ON Tuesday morning, September 25, as you may have read in last week's Irish Voice, a young motorcycle cop on traffic duty in the north inner city in Dublin got a call on his radio about a stolen car which had been spotted in the rush hour congestion by a friend of the owner.

The motorbike Garda (officer) happened to be on the North Strand, one of the main routes from the north side into the city, which was the street where the stolen car had been seen. Within a minute or two he had picked out the vehicle in the traffic and started to follow it while he radioed for backup.

What happened next is almost beyond belief. The car turned off into a side road and as the cop followed he was spotted by one of the two men inside the vehicle. The car then started to slow down, pulled into the side of the road and stopped.

The Garda did the same, parking his bike behind the vehicle. Before he had time even to get off the bike, one of the two men in the car jumped out holding a sawn-off shotgun and blasted him at close range. The young thug then jumped back in the car which sped off.

Seriously wounded, the Garda lay in agony on the side of the road. An onlooker said he was crying with the pain. This was Dublin at 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning last week.

As I said, it's almost beyond belief. But the incident encapsulates the way criminals here now behave and the way Irish society has changed.

Twenty or 30 years ago, a murder here would be front page news and would have a shocked nation talking about it for days. But extreme violence and even murder is now so common here that we have become harder to shock.

Even so, this casual murder attempt on an unarmed young Garda immediately caused outrage among the public here and led to calls for the Gardai to be armed.

As it happens, the Garda has survived and is recovering, but that is seen as more a matter of luck than any concern by the thug who pulled the trigger. At such close range, a blast from a shotgun is often fatal, and it is clear that the young thug did not care one way or the other whether he killed a cop or not.

The two young thugs involved in this incident are thought to be members of one of several vicious gangs that are based in the north inner city, a deprived area in Dublin with run down apartments, drug problems and crime. It is believed they were on their way to do a job when the incident happened. And Gardai believe that the shooter was probably hyped up on coke when he pulled the trigger.

It's one thing when the drug gangs shoot each other. Murders of that kind don't bother people here too much since it reduces the number of thugs the Gardai have to cope with.

But it is a different matter when one of these young thugs so casually tries to murder a Garda simply because he does not want to be followed. If that is what it has come to here, then should the Gardai be armed?

That debate has now started and there are strong views on the matter both within the Gardai and among the population at large here. Ireland is now one of the last countries in Europe to have an unarmed police force.

Like in Britain, the ordinary police man or woman on the beat or in a patrol car here is unarmed. There are armed officers within the Garda force in the Emergency Response Units, which are deployed whenever a serious incident happens, usually a major robbery or an action against one of the drug gangs. But the Gardai on the streets here are not routinely armed, unlike the cops in New York.

This has become more and more difficult for the Gardai involved on a daily basis with the huge increase in violence in our society. Shootings and especially stabbings are now so common here that they are a weekly occurrence.

Low level young thugs here frequently carry guns, and even young toughs who have not yet graduated into organized crime routinely carry knives on a night out. Yet when trouble breaks out on Saturday night, the young Gardai on the streets have to walk into crowds of these young thugs, many of them drugged up, with only a short wooden baton for protection. They don't even have pepper sprays.

The weapons gap between the Gardai and the criminals here is now so obvious that it is no longer possible to ignore. At the most serious level of crime, the thugs are armed with the latest automatic weapons which tend to come into the country as part of the protection for big drug shipments, and a handgun is not going to be adequate against that.

The availability of former Republican guns and gunmen for hire does not help either. But even at the level of ordinary crime and weekend violence, handguns and knives have become such a feature here that Gardai on the street on routine patrol are now at constant risk.

Is arming every Garda who goes out on duty the answer? Or is that the first step in an upward spiral that leads to ever increasing levels of weaponry and violence?

This seems to be inevitable, based on what has happened in other countries. I see from the American nightly news that in some parts of the U.S., for example, officers who are unhappy that all they have is handguns have now started to buy heavy duty machine guns out of their own pockets to give them firepower to match that of the bad guys.

And in most countries where police routinely carry arms, gun crime is much higher than it is in Ireland because criminals feel they have to carry weapons.

There is another factor as well, of course. Having an armed police force increases the sense of distance and alienation between ordinary police on the beat and the people in the communities they patrol.

That has been the experience in other countries, including countries like Australia which changed to an armed police force relatively recently. In Ireland there is still a huge level of support, appreciation, and even affection for the Gardai from 98% of the population. The fact that the Gardai are unarmed is part of that relationship, and anything that changes that is not what we need.

It is also true that because the vast majority of the population here are such strong supporters of the Gardai, an armed force is not necessary to deal with most police work like petty crime, vandalism, traffic offenses and so on. It's only the serious criminal fringe that poses the problem, and in my view there are many other things we can do first to deal with them before we routinely arm all Gardai on the beat.

For more effective than routinely arming Gardai here would be giving them much more legal support so that when they do catch the bad guys they are not let down by the system.

By coincidence, on the very day that the motorbike cop was shot, an inquest at the coroner's court was being held here into the deaths of two armed thugs who were shot dead by armed Gardai during a raid on a post office in the village of Lusk in North County Dublin two years ago.

The two were part of a notorious criminal gang from the north inner city which is led by the former IRA commanding officer in Dublin (take a bow, all of you who dropped dollars in collection boxes for "the struggle" over the years).

Gardai were tipped off about the raid before it happened and some armed emergency officers were in the vicinity as the gang arrived. But the situation did not develop as Gardai expected, civilians who were in the store at the time were at risk and the raiders either were slow about dropping their weapons or made ambiguous movements when confronted. The result was that two raiders were shot.

So what happened? Were the Gardai involved given medals for risking their lives?

Well no, actually. What happened is that some organizations here immediately began to question whether excessive force had been used.

As happens in the rare cases where the Gardai shoot someone, the events were investigated by a Garda chief superintendent from outside the area. He prepared a file which was sent to the independent Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), and after examining the detailed evidence the DPP decided that there was no case to answer by the Gardai.

Eventually - and again this is normal procedure for non-natural deaths - an inquest was held into the deaths of the two raiders. As I said, this court-format hearing was reaching its conclusion last week when the other incident took place.

But before the coroner's court hearing could conclude, the newly set up Garda Ombudsman office intervened at the last moment and asked that the hearing be suspended because it was conducting an investigation on whether "inappropriate force" had been used. It was doing so in response to a complaint from the family of one of the thugs killed at Lusk.

So the Garda officers involved now face a third level of investigation into their action. Meanwhile, the criminals feel such contempt for the police that they casually try to blow away an inconvenient motorbike cop who is following them.

And the new Garda Ombudsman's office is trying to make a name for itself on a case that predates its existence and that had already been handled by the correct structures at the time.

We don't need to routinely arm Gardai here. But we do need a change of attitude and a change of the legal structures that allow the criminal gangs to play ducks and drakes with the law here.

Instead of arming the police, we should be proactively hounding the young thugs, cutting the welfare payments to those who won't work, regularly picking up and questioning those who have no visible means of support, refusing driving licenses to those with records, giving greater powers to supervising parole officers, giving community police officers powers to intervene directly in families with criminal records and so on.

Instead of that we give the thugs free legal aid and worry about their civil liberties and rights. There's something seriously wrong with that.