Gun attacks in the Republic have plummeted, with the number of people needing treatment after being deliberately shot, and wounded, dropping to just nine cases in 2023.
That represents a decline of some 85 per cent since the peak of such attacks in the Celtic Tiger era, when the cocaine boom brought about unprecedented gangland feuding.
New information obtained by The Irish Times from the HSE reveals that in 2023, the most recent period data is available for, nine people were treated as inpatients in hospitals in the Republic for “gun assault” injuries. This compares with 13 in 2022 and 38 in 2013. Gun attacks resulting in victims being wounded peaked at 59 cases in 2005.
It means the number of people being attacked by gunmen and being wounded declined by 85 per cent in the period between 2005 and 2023. Those trends relate to gun attacks in which the victim survived. They do not capture cases in which the victim died.
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[ Number needing hospital treatment after knife attacks rises to 13-year highOpens in new window ]
However, the number of people being shot dead has also fallen to unprecedented lows in recent years, with two fatalities last year and three in 2023. In the 2000s, gun killings were regularly close to 20 per year and at times exceeded that level.
Garda sources said the landscape of organised crime, especially in Dublin, had fundamentally changed in the period since the Kinahan-Hutch feud began in 2016, with 18 gun murders in the years that followed. Once the Garda began catching and jailing the feud gunmen, and their accomplices, it had a knock-on effect across all of organised crime.
“A lot of these guys being paid, from all sorts of gangs, for shooting people were taken out of circulation,” said a source of some of those jailed for feud-related crimes. “Some of the other players, who weren’t involved in that feud, could see the sheer numbers being jailed and so gun attacks just became too high risk for them.”
[ The story of a feud: How the Kinahan-Hutch war escalatedOpens in new window ]
Other gardaí pointed out significant investment was made in anti-gang policing, and improvements in gathering intelligence, after the 2016 Regency Hotel attack, in a bid to quell the feud.
They believed that enhanced capacity had been maintained, resulting in gardaí now seizing firearms and preventing more attacks, often as they are about to be carried out. This had ensured the intended victims were not wounded, or killed, and took guns and would-be gunmen off the streets. The latest intervention took place in Clondalkin, Dublin, on December 17th last.
Gardaí from the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau intervened and made two arrests when they believed at least one person, possibly more, was about to be shot. A semi-automatic Glock pistol along with rounds of 9mm ammunition were also recovered.
“An Garda Síochána will continue to prioritise targeting those that are the most violent and cause the most harm in communities,” the Garda’s head of Organised and Serious Crime, Assistant Commissioner Angela Willis, said at the time.
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