Book review: The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology
| Author | James Mehigan |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895817744912 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 251
ad hominems against his adversaries. I remain clueless about why he is so reluctant to
take his critics at their word.
Deirdre Healy, Claire Hamilton, Yvonne Daly and Michelle Butler (eds), The Routledge Handbook
of Irish Criminology, Routledge: Abingdon, 2016; 606 pp.: 9781138019430, £137.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: James Mehigan, Open University, UK
DOI: 10.1177/1748895817744912
It was only some 20 years ago that Roger Hood welcomed the ‘first major criminological
study of crime in Ireland’. He was writing an introduction to a monograph by Brewer
et al. (1997) whose title Crime in Ireland 1945–95 was somewhat upstaged by its pithy
and perspicacious subtitle Here Be Dragons. The study of crime and criminal justice on
the island of Ireland at that time was truly uncharted territory. The discipline suffered
from a lack of funding and the overwhelming impact of some 30 years of intense con-
flict. The Northern Irish Conflict, between Irish nationalists on one side and those whose
allegiances were to Britain, subsumed politics north and south of the border. Policymakers
and academics were, perhaps understandably, more interested in the issues arising from
the Conflict and ‘ordinary’ crime often went under-researched or ignored. That today we
are able to open a handbook providing detailed assessments of the research literature
across all aspects of Irish criminology is not just a credit to the editors and authors, but
also a statement of how far the study of criminology in Ireland has come in those two
decades.
The Handbook’s 30 chapters are divided into four thematic parts. Each part gathers
together many of the leading criminologists, psychiatrists, lawyers and other experts
from Ireland and abroad. The chapters engage with theory and international research
before connecting it to the question of crime on the island of Ireland. Almost all of the
chapters consider the treatment of their topic in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern
Ireland. Many take the long view and go back to consider the influences of pre-partition
(before 1922) policies on the contemporary criminological landscape. They do this while
also drawing on international theoretical perspectives.
The first part entitled ‘Understanding crime’ sets out the key information on crime
trends and homicide as well as sexual violence and domestic violence, cybercrime,
poverty, white-collar crime and state crime. It also considers desistance and gang-
related activity. This is the biggest part of the Handbook along with Part II
‘Responding to crime’. This second part covers different responses to the problem of
crime from community safety and restorative justice through policing, sentencing
and prison life.
The experiences of victims, drug users and women in the criminal justice system are
considered in detail in the third part ‘Contexts of crime’. This also gives a lot of detailed
analysis of the policy-making process and the impact of neo-liberalism, European perspec-
tives and media influences on this process. The final, and shortest, part ‘Emerging ideas’
looks at organised crime, mental illness and ethnicity in Irish criminal justice. It also has a
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