In western Ireland, bloody feuding between rival drug gangs has instilled a climate of fear in the region. To deal with it, the government has drafted emergency legislation. But some judges and lawyers criticise the new laws as unconstitutional.

In the turf wars being waged by Limerick's drug-dealing gangs, it's less the number of victims – which has nonetheless reached 14 – than the cold cruelty with which the murders are committed that worries the town, and the rest of Ireland as well. In November 2008, rugby captain Shane Geoghegan was gunned down in front of his house. One of the fifteen bullets shot by the killer hit him in the head. The next day, however, it turned out that Geoghegan had been the victim of a case of mistaken identity. According to police, the murderer, who belonged to the McCarthy/Dundon gang, believed he was getting rid of a member of the enemy Collopy crime family, who escaped an ambush in 2006. At that time, his car was riddled with twenty rounds from an automatic pistol.

The latest innocent victim of gangland feuding was killed in April. Roy Collins bled to death when he was shot while repairing a game in the amusement arcade he operated. He had been targeted for giving testimony in the trial which convicted Wayne Dundon, of the McCarthy/Dundon outfit, on charges of threatening to kill Collins's half brother in 2004, for which Dundon initially received a ten-year sentence. Collins's father called for a silent march to protest the violence. 5,000 people from the city of 50,000 responded, ending their march with a silent demonstration in front of the town hall. The few people who have dared to speak out on the gang wars nearly all say the same thing: gun laws should be tightened drastically. They also feel that the police are overwhelmed by the situation. In a recent opinion survey, many respondents went so far as to call for an intervention by the Irish army. Instead, the government in Dublin is passing legislation amending criminal-law procedure. The new laws adopted to deal with the emergency have been criticised, however, as a blow to the Irish justice system and, more broadly, to citizens' fundamental rights.

In his speech to Parliament, Minister of Justice Dermot Ahern painted a grim picture of the threat posed by the organised crime gangs. It was so pessimistic, in fact, that he implicitly admitted that Irish courts were powerless. He pointed out that instances of witness intimidation occur every day: witnesses retract their statements, refuse to testify or inexplicably fail to recall what happened. The crime organisation exerts increasingly severe pressure on jurors. Even five years ago, a Limerick court was unable to muster the jury of twelve required by law. Although the court contacted over 700 of the city's inhabitants, fear of reprisal prevented nearly all of them from accepting the duty. Finally, the trial was remanded to a Dublin court.

The emergency laws Ahern drafted give Irish courts a much freer hand and more control. It is surprising to note that this country, so attached to peacekeeping in its foreign policy that it rejected the Treaty of Lisbon last year in the name of that value, is now being forced to take draconian domestic security measures. While other Western democracies see the rise of Islamist terrorism as the main threat to civil liberties, Ireland is struggling with organisations that go by the name of McCarthy/Dundon or Keane and Connolly, not Al Qaeda sleeper cells. A special court has been empowered to prosecute organised-crime cases. It differs from conventional criminal courts by substituting professional magistrates and judges for the usual jury of peers. In addition, the government has created new offences, such as "directing a criminal organisation", stiffened sentences (sometimes providing for life imprisonment), and simplified procedures for admitting evidence: testimony under oath from Garda police will hitherto suffice to prove that a group of armed persons constitutes a criminal organisation.

The Minister of Justice vigorously rebuffs critics who say that the new special legislation is liable to undermine the rule of law. Parliamentary debate prior to the vote on the bill mobilised many attorneys and specialists in constitutional law. 133 criminal-justice attorneys signed an open letter demanding that the project be dropped. Meanwhile, on the Irish gangland battlefront, business goes on as usual, as the war escalates. Newspapers recently reported that eight homemade bombs had been confiscated. And in the last weekend of July, the Dublin police disclosed information about armed robberies at a nightclub and a car park, while on the north side of the capital city, criminals had failed in their attempt to use a digger to pry an automatic teller machine out of the wall of a bank.