A 21 YEAR OLD woman with her life ahead of her, Bernadette O'Neill, is shot dead by a former boyfriend, Declan Lee (25), who is outraged at her for calling off their relationship. In Co Kildare, five year old Ciaran Malone is stabbed to death with kitchen knives by Jerome Kavanagh. In Co Tyrone, 11 year old Kieran Hegarty is killed by 22 year old Brian Martin Doherty, a deeply disturbed young man on release from a psychiatric hospital. In Dublin, 57 year old Rose Farrelly, a disabled woman, is sexually assaulted and strangled by 22 year old Mark Lawlor. Also in Dublin, a young woman is brutally raped by 28 year old Martin Farrell on the very night that he is released early from prison only two years into his five year sentence. He has been released early despite a lengthy record of increasingly serious offences.
The Garda statistics will eventually show that the number of murders in 1995 was somewhere in the mid 40s, nearly double the rate it has been for generations. For many years, including 1994, the murder rate has hovered around 23-25.
The 1995 figure is partly due to drug related revenge killings and the apparent greater availability of guns on the streets. At the same time, however, most of us seem to sense instinctively that something terrifying is happening in the fabric of Irish society. Are we being needlessly fearful?
"Our crime rate is the least bad of possibly all developed nations. It does not warrant the level of panic and hysteria and the media coverage," believes Paul O'Mahony, formerly a forensic psychologist in the prison system and for 10 years research psychologist at the Department of Justice.
But others, such as Dr Art O'Connor, consultant forensic psychiatrist at the Central Mental Hospital, Dublin, believe that the overall statistics do not reflect what he calls the "new viciousness" of crime. Merely counting, the number of attacks, muggings, robberies and break ins - which numbered 1,327 in 1994, scarcely changing from the levels of 1991-1993 - does not reflect the increasing violence of these crimes. The viciousness is not measured by statistics.
And this is why the 1994 Garda crime statistics may actually be falsely reassuring: crime nudging over the 100,000 barrier to 101,036 for the first time since 1983, but not by that much; aggravated burglaries involving firearms down by 32 per cent.
THE Garda likes to play it down - saying that all but 1.3 per cent of crimes are against property, not people, and that the majority are drug related, opportunistic crimes of the smash and grab variety. But, as Dr O'Connor has observed, the statistics don't tell the whole story. You have to look at the kinds of crimes which are on the increase. In just one year, 1994, there was a 25 per cent increase in the rate of wounding and other acts endangering life at the felony level, from a stable figure of 76 in 1991, 77 in 1992 and 76 in 1993 to 99 in 1994.
Robberies with firearms are up by 38 per cent. And while aggravated burglary dropped by 32 per cent from 1,832 in 1993 to 1,412 in 1994, you have to take into account that it dropped only to the 1992 level, which was 1,409, and is still considerably above the 1991 level of 1,179.
Assaults in the non indictable category against ordinary citizens, as opposed to gardai, have been steadily increasing, from 5,950 in 1991 to 6,839 in 1994 - nearly 17 per cent in four years. You do not see this increase if you look at the figures for assaults including assaults on gardai (7,992 in 1994, down from 8,023 in 1993) because assaults against gardai have dropped. Compare the overall 1994 figure of 7,992 including assaults on gardai with the 1991 figure of 7,037, however, and you see another story: a 15 per cent increase in serious assaults in four years.
To get to the roots of what's happening one thing all the experts agree on is that we have to look at the troubled children who will be our main criminal problem in the future.
In 1994, nearly 15 per cent of all crime - 14,720 individual reported acts of aggression - were committed by juveniles as young as 10, the vast majority of them male. More than 70 per cent of this crime was committed by teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17. Most Mountjoy residents are in their late teens and early 20s and near the end of criminal careers which began at least a decade before. To understand the roots of crime, we need to understand them.
