McDowell praises crime fight success

IRELAND is one of the safest countries in the world to live, with an extremely low homicide rate and falling levels of other serious crime, the Justice Minister revealed yesterday as he published the latest garda crime figures.

Those provisional figures, now released every quarter, only relate to serious crime, while lobby groups and opposition politicians consistently claim there is large scale under-reporting.

In the first three months of the year, there were 23,659 serious crimes logged by gardaí, a drop of 2848, or 11% in the same period last year.