Crime victims have become less likely to report incidents to An Garda Síochána as they believe the force could not or would not act, according to new research.
The number of people who said they have experienced theft, fraud or assaults in the past year has nearly doubled since 2019, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) report shows.
A rising number of people are deciding not to report a large proportion of the crimes they experience, the CSO found in its most recent household survey examining public perceptions and experience of criminality.
Overall crime reporting rates were down last year against 2019, when the household survey was last carried out.
The most common reasons for people choosing not to report crimes were the perception that gardaí would not or could not take actions to combat the crime, or that the incident was too minor to report.
The reporting of personal crime – thefts, fraud and assault – fell from 39 per cent in 2019 to 30 per cent in 2025.
Less than half the incidents of household crime – burglary, attempted burglary, or vandalism – are now reported. The reporting rate fell from 59 per cent in 2019 to just 47 per cent this past year.
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The CSO data points to a significant increase in the rates of violent and non-violent thefts as well as fraud and assault.
In 2019, 10 per cent of people had been the victim of one of these “personal” crimes, but that number has nearly doubled to 19 per cent this past year.
The data suggests that men are more likely to suffer personal crimes than women, at a rate of 21 per cent of men to 17 per cent of women.
However, women reported significantly higher levels of fear of being physically assaulted than men.
It comes at a time when both genders reported being increasingly worried about being a victim of crime.
When the survey was last published in 2019, half of all respondents (51 per cent) said they did not worry at all about suffering crime.
That figure has fallen to just 32 per cent, with the share of people constantly or often worried about crime increasing by 8 percentage points to 23 per cent.
Just over half of people polled said they feel safe while walking in their local areas, an additional third of people said they felt “fairly safe”.
The perceived effectiveness of the gardaí has fallen notably.
Less than half of people feel the Garda has been effective at tackling crime at a national level.
Across the State, 51 per cent of respondents feel the force is either ‘not very effective’ (38 per cent) or ‘not effective at all’ (13 per cent), this compares with just 35 per cent of people who felt this way in 2019, CSO statistician Jim Dalton said.
On a local level, people still feel gardaí are effective (57 per cent), but that figure is down from 68 per cent in 2019.
Dalton noted that just 43 per cent of people feel very confident or quite confident that the wider justice system was bringing people who commit crime to justice in Ireland.
“This represented a fall from 46 per cent in 2019,” he said.