the scum are on the streets

Coffee with Ron Baines.
"You know," he said, "that nobody can open a shop in Dublin now without paying protection money to the gangsters?"
My mind flew to a conversation I'd had back in the 1980's with a young banking executive.
The first of the Dublin crime families were flooding the city with heroin at the time.
I had said to the banker: "I hope you people aren't paying protection money to drug gangs in order to get permission to open your banks in Dublin city."
The bank official had replied with unusual indiscretion: "Sure if you don't pay, you can't open."
I had then said: "If you people are bowing to gangland already, our children will end up having to ask gangland for permission to walk down the street."
So it has come to pass.