Wayne Doherty was shot dead on Saturday night outside his parents’ home in Hartstown, west Dublin.
He was thirty two years of age and the father of two children.
Every cold blooded murder is a heinous act but when the victim is a loving husband and father, liked and respected in his local community, it adds to the revulsion felt by decent people everywhere.
I knew Wayne Doherty and his family from when he was about ten years of age. As a child, teenager and young man, he was kind, courteous and pleasant. Like his parents and siblings , when the youngest in the family was born with Down’s Syndrome, Wayne doted on his little brother making him the favourite of all the family. I could see him being a caring and loving father to his own children.
Wayne’s parents, John and Angela, are salt of the earth people. Moving to west Dublin from the inner city where John worked in the Irish Glass Bottle company, and was an active trade unionist , their young family was their life.
What kind of creatures then can arrive in a car into a peaceful neighbourhood like the Oakview estate, and, with a shot gun blast shatter, not only the life of Wayne Doherty but also the lives of his wife and children, his parents, extended family and friends.
Gun murder comes down to one person Oakview pulling a trigger. In the case of the killer of Wayne Doherty, we want to see that person found very soon and taken out of society for a very long time.
But it is also worth speculating on the nature of a society that spawns young men who are capable, without apparent compunction of cold-bloodedly blasting others to bits as one of them just did with Wayne. And, although this was absolutely not at all the situation in Wayne’s case, why is it that over several years now, there seems to be a marked increase in viciousness in the murderous rows among criminals engaged in organised crime, sparked it would seem by naked greed over the proceeds of criminal rackets?
‘Greed’ is a word used a lot in the last twelve months in the context of the economic and political debate around the crash in the Irish economy. But is it tenuous to suggest any link between the reckless gambling for profits by the exalted crews of property developers and bankers which brought down the economy and the more easily identifiable criminals grubbing around to enrich themselves in a different way by victimising vulnerable communities?
In a simplistic way, this can be seen in the terms of the Woody Guthrie song, ‘Some men rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen.’ More profoundly however are the implications when the morality of official society, underwritten by the ruling class of establishment politicians, bankers, developers and big business is sheer, naked greed.
There was a naked ruthlessness in the way, for example, that the housing market was rigged in the ten or so years leading up to the crash of 2008. The cabal of profiteering bankers and speculators, legislated for by Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats in government, crucified without mercy young working people needing homes. The fact that the result of their greed would be a generation of youth burdened with massive mortgages for the rest of their lives was a matter of no consequence to them. The fact that a generation of young workers was forced out of their native city of Dublin and obliged to buy homes in areas some hours of commuting time away from their employment – with all the ramifications for personal relationships and community life- was a matter of no consequence to those who were pushing for their own super profits nor to their political facilitators and beneficiaries.
Those who were responsible for this situation were profoundly anti social. And this naked greed and opportunism seeping out of official society is also absorbed by some of those in other social strata and reflected in a more shockingly brutal way. The utter disregard for the wellbeing of society and human relationships evident in the profit driven property fest is mirrored in the utter disregard for society and human life itself on the part of the thug who takes out a shotgun to settle scores.
While we wait for the killer of Wayne Doherty to be brought to justice and indeed the killers or other utterly innocent victims of similar thuggery, we should resolve to do more. We should work to replace the callous values of capitalism with the kind of respect and solidarity that John and Angela Doherty instilled in their family but which tragically was savagely negated by the brutality of others.
Originally published in the Irish Daily Mail, where Joe Higgins has a weekly column every Wednesday
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