This book establishes Ireland's unique contribution to criminological research, addressing the effects on crime of its peculiar patterns of industrialization and social change, as well as the effect on ordinary crime of a quarter of a century of civil unrest and terrorism. Crime trends are explored over a fifty-year period between 1945-95 at the national level for the two countries as a whole, and at a city level for Belfast and Dublin. Trends in specific categories of crime, from murder to rape and drug crime, are also explored over the same period. The book makes a significant contribution by supplementing statistical material with ethnographic data. It reports on in-depth interview material among residents in two areas of Belfast, one in largely Catholic West Belfast and the other in largely Protestant East Belfast. In these interviews, those questioned speak of their own experiences of crime, the police, and the paramilitary organizations.
