Guns and roses. Rocket launchers and angels. Gravestones and ravens. There they stood, in last night's Herald, stripped to the waist (although not all of them had waists) covered in skin art, articulating threats about the future of members of other gangs.

The tattoos were beautifully executed. And significant. The 'tramp stamp' and Angelina Jolie-type skin messages have made tattoos fairly mainstream. Up to this century, they were not mainstream. One of the earliest records of tattooing, in the third century, looked at body art as practised by a coastal Japanese community.

"Men, great and small, all tattoo their faces and decorate their bodies with designs ... They are fond of diving in the water to get fish and shells and decorate their bodies in order to keep away large fish and waterfowl."

Somewhere along the line, however, tattooing became the habit of the seafaring and the criminal. Lincoln's assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, had a tattoo between his thumb and forefinger. Studies were done which suggested that tattoo-carriers were markedly more likely to be violent.

These days, tattooing is to be found in every second beauty parlour, in the form of permanent make-up, and every second girl in her teens and 20s sports an eternal butterfly on her person. But the fact is that, for criminal gangs, tattoos have always been the sacrament of their church, the outward and visible sign of their family values.

Guff

Which is why the well-meaning guff about the ghastly killing of Shane Geoghegan changing everything is precisely that: well-meaning guff.

The gang members themselves say a big fuss is being made because of him being a rugby player. Lots of other "innocents" have been gunned down, they point out. What's significant about the way they point it out is that none of the deaths evoke their empathy. They come of a multi-generation tradition of boredom alleviated by violence. Criminal psychologist Aaron T Beck calls them "prisoners of hate".

Dr Beck points out that the high value placed on violence (and demonstrated, in yesterday's pictures, by the detailed glorification of weapons and of death) is what has always distinguished gang culture from other kinds of criminal association. This, he says, leads to an inevitable pattern.

"First, the members of the opposition are homogenised; they lose their identities as unique individuals," he maintains. "Each victim is interchangeable, all are disposable.

"In the next stage, the victims are dehumanised. They are no longer perceived as human beings for whom one can feel empathy. They could just as easily be inanimate objects, like mechanical ducks in a shooting gallery...

"Finally, they are demonised: the embodiment of evil. Killing them is no longer optional; they must be exterminated. Their continued existence becomes a threat."

Embed that in families over a period of time, and it becomes clear that what middle-class Ireland wants done, in relation to Limerick, can have only limited effect.

Arrest and convict more of the gang members and one tangible gain results: few of them are on the streets. But they grow, the younger generation. They grow filled with ritual hatreds and the habits of violence they were brought up to repeat.

Changed

The ones who go to prison will emerge, embittered by the fact that, during their incarceration, power may have shifted, within the gang, to others.

They will not emerge changed, improved, or with new approaches to earning a living or expressing their personalities. That's not what prison does.

That better education will provide the offspring of gang members with more socially acceptable options and eventually eradicate the problem is a comforting idea, but with little in the way of real evidence or real possibility, in current economic circumstances.

Instead, the reporter's cliche grimly applies. This will run and run.

- Terry Prone