The incidence of personal crime, including theft and assault, has doubled in the past five years, according to the CSO. Carol Coulter, Legal Affairs Correspondent, reports.
Mr Gerry O'Hanlon, director of the CSO, said that because of the way the household survey was conducted, by personal interview in people's homes, certain types of crime were not picked up. These included domestic violence and sexual assaults. The emphasis in the survey was on personal crime and crimes against property, he said.
Personal crime doubled between 1998 and 2003, the survey found, with 5.2 per cent of people aged 18 and over reporting that they had been a victim in the past 12 months. The crimes included theft with or without violence and physical assault. The comparable figure for 1998 was 2.4 per cent, or one in 40 of the population.
Those most vulnerable were young men, though young women were equally at risk of theft without violence. More than one in 20 young men reported having been a victim of physical assault, and 3.5 per cent reported theft with violence. In all 11 per cent of this age group reported some criminal attack.
By contrast, older people were least likely to suffer from personal crime, with only 1.9 of all those in the 65 plus age group reporting it. However, the likelihood of being a victim was not reflected in the way a person perceived crime, with young men emerging as the group least fearful of crime, while women between 25 and 64 were most fearful.
Personal crime was more prevalent in Dublin than elsewhere, with 7.3 of all those surveyed in Dublin reporting a personal crime, compared with 5.2 in the State as a whole.
The figures also showed that non-nationals were more likely than nationals to experience crime. While the proportion of Irish people who did so was just over 5 per cent, this rose to 5.4 per cent among the citizens of other EU states and to almost 7 per cent of other non-nationals.
Mr O'Hanlon said that part of this discrepancy, though not all, was due to the fact that non-nationals were more likely to be concentrated in the younger age groups.
The Labour Party spokesman on justice, Mr Joe Costelloe, said that the figures were a "shocking indictment" of the record of Fianna Fáil and the PDs. Ireland was a far more dangerous place than when these parties took office, he said.