Gangs are ramping up the violence
THE recent spate of violent offences in Dublin and Cork prompts reflection once again on criminal gangs in Ireland and their role in propagating such violence as a means of controlling people and drug markets.
The planned and purposive nature of these attacks marks them out from other homicides, which are often interpersonal in nature.
Moreover, in the last decade or so, public sensibilities have been understandably offended by the deaths of an increasing number of unconnected persons in such attacks, as occurred with the tragic killing of Bobby Messett in Bray.
While we need more research on both organised crime and homicides more generally in Ireland, we can gain some sense of the size of the problem from recorded crime statistics. Homicide statistics are generally regarded as one of the most reliable categories of recorded crime as most incidents are reported to and recorded by the police. With other crime categories, criminologists are often concerned with problems of under-reporting and under-recording (the ‘dark figure’ of crime), with the result that crime victimisation surveys are seen as a more reliable barometer.
Overall, homicides in Ireland are in decline. Figures published by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in March this year show a peak of 152 unlawful killings in 2007, down to 71 in 2017. While these figures have been recently revised by the CSO to include offences such as dangerous driving causing death, and have been published ‘under reservation’ (indicating concerns about the reliability of the statistics), the trend is consistent with previous data showing, in broad terms, an upswing from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and a downturn from that point onwards.
It is noteworthy that Ireland appears to be following the lead of other jurisdictions in this regard, with many Western countries experiencing declining homicide rates from the beginning of the millennium. Indeed, the same can be said of crime more generally.
Despite all the bad news often carried in the media, leading US criminologist Professor Michael Tonry was able to write in 2014: “Almost no one except a handful of academic specialists seems to have noticed that crime rates are falling throughout the Western world. That is curious. It should be seen everywhere as good news.”
Of course, a downward trend in homicides overall in Ireland may mask a persistent or even growing problem with gang-related lethal violence. For many people, the issue is whether recent decades have seen systemic gang violence accounting for a greater proportion of homicides in Ireland.
The first step in answering this question is to separate out murder, arguably the offence we should be most concerned with, from the rest of the homicide statistics (manslaughter, infanticide, dangerous driving causing death).
For this subcategory, the same broad trajectory can be observed, with a peak in 2007 and a broadly downward trend since that time (although there are year-on-year variations). A more difficult exercise, however, is pinpointing the number of homicides in a given year associated with organised crime, both given the absence of any explicit labelling of the types of homicide in the published statistics and the elasticity of the term ‘organised’ crime.
One useful, though not exact, indicator is the number of homicides involving firearms. We know from two landmark studies carried out by Dr Enda Dooley, former director of Prison Medical Services, that this subcategory has registered a steady increase since the 1970s, rising from approximately one-fifth of all homicides between 1972-1991 to just over a quarter between 1992-1996.
More recent research, carried out by Sarah Skedd for the Routledge ‘Handbook of Irish Criminology’, found a further increase to one in three of all homicides between 2003 and 2013.
While, again, it is important to note that the use of firearms is not synonymous with organised crime, this research is supportive of an increase in organised-crime-related violence, with Skedd noting that recent variations in the number of homicides committed using firearms are consistent with fluctuations in the estimated numbers of homicides linked to organised crime in media reports.
Further support for this conclusion can be derived from research published recently by Italian research institute, Transcrime, into the use and trafficking of illicit firearms in Europe, supported by the European Commission. The report, published in 2017, ranks Ireland as having a ‘medium-high’ rate of fatal shootings and seizures of firearms for the period 2010-2015.
BREAKING this down further into regions, the rate is higher for the east and south-east than the rest of the country. While the report notes a correspondence between areas with a high concentration of deadly shootings and regions characterised by a strong presence of groups involved in criminal activities with firearms, it is important to remember that shootings occur in different contexts, and the report attributes approximately 12pc of fatal shootings in all EU member states to organised crime groups.
Without further research in this area it is difficult to speculate as to the reasons for this higher rate of lethal violence in Ireland and its relationship to Irish criminal groups. Two features of Irish gangs identified by academics such as Niamh Hourigan are the role of families in structuring Irish groups and the overlap between gangs and dissident Republicans.
It may be that the first feature in particular lends itself to cycles of revenge attacks, as witnessed in the recent Hutch-Kinahan feud, and the latter perhaps to a more subversive attitude to the State. Whatever the impact of the distinctive conditions in which criminal gangs operate in Ireland, the root of the problem remains clear: the continued demand for illegal drugs and the willingness of Irish people to pay high prices for them.
Overall, homicides in Ireland are in decline. Figures published in March this year by the CSO show a peak of 152 unlawful killings in 2007, down to 71 in 2017