In a recent interview with Pat Kenny on Newstalk radio, Joe Duffy said that, far from the years mellowing him, there are still issues that cause him to get hot under the collar, that he still ‘monitors’ radio shows and wishes sometimes that he had the microphone in front of him.

Well, the veteran broadcaster, below, certainly got his wish at the weekend’s event to honour Veronica Guerin at the National Convention Centre where, taking to the podium as guest speaker, he urged new sweeping powers for gardaí to allow them to seize mobile phones ‘on a hunch’.

Joe’s audience, which included the Taoiseach, Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan and the new Garda Commissioner, must have been taken aback at hearing the pride of Ballyfermot and self-styled man of the people suddenly sound like an intolerant crank delivering a diatribe on Liveline about society going to the dogs.

Most of the great and the good in attendance are old enough to know that before finding fame in RTÉ, Joe worked as a probation officer for the prisons after training as a social worker, and that he carved a niche for himself as a breath of fresh air in stultifyingly middle-class Montrose.

Joe’s astonishing intervention shows that, like many people, his early idealism has been tempered by age and experience.

But a cursory look at his plea for greater Garda powers – not to mention his defeatist attitude towards the social media ban for under-16s, of which more later – suggests that far from turning the dial between his favourite radio programmes, Joe might just be spending a lot of his time online on sites that are a tad removed from his left-wing youth.

There are obvious shortcomings in the veteran broadcaster’s proposal, not least of which the lack of Garda resources to trawl through the mobile phones of everyone who looks at them sideways.

There is also the fact that no self-respecting criminal is going to walk about the place with a smartphone or a burner phone in their pocket once Joe’s new dispensation for gardaí is in place.

Joe’s proposal also reeks of the same heavy-handed tactics that so called ‘patriots’ urge online when it comes to ‘taking back our streets’. Like armed gardaí, internment camps for refugees and other severe law-and-order measures, his proposal is predicated on the notion that the country is going to hell in a handcart, crime figures are spiralling out of control and desperate measures are called for.

The statistics show otherwise. Latest CSO figures show a significant reduction in serious crime, with homicide and related offences down 25% in 2025 compared to 2024. An Garda Síochána agree that major crimes have seen sustained decreases in recent years although there is an increase in cybercrime.

In Dublin, where crime rates are highest, assaults causing harm have decreased by 18% and minor assaults have decreased by 12%, an improvement that’s attributed to high-visibility policing more than anything.

In his proposed crackdown on mobile phone privacy for suspected gangland criminals, Joe ignores these facts.

He says he’s echoing criticisms of EU privacy laws expressed by retired Supreme Court judge Peter Charleton, published in the Cambridge Law Journal.

In the article, Judge Charleton wrote that a blanket ban imposed by the European Court of Justice on general metadata retention in the fight against serious crime means privacy rights ‘trump’ the rights of crime victims to a fair judicial process.

We must leave it to the learned judge to determine whether Joe’s interpretation of his views as having such draconian intent is accurate or not.

But it’s not in his disregard for human rights that Joe lets himself down, it’s in his outright dismissal of the proposed under-16s social media ban.

The ban is a ground-breaking move with the potential to change the culture around smartphones and allow the next generation of children to grow up free of cyberbullying, online harassment and sexual abuse, eating disorders born of exposure to unhealthy body images on apps like TikTok, and every other online scourge that’s anathema to healthy childhood development – including being brainwashed by propaganda from extremist sites and toxic influencers.

Yes, it has its critics but until now no one has been cynical enough to dismiss it, like Joe, as ‘a gimmick’ and ‘a distraction’. He even claims that it is ‘simply unenforceable’.

During his speech, he said crime has changed. ‘Many criminals now carry something far more powerful called a smartphone. It’s a communication centre, a financial device, a map, a tracker, an organiser, a treasure trove. But our laws on phones haven’t changed since 1993.’

He added that the European Court of Justice is ‘stuck in George Orwell’s 1984, believing that any garda, any State interest in your mobile phone, is somehow Big Brother’.

Joe’s view of smartphones as powerful, multipurpose instruments is accurate. But his argument cuts both ways. Many people run their entire career and a lot of their leisure time and their relationships from their screens, so arguably they are deserving of more privacy than ever over their phones, not less.

Children spend too much time online. They are potentially exposed to the worst vices in the world as soon as they can sit up straight and press a button.

The Taoiseach says that social media is the public health issue of our times. It is too late for today’s teenagers but if we can formulate a ban for youngsters, either in lockstep with the EU or alone, we can help protect the next generation from seeing something awful online and suffering trauma as a result.

It’s a mystery why such a maestro of public interest broadcasting as Joe Duffy is not on board with that.