From top: Ballymun tower blocks in the 1960s; David Langwallner

I recently concluded a Crown Court Case with 16 defendants in an Inner London Crown Court which was effectively a drugs conspiracy trial of the young with some heedless older models. I am very much mindful of such social developments, having seen them in Dublin and the way they have corroded and destroyed the social structure in Ireland.

This is known in South America as the Pixote phenomenon. The radicalisation or corruption of the young. The degradation and the massacre of the innocents. Little Toy Soldiers.

It is based on the exploitation of young and often deprived people, sometimes in care and often, without generalisation, in dysfunctional family units. It is based on abuse and coercion and grooming, similar in a way to sex exploitation, and is an awful feature of our woe begotten times. In fact, it has led to a potential new defence in criminal justice terms of ‘modern slavery’. Usually applicable to the last person in the indictment or the ‘runner’.

It is an urban transplantation from the Third World to the First World, endemic across Southeast London and the Northside of Dublin, with younger gangs also trafficking the drugs across county lines in England. I recently gave a broadcast on RT UK in this respect arguing that the drug culture is now an all-pervasive social problem which the neo-liberal agenda has created and enhanced.

How? When you don’t invest or give people proper jobs or opportunities, ghettoise and marginalise them and treat them like animals, how do you expect them to behave? With the lure of consumerism and endless media barrages of lifestyle choices, hedonism, and easy money? A vicious circle and a Catch 22. Accentuated by Coronavirus.

In this respect, having role models or elements of personal discipline is important. But who is the role model, and can they impose their good values on you? Or you on yourself? Can you, at one level, break a dependency on gang culture?  A vicious cycle or circle.

And what is a gang? Can you avoid becoming a corporate lawyer for that, in my view, may be a different form of gangsterism.

Now through my various representations and through my involvement with the Innocence Project, I have had extensive experience with gang culture. A rather dangerous visit to South Los Angeles with the project should establish my credentials in this respect.

I am non-judgmental and understand the Marxist analysis that poverty and the lack of opportunity, allied with consumerism, creates this desire for emulation which leads to the drug industry. I also understand that all of us need to exercise a level of personal responsibility without going overboard. Though when blathering, right-wing idiots rabbit on about law and order well, I AM SCEPTICAL their deeply right-wing ideology contributed to the creating of the problem in the first place.

The drug problem in Dublin, for example, was in effect a failure of urban planning, putting people in tower blocks in Ballymun and elsewhere which created drug-infested infernos. people were moved from a local community with a sense of community to anonymous tower blocks. The London Drug Problem is no different.

I have written extensively about Catholicism and the mafia culture it engenders. More to the point and this I think distinctly relevant, as Roberto Saviano, the expert in the Italian drug trade and his book “Gomorrah” (2006) demonstrates, are the economics and indeed organisation of drug cartels.  Saviona wrote a subsequent book called “Zero, Zero, Zero” (2016) which makes the following incredibly significant points:

1: The drug cartels of South America and Italy among other places created a model of business organisation and funding that corporate organisations have emulated. What difference in moral terms is there between vulture funds, Goldman Sachs, and drug barons? None. The business of America is business. Or of Ireland or, more pertinently, of China.

2: Said model has become, both in ruthlessness, the Omerta code and indeed drug economics, a model for corporate business organisation. The transnational vulture funds of Canadian and American origin destroying Ireland are, in fact, morally drug cartels.

There is, in fact, no distinction between Steve Bannon, the late Peter Sutherland and Pablo Escobar in moral terms. In terms of organisation corporate law firms and the merchant bankers share the same dynamic with the drugs trade. Different forms and emanations of criminalisation.

So, if we have a Proceeds of Crime or POCA Statute or Asset Forfeiture Act, subject to safeguards, why use it against minor drug dealers when it needs to be used against the banksters and Goldman Sachs since of course they have adopted and emulated the modes of organisation and mentality of the drug trade and have caused the drugs trade or augmented same and unquestionably profited from same? And let us be reminded of Bob Dylan’s song Early Roman Kings and the sentiments it invokes.

The drugs of consumerism and corporate liquidation, to paraphrase a British pop song, do not work and in fact they blur people’s moral intelligence.

Sorrentino’s film Il Divo (2017) is about Andreotti the Christian democrat Divo. Prime minister eminence grise and ruthless criminal in league with the mafia. Pious Catholic and gangster, the perfect toxic combination. Christian fundamentalism, gangsterism and mafia drug money destroying the social fabric in Italy a model now exported all around the world.

In fact, the protection of the young against exploitation is called the Palermo Protocol and it is a beautiful pious document of the international sanctioning of abuse, coercion and grooming over-riding real or putative consent.

An anecdote: I visited Sicily and when in Palermo stayed in a beautiful old hotel with a golden bath frequented by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for £40. Why? I arrived and wished to go and see a famous restaurant recommended by Peter Robb in his book Midnight in Sicily (1996). It was just around the corner, a five-minute walk.

“Oh no, Sir, we will get a taxi the alleyway is bad,”  I was told. The resonance hit me. “Well you can walk left and round about it will be 45 minutes or you can take a cab which will take 15 minutes. It is a beautiful drive,” they said.

And it was. When I arrived in the restaurant with the fantastic Sicilian dish recommended by Robb of Pesto Al Sarna, the adjacent table has a mixture of the incredibly old and the incredibly young and lots of guns on the table and the alleyway the hotelier referred to… well there was audible gunshot in the drug crucible. Like Sicily, in general, beauty and repulsion simultaneously.

A trip from Palermo to Agrigento showed the classic mafia and corporate methods enshrined that which blend into one another and destroy the social structure. The drive into Agrigento is full of half-finished buildings. Not finished because of backhanders to the mafia.

So, investment in the young is now necessary, and real, not cosmetic, opportunities are necessary. If not provided, we allow further county lines developed in half-completed or derelict buildings, a point the author of the recent book also makes.

The environment in urban planning and opportunity creates high self-esteem and environment is everything needed to create appropriate adults. Beautiful spaces and buildings create balanced, adjusted people, as Alain De Boton rightly argues in his book about buildings and urban spaces. The Architecture of Happiness.

And we are rendering housing, both for the rentier and mortgaged class, impossible in Ireland. We are destroying generations from living happy and fulfilled lives on the road to an ever-compliant mediaeval feudalism.

David Langwallner is a barrister specialising in public law, immigration, housing and criminal defence including miscarriages of justice. He is emeritus director of the Irish Innocence Project and was Irish Lawyer of the Year at the 2015 Irish Law Awards. Follow David on Twitter @DLangwallner

Pic via Irish History