Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The answers Dr. Lambert has given are really good. She drew a distinction and referred to prevention. Basically, if somebody dies through violence, the response, as a policy, should not naturally be a harsher sentence and that is not saying the person should not be held accountable. There is obviously accountability for crimes that have happened and the fact that there is a victim. I am thinking of my friend who in the last year lost her son due to knife crime. The trial will start soon and she talks about the devastation of going to the graveyard. We have done well in Ireland in having big and open conversations on gender-based violence but we have not even begun to have a conversation about class and violence, and I do not mean in a stigmatising way. When my friend visits her son's grave in Bohernabreena cemetery in Tallaght and looks along the row of gravestones she sees the names of young men who have died by violence. Sometimes it is as if their lives do not matter because they are potentially seen as if they somehow chose to be in a situation or chose to be part of a gang.

I do not like the word “gangland” because it feels like it refers to something separate from us, that is over there and describes this other world, whereas it is actually part of our communities and our lives in a way that we do not want. I refer not to my friend's son but to the others buried down the row in Bohernabreena. What type of investment do we have in strategies that are not punitive but that are about being able to have interventions in the lives of young men who engage in violence? There are massive stressors in their lives. Most people would say that they carry a knife for protection. If you are carrying a knife for protection, you are indicating that you do not feel safe. Whether you are involved in what is known as gang activity or not, the fact that is you generally feel unsafe. Protection is the biggest reason as to why somebody might carry a weapon.

We had legislation recently which changed the sentencing around knife crime. I was trying to collate evidence on knife crime, but there does not seem to be a huge amount of research available. I found a systemic review that pulled what is out there together. I have done a little research into the No Knives Better Lives campaign in Scotland. Some of it did not seem very real because it kind of said that knife crime increased, but yet there just seems to be better policing data that is able to capture the instances of knife crime. What I struggled to pull from the research I looked at is the characteristics relating to or the drivers of knife crime. They do not seem to be different than other core drivers of crime. The one thing that stood out was that women were likely to use knives in the home, which sounds like potentially a reactive thing in terms of what is closest to them. It has been stated that knife crime is on the rise in Ireland. I do not know whether that is true because there does not seem to be a massive amount of research or data that captures the incidence of knife crime.

Should we differentiate between types of violence, whether it is knife crime, gender-based violence, community violence or gang violence? Is there a differentiation to be made between those things? Are the core drivers or stressors potentially the same across all types of violence? Is there a differentiation at all between them? Is gender-based violence a thing on its own? If so, are the others all one and the same?