Estimating the "true extent of crime" will be one of the primary tasks of the State's first Institute of Criminology, which has been set up by University College Dublin.
The institute is to undertake a national crime survey based on the assumption that "crime recorded by the police does not reflect the totality of crime", said Mr Paul O'Connor, dean of the faculty of law at UCD, which is setting up the institute.
He said surveys done by other academic institutions, for example in Australia, showed that a significant amount of crime was not reported to the police. These surveys indicated that many crimes were not reported because the victims either did not think the crimes were important enough or "they take care of it themselves".
He said other surveys showed that while there was high reporting of car theft, assault and sexual assault tended to go unreported.
Launching the new institute in Mountjoy Prison, the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, said he envisaged it would "provide a vast range of valuable information and insights into the wider dimensions of crime in this country".
He said Government departments depended on prompt, accurate and appropriate information, and the institute would be invaluable in providing this.
The institute is needed because there are "substantial gaps in our knowledge on nearly every aspect of the crime problem", states the executive summary which sets out its work programme.
Mr O'Connor said there was no shortage of subjects to be researched by the institute. But its programme would concentrate on: the nature and extent of organised crime; the trends and pattern of crime; the social and economic cost of crime; the relationship between crime and opportunity; official data and the causes of crime; the nature and operation of modern policing and the relative efficacy of penal measures
Mr O'Connor said the institute would be open to collaborative approaches with other colleges and researchers. He said the decision to undertake a national crime survey was not meant to suggest there had not been valuable work done by the Central Statistics Office over the years.
He said the survey would extend from the 1950s (when official Garda statistics began to be returned on an annual basis) to the present day. "It will include the era of significant net emigration, and the period of rapid growth in officially recorded crime from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s," said Mr O'Connor.
The survey would be carried out in accordance with "well-established British and American examples".
The current head of the school of law at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Peter Young, has been recruited by UCD to run the institute. He has carried out widespread research in the crime area and has been director of Edinburgh's Centre for Criminology.
He will work with a team of researchers who hope to co-operate closely with other agencies and bodies involved in the area, such as the Gardai, the Department of Justice, the courts and the prison service.
In time, said Mr O'Connor, the institute could offer teaching programmes. "The faculty of law believes that it is highly desirable to develop, alongside the institute, diploma and degree programmes. It is certainly the intention of the new director, Dr Young, to do so," he said.