Archbishop unleashes rage at recreational drug users
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin today unleashed a scathing attack on recreational drug users, accusing of them of being inherently connected to gangland violence.
The most senior Catholic churchman in the country insisted anyone taking illegal substances could not sanitise their role in spiralling gun crime and murder that has gripped the state.
“Violence and the drug trade belong intrinsically together,” he told an active citizenship service, led by his Church of Ireland counterpart Dr John Neill, in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral.
In what will be viewed as a thinly-veiled reference to the growing culture of cocaine use by Irish middle-classes, Dr Martin was adamant there could be no moral ambiguity about involvement with the drugs trade. “Illicit drug consumption cannot be sanitised out of that equation,” he said.
“I find it particularly difficult to understand how in a society which rightly abhors any expression of double-standards in public life, there are those who attempt to make germ-free the bond between the sordid network of drug trafficking and violence and the socially accepted use of certain drugs as ’recreational’.”
He added: “Double standard about the drug trade can never be made politically correct. It is certainly not socially correct. It is not correct for society.”
Dr Martin said society as a whole needed to take a stand against the gangland and drug culture.
“That is what citizenship is about. There is no room to be complacent in the face of wanton disregard for human life,” he told the congregation.
“Too many lives have been lost. Violence is a blind alley that in the long term achieves only grief. Vengeance only rebounds on those who practice it.
“The drug trade is in its own right violence, a trafficking in death and the ruination of lives, many of them young and vulnerable.”
