Capital expenditure on crime prevention by small businesses has risen by 58 per cent to €1.25 billion, in the past year, according to the Small Firms Association (SFA).

The association's annual crime survey found that 41 per cent of the businesses surveyed had suffered from crime during the year. The average cost of each incident was €5,403, making for an annual total of €425 million, according to the association.

"Crime is of paramount importance because it costs money, affects health, and lowers the quality of life. All those unfortunate enough to become victims of crime experience one or more of these traumas," said SFA director Pat Delaney.

"Both business and citizens no longer have faith in a system that has a constitutional responsibility to protect them," he said.

The survey, which had 420 respondents, found that theft of stock was the major form of crime cited, followed by criminal damage, burglary, theft of cash and others. It found that 4.9 per cent of respondents who trade or offer services over the internet had experienced fraud.

The percentage of respondents who had experienced violent crime was down 2 percentage points, to 9 per cent. Capital expenditure by small businesses on security measures averaged €6,537 per company, according to the survey, an increase of 58 per cent on the previous survey.

A large part of the burden "falls on retailers who are especially vulnerable to crime and find themselves spending large sums of money on security measures they can ill afford," said Mr Delaney. "The use of CCTV has increased from just 7 per cent in 1997, to more than 51 per cent today."

Some respondents had been the victims of fraudsters who had secured payments for inclusion in business directories that never appeared. Others had fallen victim to so-called 419 frauds, where a request is received to be allowed use a bank account to move substantial amounts of money out of a foreign country.

Mr Delaney was strongly critical of the conviction rates that are being achieved in Ireland relative to other jurisdictions.

The latest annualised Garda figures show the number of headline cases reported was 103,360 and the number of convictions achieved to date was 4,411.

"From these figures it appears there is very little chance of Irish criminals ever being brought to justice," Mr Delaney said.