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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0818 715 815. This is LiveLine on RTÉ Radio 1. Sponsored by Harry Currie. Step into summer with our new curtain designs and colours. Explore our latest designs in-store or online.
Good afternoon. You are very welcome to LiveLine. 51551 is the text number. You can email me, LiveLine at rte.ie, or as always, give me a call on 0818 715 815. And as you'll no doubt be well aware of at this stage, a 21-year-old man was stabbed to death over the weekend in Dublin city centre, Caim Balogan, was his name and details still emerging as to what happened.
But it was after attending a late night concert on Grafton Street when the incident occurred and a murder investigation is underway and a bystander as well sustained stab wounds during that attack in which Balagan was stabbed several times, including in the chest. Whenever anything like this happens, people get in touch with us here on LiveLine.
They get in touch through all the different numbers and email addresses and everything I read out. People get in touch by WhatsApp as well, and they send in voice notes. 087 484 8888, I should say, is that WhatsApp number. But Adriano is one of those who got in touch and sent us a voice note. He lives on Parliament Street in Dublin city centre.
And he said he's noticed an increase in public order offences in the last few months.
I've been living in Dublin for about four and a half years. I'm originally from Sao Paulo and I moved here after seven years living in Berlin. I love Dublin, even the corners that a lot of Irish people avoid, like Temple Bar. So much so that last year I bought an apartment in Parliament Street. It's still culturally richer than most people would think.
Now, I have to say for the past six months or so, public order around here has been going steadily downhill. Let's say in the area between Christ Church and Trinity and then Cabin Street and the leafy in that rectangle, you'd be lucky to see two guards walking around at any time today. And then shops are struggling as well. Shops have been attacked frequently, like Rumi Cafe in Essex Street.
They were broken into twice in only a few months. And that's just around the corner from Dublin City Council. That should be looking after our safety. For instance, in the last three months, we've been seeing people smoking crack pipes in broad daylight, even in Parliament Street, because they know there's no guards around.
And don't take me wrong, there's always been drug use around that area, but these guys just hide to do it and now they know they don't need to. Another example, just this Saturday, I witnessed a man, completely out of his faculties, push a homeless woman And I know she's homeless because I see her around a lot. She pushed her against the wall. She hit her head and fell to the floor.
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Chapter 2: What recent incident highlighted the rise in stabbing injuries in Dublin?
And now, as everyone knows at this point, someone just got stabbed near Stephens Green. If public power doesn't wake up, this will keep happening, because for us who live there, we are seeing it increasing every single day.
The residents call the police once a week, so at least this turns into statistics, otherwise it's just invisible, but they always arrive too late, because there isn't enough guards around. I generally don't think this is a problem that will be solved only by policing the area. You need sports programs, cultural programs, things that bring social cohesion.
But in the short term, the chaos needs to be controlled. Otherwise, more people will end up hurt.
That's what Adriano had to say on the WhatsApp on 0874848888. He mentioned statistics. I don't know if you saw it. There was a brilliant, brilliant breakdown of crime rates by Garda Station and the Irish Independent yesterday. And what they showed flies in the face of people who I know are going to get in touch and say the whole country's gone to hell in a handbasket.
It hasn't really, despite how people feel. Three quarters of Garda Station saw a decrease in crime criminal offences recorded last year. But actually, when you dig into it, to the point Adriano makes about Dublin City Centre specifically, Store Street Garda Station saw an increase in offences. Pier Street Garda Station, an increase in offences.
Kevin Street Garda Station, an increase in offences. And across the country, huge drops in burglary and driving offences, but increases in weapons and firearms, increases for assaults and theft, increases for drug offences and increases for public order offences. So it can't just be Adriano who's noticed this.
If you have, wherever you are, it doesn't have to be Dublin City Centre, it could be anywhere in the country, get in touch. And 51551 again is the text number if WhatsApp or a call doesn't suit you. Dennis McGrath is on the line. Dennis, would you know Dublin City Centre well? I would indeed, Ciarán.
I'm born and bred in Dublin, so I'd be in and out of Dublin all the time. But I have curtailed my movements there over the last sort of 12 months. I no longer, unless I have something specific to do, I stay away from it. Because it's become too dangerous. Wherever you are, whatever time of the day it is, you're constantly on red alert, looking around who's doing what, where, when.
That chap there has just been on and left a voicemail. He's absolutely spot on. Ciarán, I brought this subject up back in 1999 when I returned from London after seeing what my city had turned into. We're now in 2026 and it's just completely out of control.
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Chapter 3: How do residents perceive the increase in public order offences?
And that's, what's going on. And my condolences must go out to the family of that poor individual who unfortunately lost his life, uh, in Dublin. And it was only 12 months ago that within five minutes of that venue, another chap, uh, lost his life, which spilled out onto the streets of the South End Street at all hours of the morning. So it's not where you want to be.
If you want to go out for a night out with your friends or a social evening, you can't. It's unpredictable. The whole Dublin's become unpredictable.
The presence of knives in some of these attacks as well has got a lot of people's attention, Dennis.
