The 1970s were a watershed in the history of recorded crime in Ireland, Dr Peter Young, director of the Institute of Criminology, said yesterday.
He was launching the Crime in Ireland report written by him, along with Dr Ian O'Donnell and Dr Emma Clare, for the National Crime Council.
"The general pattern of recorded crime is of a sharp period of rise between the late 1960s and the middle years of the 1980s, sandwiched between two periods of fall", he said. "The decade in which recorded crime rose at the fastest rate was between 1970 and 1980.
"Recorded crime in Ireland has been falling from 1984."
Recent years have seen a fall in recorded, or indictable, crime, he said, and Ireland was quite distinctive in this. Offences against property were down 14 per cent in that period and larcenies were down 19 per cent. However, offences against the person, including sexual offences and murders, were up 15 per cent, though still lower than in the 1980s.
In a statement issued to welcome the report, the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, said Garda figures showed that crime dropped further in the years not reached by the report, with a fall of 5 per cent in 1999 and an anticipated fall of 4 per cent in 2000.
Traffic offences are the most common type of non-indictable recorded offences, according to Dr Young.
Taken with indictable crimes such as stealing vehicles, or stealing from them, and criminal road traffic deaths, "a substantial amount of crime is connected with moving vehicles".
Dr Young said that Garda reporting and recording practices, the basis of the Garda Commissioner's annual report, changed over the period studied.
The report states that the bulge in crime statistics in 1983 was probably the result of a change in recording practices.