LIFE SEEMS TO BE DIRT CHEAP ... ON BOTH SIDES OF THE BORDER

Eilis O'hanlon In Belfast On Why Drugs Are Becoming A Common Factor In
Northern Irish Violence And Why The Authorities Are Reluctant To Interfere

`MAY the last person in the book be the last person to die.'' The words
were those of Seamus Kelters, journalist with BBC Northern Ireland and
co-editor of the recent Lost Lives a necessarily monumental testament to
all those murdered during the Troubles when interviewed on RTE radio before
Christmas.

His wish was not to be. By this new year, another name was added to the
list, a new entry for any updated second edition: loyalist Denver Smith,
who died after a New Year's Eve beating on an estate in Antrim. And last
week there was another: Richard Jameson, UVF commander in Portadown, gunned
down as he returned home, apparently by the Loyalist Volunteer Force.

Meanwhile, the bodies of two young heroin couriers were pulled from the
Grand Canal 10 days after being reported missing in west Dublin: naked,
shot through the back of the head, an archetypal study in clinical
paramilitary-style execution.

But Patrick Murray and Darren Carey will find no place in the pages of a
book such as Lost Lives, though their end arguably had its beginning in the
North just as surely as that of Richard Jameson had. For if Northern
Ireland has been sneezing for the past 30 years, then Dublin has most
certainly caught a variant of the virus. At the very least, it seems intent
on aping and mimicking the symptoms.

There are drug murders everywhere. Manchester last week saw its eighth
drug-related shooting in six months; but it is Dublin, above all, which
regulates its drug trade using the North as the desired template. Mainland
Britain favours the drive-by shooting paradigm of South Central LA; Dublin
prefers to abduct, shoot, dump its victims or gun them down in bars, or at
the wheel of their cars. What else could one expect from a generation of
media-conscious young gangsters who grew up on the latest breaking news
from Belfast rather than the latest Scorsese?

But however much the subversion encouraged by the ``armed struggle'' can be
blamed for importing a certain subculture into Dublin, or at least for
making it easier for that subculture to take hold, last week's events
suggest that it won't be long before it is Belfast which is taking its lead
from Dublin. The differences are breaking down. The North always used
politics as a cover to carry on a gang war over territory and drug profits;
now Dublin seems the best candidate for teaching the North how to carry on
the war once the pretence of politics has been dropped.

Drugs are becoming an increasingly common factor in Northern Irish
violence. Denver Smith's UVF/PUP colleagues are insisting that he was
attacked because of his opposition to dealers in Antrim; Richard Jameson's
UVF/PUP colleagues say their man's murder was prompted by his opposition to
dealers in Portadown.

Nothing is quite so simple, not least because the UVF as a whole is hardly
less innocent of drug-dealing than those it purports to be driving out on a
concerned community's behalf.

But drugs are becoming a handy excuse for internecine territorial
squabbles, and a handy technique too for avoiding repercussions which might
flow from more straightforwardly ``political'' murders.

Both the British and Irish governments seem curiously reluctant to
interfere any more, just so long as a murder can be chalked up to a drugs
feud or else what has become euphemistically known as ``internal
housekeeping''.

What enables the governments to turn away from murders which it would be
inconvenient for them to notice is the sheer invisibility of most of these
crimes.

Bloody Sunday is remembered largely because it came accompanied by
pictures; but nothing will be remembered of the brutal end of two drug
couriers in Dublin, because their deaths amount to nothing more in the
public consciousness than a headline on Monday, a few questions in the Dail
on Wednesday, all of which is then forgotten by Friday.

The thousands of others who have died in Northern Ireland are equally easy
to forget because there is nothing to remind us of them save for an entry
in the pages of Lost Lives. How much harder it would be to ignore the
savagery if the squalid details of it could be seen, if images of each
murder could be played back on national television, and all of us forced to
watch.

That's what award-winning cameraman Sorious Sumara risked his life to do
when civil war engulfed his home country of Sierra Leone, and some of his
images finally made it to the screen on Channel 4's Out of Africa last
Thursday night.

Here were young men shot in the street for not having the right answer
ready to a rebel's barked question; an entire family burned alive in their
home for refusing to come out and join a human shield. The rebels called
their offensive ``Operation Annihilate Every Living Thing''.

One issue raised here was how much of what happens should be shown on
television. Would the images for which Sorious Sumara risked his life end
up pandering to voyeurism?

The question is unanswerable, but if more people were confronted with the
reality of an actual murder the banality and ease of evil then surely they
would not dare treat their freedoms so lightly again, much less squander
and dishonour their own democracy by always so quickly brushing from sight
that which violates it.

Evil needs only apathy to flourish, and where murder in Ireland is
concerned, we are growing more apathetic by the day.