THE RATE of gun killings in the Republic has been up to five times higher than in England and Wales in recent years, despite being virtually identical only a decade earlier, academic research has found.
The study by Dr Liz Campbell of Aberdeen University concludes that the Government’s emphasis on tougher laws and longer sentences for those involved in gun crime is misguided and ineffective.
She believes more gardaí are needed on the streets, particularly in gun crime blackspots in parts of Dublin and Limerick.
Dr Campbell also argues education is key to keeping at-risk young men away from drugs and taking them out of poverty.
Her findings are presented in a paper, Responding to Gun Crime in Ireland, which has been published in the British Journal of Criminology.
She found that in 1998 gun killings in the Republic represented 7.8 per cent of all killings. In England and Wales that year gun killings represented 7.2 per cent of all killings.
However, since then Ireland’s gun killing rate has leaped ahead of England and Wales. In 2008, for example, some 38.2 per cent of murders and manslaughters committed in the Republic involved firearms. During the same year, just 6.8 per cent of murders and manslaughters committed in England and Wales involved a firearm.
Dr Campbell lectures at the University of Aberdeen’s School of Law. She previously lectured at University College Cork (UCC), where she carried out her doctoral research as a Government of Ireland scholar. She has written papers on a wide range of issues relating to the criminal justice system, including the trial process and organised crime.
She said the Government’s response to gun crime – focused mainly on harsher sentencing and the erosion of suspects’ rights while under arrest – represented “an unduly narrow perspective”.
Longer sentencing assumed armed criminals considered the penalties and saw harsher penalties as a deterrent, neither of which was true.
The tougher sentencing approach was also undermined by the poor conviction rate for gun killings here.
Despite the over-representation of gun killings in the Republic’s homicide rate, the total homicide rate was only marginally higher in the Republic than in England and Wales.
In the Republic there were 1.63 homicides per 100,000 in 2006 and 1.95 per 100,000 in 2007. This compared with 1.42 per 100,000 in England and Wales in 2005-2006.
While the rate of gun killings was higher than in England and Wales, the number of such crimes was still relatively small and Ireland was far from a “pistolised” society, such as the US.