More money, more murders

The new year got off to the most tragic start for the family of a young Dublin man. Martin McLoughlin was just 21 and had been celebrating with friends when he was stabbed to death in Jury's new Croke Park Hotel in the early hours of 2006. After a record number of murders in 2005, he is the first casualty of this new year.

Last year's murder death toll was 60, the highest number recorded in the history of the state. The figure also marks a radical shift in the patterns of unlawful killings in this country over the past number of years. The changes show in a brutal way how our society has changed for the worse as we have become more prosperous. An examination of the bare figures reveal an awful lot.

The 60 murders last year mark a 1,400 per cent increase in the murder rate in 50 years. Central Statistics Office figures show that in 1955 there were just four murders, really a tiny number. Every murder at the time was the subject of huge newspaper and public interest. The curious would come for miles around to view a murder scene and every detail of the trial was recorded for public consumption.

By 1960 the number of murders had fallen to three, even though the implementation of the death penalty had been discontinued. But the trend ever since then has been inexorably upwards. In 1965 it was seven, in 1970 it had gone up to 11, by 1975 when the Troubles were at their worst, it was 23. Even in 1974, when loyalist bombs killed 33 people in Dublin and Monaghan, the murder rate never went anywhere near last year's figure of 60.

The statistics take another leap in the nineties. In 1995 there were 43 murders. The following year the murders of Garda Gerry McCabe and Veronica Guerin spurred the state into action and the numbers of murders fell for a couple of years. But since 2001 the graph has shown there has been a steady increase. That year and the next, there were 52 murders each year, 45 in 2003 and 44 in 2005. Even though the figures have dropped slightly in one or two years, criminologists say the trend is rising all the time. The only good thing to say about the rising toll is that, statistically, women now make up a lower percentage of the figures than they used to.

These statistics are telling a bare truth and that is that our society is becoming a far more violent place. Interesting statistics emerge when you compare the murder rate with the number of indictable offences recorded in the same year. In 1955, murder accounted for 0.28 per cent of all indictable (or serious) offences. This had fallen to 0.23 per cent in 2003, the last year for which full figures are available. But when you look at the actual figures for those years, the number of serious offences had risen ninefold while the number of murders had increased by more than 11 times.

Is it really the case that our society is becoming so much more violent and if so is there anything we can do to stop it? It seems that the nature of crime in our society has changed as we have become more prosperous. During the years of high unemployment and emigration, burglaries were the crime of choice for criminals. Sure, some were looking for drug money, but for others it was the only viable crime if people had little disposable income. Now the viable crime is drugs and the whole nature of our crime has changed.

Of the sixty murders last year 18 were gangland killings, almost all related to drugs in one way or another. But when you these out of the equation, along with some exceptional other cases, it is obvious to anyone that drink is the major factor in a majority of killings. And not just people being drunk, it is people being totally out of their minds with drink having spent hours and hours drinking heavily. Many occurred in the early hours of the morning – as did Martin McLoughlin's – hours after official closing time but within a couple of hours of clubs closing, when thousands of people pour onto the streets at the same time searching for some way to get home.

It seems to me that when we had no money to spend, the licensing laws were restricted in an insane way, but now that we have plenty of money they have been liberated to an equally insane degree. We are drinking a lot more and it's killing us. Surely now it is time to look again at the hugely increased availability of drink in the early hours. Someone must say enough.

Fergal Keane is a reporter for RTÉ's Five Seven live