been wholly localised to the November 1982 Fine Gael / Labour government of Garret FitzGerald either.
Notes released from specially convened government meetings in 1980 outline the various problems affecting the Dublin urban area at that time under the previous administration:
The Taoiseach opened the meeting by outlining the range of problems affecting Dublin and other urban centres – vandalism, squatting, delinquency, burglaries and break-ins, and itinerant begging.
The stealing of cars in particular appears to have been absolutely rampant in Dublin at the time, with 22,000 cars being stolen in 1982 alone.
Dublin City Council were so anxious about the stolen-cars-and-joyriding situation that they decided to call on the government to do something:
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Joyriders, Noel Kennelly, and a lost petition
Joyriding, a problem that still remains today despite three decades of advances in vehicle-security, seems to have been something of a cause-célèbre in Dublin at the time, as can be seen from the following letter to Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald from April 1985:
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The problem with such joyriding was identified in the garda crime report for 1984 and was described as one that was being “tackled vigorously”.
However, the government found itself having to face the issue head on in the summer of 1983, in the wake of a unique campaign conducted by a Dublin man named Noel Kennelly.
Kennelly’s brother-in-law Peter Collins was killed at Kinsealy, Dublin in March 1983 by joyriders. Subsequently, in early May Kennelly approached the Department of Justice with a petition signed by 4,000 people from his locality imploring the department to increase the scale of punishment for joyriding offenders.
It wasn’t a simple request either – Kennelly had very specific ideas for how he thought the Road Traffic Acts as they stood needed to be amended to ensure those breaking the law were adequately punished.
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The problems began when the government failed to respond quickly enough to Kennelly’s initial petition. Part of this was he had spoken to the Department of Justice, who weren’t in fact responsible for the Road Traffic Act. That fell to the Department of the Environment.
The other problem was that the Department of Justice had actually lost the petition.
As Mr Kennelly’s case rumbled on for almost four months of tit-for-tat response and counter-response, his interactions with the government departments he had been in contact with began to get increasingly tetchy, to the extent that one of his latter missives was deemed “offensive” by the Taoiseach’s department in a memo.
Kennelly felt the government wasn’t doing enough. The government countered that there was nothing it could do.
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In particular Kennelly wasn’t happy that the various government departments were sending him the same reply at the same time. The flip side of this is that the government itself felt that this was the professional thing to do given his Kennelly’s tragic circumstances.
The worry for the senior civil servants involved seems to have been that Kennelly intended to “embarrass” the Department of Justice. And given they lost his petition, they may have had good reason to be worried.
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“I feel the only legitimate complaint he has is that it did take some time for the Department to reply… However, this could be attributed to the fact that the original petition was mislaid,” reads an internal memo from the Department of the Taoiseach in September 1983.
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That final September memo also suggests a more conciliatory tone be taken in any further correspondence with Kennelly, given the government didn’t want to set him off again as his campaign had effectively “run out of steam”.
While Kennelly and the government may have ended at loggerheads, some good may have come from the dispute – two months later an amended Criminal Justice Bill was brought before the Oireachtas with specific provision being made for penalties for the offence of stealing a vehicle:
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See National Archives files 2015/88/46, 2015/88/297, and 2015/88/663
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