These days the opium of the people is opium

These days, the opium of the people is opium.Second, there is the need of the IRA to reassert its authority during a long ceasefire which may, or may not, lead to a peace agreement. It cannot survive unless it has the fear and respect of working-class Catholics. These are given because of its ability and willingness to act violently – if not against British troops, then against ‘’social parasites”. There is first (and least importantly) the puritanism of any revolutionary organisation.These guys really don’t approve of drugs, which dull the minds of Catholic youth and turn them away from a fervent concentration on British oppression. Just as heroin is the ultimate denial of the world of work, pensions, relationships and personal progress – the ultimate short-term consumer high – so it is also the ultimate rejection of politics and rebellion.

The real answer is simply that Belfast’s terrorists control their host communities far more effectively than the legally restricted police can do.Having acknowledged that, we need to turn to the IRA’s motivation, which is at least triple-layered. If all communities contained the kind of heavily armed and socially conservative gangs that Belfast boasts, who knows what would happen to the local retail outlets of the Colombian cartels? Politicians call loosely for a war against drugs; now they know what a real one would look like.This, in essence, is why the southern capital has such a heroin crisis while Belfast doesn’t – some 5,400 addicts, against just 23 registered heroin abusers in the northern city. It isn’t because the people of Northern Ireland are abnormally moralistic and intolerant of drugs – Dublin’s Catholics are just as traditionalist in these matters. And now? Now the street patrols have gone and things are even worse.The Dublin comparison matters for two reasons. First, it is a useful reminder of how desperate people feel about the dealing of hard drugs in areas where the state seems unable to stop it. If few take the law into their own hands, many more wish someone else would. How many inner- city Britons, told that a vigilante group had been formed to deal with local junkies, or that a notorious dealer had been summarily executed, would privately cheer?Thus the IRA, arch-enemy of popular opinion, is, on the issue of drugs dealers, merely acting out the ‘’string ‘em up” instincts of its critics.

On some questions, the IRA commander and the archetypal London cabbie are in deep, if illiberal, accord.Indeed, these are widely-held instincts: everywhere, people lap up the vengeful morality tales that star Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood blasting anti-social elements to pieces. For a while, over a decade ago, the patrols had some success, though as Moore laments, Whacker Humphries eventually served a short prison sentence (for evicting an inner-city dealer with the splendidly Chicagoan name of Ma Baker). This organised street patrols and vigilantes to protect inner-city Dublin neighbourhoods. Or, as Moore sings, ”They called on dealers’ houses and ordered them to quit/Time and time again they warned, we’ve had enough of it…”Junkies weren’t shot, but warned they would be ”moved out”.