Knife crime - More will die if action is not taken

IF eleven young people had died of drug overdoses in the past seven months, there would be a public outcry.

Yet, even though 11 fatal stabbings have occurred so far this year, including the latest killing of a 19-year-old in Swords, Co Dublin, despite the near epidemic scale of the problem, the reaction has been muted.

This increase in gratuitous violence, invariably fuelled by alcohol, is extremely worrying. Behind the chilling list of the 11 victims named in today’s report lies a nationwide pattern of violent crime, ranging from Dublin to Kildare, Waterford, Meath, Cork and Tipperary.

Behind the cold column of statistics, the names represent a tragic and senseless cutting short of a person’s life before their time, with all that implies for the families and loved ones left behind. Nor is the upsurge in fatal stabbings confined to foreign nationals, as some have suggested. It appears that when they get angry in drink, young Irish men are as prone to use a knife as their eastern European counterparts.

The second knife killing in four days, the Swords incident, reflects an increasing tendency among young people to solve their arguments by using knives, a trend overshadowed by the murderous spate of fatal gangland shootings.

In an average year, gardaí deal with around 1,200 incidents involving knives, solving the vast majority of them. Indeed, when it comes to solving fatal stabbings, they have a 100% success rate.

Obviously, this is an issue that needs to be tackled with urgency. In a bid to root out knife crime, the Government supports a campaign under the challenging slogan, How Big Do You Feel, aimed at discouraging young people from carrying or resorting to knives.

But more needs to be done. Arguably, the introduction of a deterrent sentence would go some way towards discouraging knife crime but it is far from being the only solution.

By any yardstick, the current maximum of five years for possession of a knife in public should be deterrent enough.

Clearly, the rising trend in fatal stabbings reflects a social malaise and a serious failure in the home and the classroom to convince young people of the sheer lunacy of knife crime. When someone decides to carry a knife, the obvious implication is that they are prepared to use it.

If it is to be eradicated, a new approach is needed. The call by AdVIC, a group representing victims of homicide, for a national debate on the question of why violence is rampant in Ireland makes much sense. As the body rightly points out, it is clear that young men who carry knives do so because they simply don’t know how to deal with their problems without killing each other.

Unless knife crime is rooted out, we can be sure of one thing – the names of more young people will be added to the growing death list of victims of stabbings.

More likely than not, their lives will be lost in a drinking bout when a mindless fight breaks out and someone takes out a knife.