A number of incidents this year have indicated to gardai that there is an increasing tendency towards the use of guns to settle relatively minor disputes.

On March 15th a fight outside the Blue Banana night club in Clondalkin led to the less successful of the combatants going to a local house and collecting a sawn-off shotgun. The following day the youth, riding on the back of a motorcycle, went to a local soccer match where he hoped to find some of his adversaries.

With little regard for the safety of innocent bystanders, he opened fire into a crowd watching the match. A local milkman and manager of one of the soccer teams and his nine-year-old son were hit and lucky to survive. Two other people were also hit but suffered only minor injuries.

Two weeks ago in a Tallaght chip shop a teenage member of a local criminal family started an argument with another youth. This young man produced a knife and slashed the other youth in the face. While the victim's wounds were being treated in Tallaght Hospital that evening a gang of up to 20 men appeared at the home of the young man with the knife and chased him upstairs where he took refuge in the attic - with his knife.

There was a stand-off, with none of the gang quite courageous enough to climb into the attic. They wrecked the house, assaulting other family members.

Four days later members of the gang which had invaded the house were abducted by armed men and taken to a warehouse in Clondalkin where they were stripped and beaten by men and two women wearing balaclavas.

Word of the abduction spread, and members of a drug-dealing gang run by a man living in Walkinstown Avenue arrived and overpowered the men and women in balaclavas who, as it turned out, were members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). The INLA apparently thought the arriving criminal gang might be armed gardai and panicked.

In the ensuing melee, a 22-year-old INLA man from west Belfast was horribly attacked with a machete and clubs and died later in hospital. In the following days at least one team of professional gunmen arrived from Belfast intent on revenging Patrick Campbell's death.

Campbell comes from a well-known republican family in west Belfast and was said to be a very popular member of the INLA.

So, from an argument in a chip shop between two youths, a potential minor war erupted between a highly volatile and dangerous republican terrorist group and a drug-dealing gang which employs members of several criminal families in the southern and western suburbs of the city.

The two incidents serve to show how easily minor disputes are leading to serious incidents involving firearms.

About 30 people have been injured in shootings in the State this year, several as a result of relatively minor disputes escalating into feuds involving firearms.

The locations of these disputes are depressingly familiar. A survey of the incidents reported in the press in the past year shows a concentration in Garda divisions in Dublin which contain large working-class estates, particularly in the west and north of the city.

The postal addresses that spring up are concentrated in the ring of 1960s outer-suburb housing estates from Tallaght to Ballyfermot, Clondalkin, Blanchardstown, Finglas, Coolock and Darndale.

Apart from a minor spate of shootings in the north inner city at the beginning of the year, the inner city seems to have escaped most of the shooting incidents this year.

Most of the inner-city shootings, particularly the one or two that have occurred in the south inner area of Dublin, have been characterised by long-standing disputes between middle-aged members of the criminal fraternity.

In one incident the Provisional IRA attempted to assassinate a young man in the Liberties area. Five men have been shot dead in the greater Dublin area this year in incidents in which criminals, mostly involved in drugs, have been responsible.

Outside Dublin this type of incident is confined mainly to Limerick, within the Travelling community and to a lesser extent in Dundalk.

Limerick was free of any serious gang disputes until the middle of this year when a dispute broke out between local drug-dealers in early July. These followed a fatal shooting outside a pub in Southhill at the end of June. There was then a spate of about five shooting incidents in a month, mostly of the drive-by type.

Two members of the Travelling community were shot dead this year in disputes. In one incident at a funeral in the midlands in May a series of incidents in which firearms were present broke out. One young Traveller, Patrick Ward, was killed. Six days later another young Traveller, Tomsie Harty, was shot dead at a halting site in Galway.

THERE were other incidents in which firearms were used in disputes concerning members of the Travelling community. Gardai say it is often hard to gain proper evidence about these incidents but say there does appear to be an increasing predilection among sections of the Travelling community to resort to the use of firearms where previously knives and cudgels would be used.

One detective who has followed trends in the Travelling community said that in recent years Travellers involved in disputes have been returning from England with firearms, often handguns. Gardai are now concerned that there could be loss of life and serious injury in any major inter-family disputes in the Travelling community.

Dundalk has had three shootings this year. Two men were shot on the same evening 12 days ago by members of the INLA. The man shot dead in Dundalk in September is also believed to have been the victim of members of a local criminal group with republican connections.

However, gardai point out that the State still has probably the lowest homicide rate and incidence of gang-related shootings in the Western world.

Jim Cusack is at jcusac@irish-times.ie