Well, Ciarán, with all due respect, anybody who heads out for a social evening tooled up needs to be taken off the streets. And if they turn out to be non-Irish, then they need to be heading straight to Dublin Airport and out of the country. It's about time we sort this problem out. Otherwise, as Adriana said, it can get progressively worse.
Is that a trend you worry about? It's actually very hard to pin down to what extent it is a trend in Ireland because the guards don't record what type of weapons are used. They did a big survey a few years ago, kind of over 10 years, but you don't get a detailed breakdown of knife attacks like you do in the UK.
So they were well able in the UK and you lived there for a long time, you seem to suggest. They were well able to point to trends and say, listen, we've got a growing culture of knife crime. We actually, we don't gather the data here to be able to say the same.
Well, what does that tell you? And people need to be held accountable. It's as simple as that.
Yeah.
And I... despair when I hear politicians coming on the airwaves or on social media making statements like Dublin is safe when they are surrounded by armed detectives I don't get that luxury when I go into Dublin I'm on my own and if anything kicks off I'm on my own Simple as, will the police be there for me? Will they get to me? Doubt it.
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Chapter 4: What statistics reveal about crime rates in Dublin's Garda Stations?
It's as simple as that. And it's taken, as I said, 1999, 2026, that's a long time to be still having this conversation, which tells me that whatever system they introduced or are to introduce, they ain't working. It ain't working.
Stephen, what do you think about that idea of, and this doesn't apply to every single person carrying a knife, but that a certain amount are maybe doing it because it's become part of the culture. They think they need to.
No, I don't agree. I don't think that's acceptable, no. No, I just think that's an easy answer for, an easy excuse for the paper over the cracks for this. We didn't do it. I'm 40 odd years of age now. I didn't do it in my 20s or my early teens or whatever. You don't do it. You just don't do it. It seems to be the norm now. It just seems to be the easy option.
But if you're going to that port shop there in the weekend, if you're going for a night out and you want to get home, a lot of people are not getting home. I'm 20 minutes from city centre, 15, 20 minutes from city centre in a taxi And you should not be that scared about going to a city centre. I'd stay away for as much as I can. As much as I can.
I'm in there on Friday and I don't even want to go. I don't even want to go at all. Because you're just on edge. You're looking over your shoulder. And it is obviously about the city centre, this topic as well. But it's all over. There's just no fear nowadays. There's just absolutely no fear. You can see it. It's everywhere, you know.
Because I mentioned the UK and they've tried lots of different things, you know, much tougher sentencing. They had knife amnesties. They had knife amnesties where people actually went door to door. You know, this idea that the guards know full well.
who these people are often and so they would go door to door collecting weapons they had bins outside certain clubs and on certain streets that people could drop knives into they had no knife campaigns these education campaigns as well to try and push back on the culture do you think there's value in doing any of that?
If the guards knock on some of the doors here you know what kind of answer they're going to get asking them sorts of questions That's probably true in the UK though as well isn't it? Yeah probably yeah I don't think that's working. The weight of resources is enough going on in the city. I think we are really, really short of guards. You can see that.
But who's going to want to get into the guards with all this going on?
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Chapter 5: How has the perception of safety in Dublin changed for locals?
And what types of injuries then are you dealing with as a result of increased knife crime or prevalence of knife crime?
Well, injuries really from the head to the toe, like knife crime affects any part of the body. And so some injuries are, you know, have more morbidity or mortality associated with them. But a message that we, you know, do definitely want to get across is that there isn't any safe place to stab somebody. Somebody can die from
a stab wound to the arm just as easy as a stab wound to the chest but in terms of the overall injury pattern and knife injuries we're seeing them on every part of the body.
And is there... I mean, is there a prevailing view amongst you and your colleagues then as to what's driving it, whether it is, as Jim O'Callaghan has maybe suggested in the past, this kind of this culture, this normalisation of carrying knives amongst young men in particular?
I would agree with some of those comments that you mentioned earlier on. I work in the UK at the Royal London Hospital as well. And that's what they're seeing over there, that young males, when they're questioned about it, there is a kind of gone with this pack mentality where they do carry knives.
And it is because they know that these people who, these other gangs that they'll be associating with will also be carrying knives. The WHO does mark kind of four different pillars when it comes to kind of tackling and delivering interventions. So with interventions for the person themselves,
for their network, and that means kind of their family, their friends, their associates, the media as well, you know, the responsibility on kind of responsible reporting and such, and then at a societal level as well, and embedded in those societal interventions are violence intervention programs and recidivism prevention programs as well, to try and tackle all those together.
From a clinical point of view, if I can just make a mention to that, there are things that can be done. And you had spoken about this a little bit before about the education programs. So something that we learned from London and from Liverpool in particular was the Knife Saver program. The Knife Saver program was about community intervention, community education programs. but also training.
So training when it comes to, you know, these societies will get out, they get into a school, they get into a football club, into a stadium, and they would teach people what to do if they did meet a victim of a penetrating crime. Because ultimately you can bleed to death very quickly from a stab wound. The international data would tell us that people could bleed to death within five minutes.
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