Justice doesn’t know how many unsolved homicides there’ve been since 1995
Neither the department nor the gardaí are able to provide basic stats, let alone a gender breakdown of such murders
THE Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, has admitted that neither she nor the Gardaí are able to provide figures for how many unsolved homicides there have been in Ireland since 1995.
Ms McEntee is also unable to provide figures for unsolved murders of women in the same period – making both these revelations in response to questions from independent TD Carol Nolan.
In the wake of high-profile murders such as that of teacher Ashling Murphy in Tullamore in 2022, Ms McEntee promised a zero-tolerance approach to fatal violence against women.
However when asked for ‘the very basic facts’, neither she nor the Gardaí appeared to know.
Ms Nolan first posed the question on January 18 when she asked the minister in writing about the number of unsolved homicides in Ireland from 1995 to date along with the breakdown, by gender, of the victims for each year.
In her initial response, Ms McEntee said: ‘Unfortunately, the information was not received in time. I will contact the deputy directly once it is to hand.’
However, six weeks later, in a letter on February 28, the minister was forced to concede that the information had never been collated within the Garda or the Department of Justice.
She wrote: ‘As you will appreciate the manner in which all Garda investigations are conducted – including unsolved murders – and how resources are deployed are matters for the Garda Commissioner and his management team. Garda authorities advise me that the work of the Homicide Investigation Review
Team remains ongoing.
‘I am further advised that the information requested is not readily available and would require a
disproportionate amount of Garda time and resources to compile.’
And despite her pledges for renewed focus on the issue of femicide, she admitted: ‘I also understand that there is no gender analysis available for undetected homicides specifically.’
She added: ‘As you may also be aware, 2016-2022 statistics regarding victims of homicide and other offences, including the sex of the victim, are available from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).’
In response, Ms Nolan said, ‘It is a matter of deep surprise and indeed disappointment to me that data on the number of unresolved homicides is not readily available.
‘This is particularly the case given the significant emphasis in recent years on the issue of violence against women.
‘In fact, I would go further and characterise the information deficit as acutely embarrassing for a modern police force. This points towards a level of disarray that will do nothing to inspire confidence in how crimes of this magnitude are collated.
‘We are not talking here about
data hidden away in archives from the era of the foundation of the State, but about murders that took place in recent decades.
‘I would have thought such information would have been readily available.’
The quality of Garda statistics has been a matter of concern for over a decade, with the CSO suspending the publication of
Recorded Crime statistics in 2014.
The CSO said it did so following a Garda Inspectorate report identifying ‘quality issues in relation to the recording of data on the Pulse system’. The Pulse system is the only source of recorded crime data available to the CSO to produce these statistics.
In 2015, the CSO published a Review of the Quality of Crime Statistics. At that time, it recommenced publishing recorded
crime statistics but included caveats in relation to the quality of the underlying data.
However, after further quality issues emerged with regard to Pulse data, the CSO decided in early 2017 to postpone further publication.
The CSO said it made this decision ‘pending the completion of an internal review of 41 homicide incidents by An Garda Síochána and the investigation of concerns raised separately by the CSO in respect of Pulse homicide records.’
In September 2017, the CSO further deferred the publication of Recorded Crime statistics.
Meanwhile the Journal website this weekend said that a ‘pandemic of gender-based violence’ continues unabated, according to a new cross-European investigation.
Thousands of women are murdered every year across the 28 European countries examined, with over 14,000 women the victims of intentional homicide from 2012 to 2022.
During that time, almost 100 women were murdered in Ireland, according to the Garda figures released by the CSO.
Last year, nine more women were murdered, according to the Women’s Aid Ireland Femicide Watch, meaning in total over 100 women have lost their lives in a violent crime since 2012.
However, the Domestic, Sexual and Gender Based Violence report published by the CSO reveals that ‘homicide offences including murder, manslaughter and dangerous driving causing death had been trending downwards, even before the Covid-19 pandemic and 2021 had the lowest number of incidents recorded since 2013.’
Between 2013 and 2021 there were 741 such homicides with the numbers peaking in 2014 at 111 and falling to 47 in 2021.
The report notes that ‘examining only the murder, manslaughter and infanticide sub-group, it can be seen that incidents overall have decreased substantially over the years examined... the number of murders is 388, peaking at 59 in 2013 and falling to 25 in 2021.
‘The proportion of male/female victims has varied over the years examined. There was an increase in the proportion of female victims between 2020 and 2021. However, these are based on very low volumes. On average, since 2013, 21% of murder/manslaughter/ infanticide victims have been female and 79% male.’
There is, however, no breakdown of the number of unsolved homicides and the gender of these unsolved homicides.
Responding, a Department of Justice spokesman said this weekend: ‘An Garda Síochána would hold information relating to
‘The entire situation is frankly astonishing’
‘The data requested was not readily available’
homicide investigations and the status of those investigations.
‘As advised to Deputy Nolan in the minister’s response of February 28, the minister was advised by An Garda Síochána that the specific data requested was not readily available and collation of the data in the manner and timeframe requested in the PQ would involve an inordinate expenditure of Garda time and resources.
‘You will note the short timeframe between submission of a PQ and the deadline for a response, generally a maximum of a week in most cases,’ they added.
A Garda spokesperson told the MOS: ‘It is not possible to provide figures going back to 1995 within the time-frame required as PULSE only came into existence in the late 90s/early 2000s. Due to changes on PULSE, detections from prior to February 2018 cannot be directly compared to those after that date.’
A spokesperson for the CSO also confirmed: ‘We do not have a category of “unsolved” for any of the crime types that we publish. Instead, the distinction is made between whether a crime has been marked as detected or not.’
However the spokesperson said the organisation did carry data as to the gender of suspects for particular crimes.