21 October 2025
By Tom Collins
tom@TheCork.ie
File photo of Ken O’Flynn
Independent Ireland TD Ken O’Flynn has said he has written to the Minister for Health Jennifer Carrol MacNeil asking her to allocate funds for the widespread community rollout of Bleeding Control Kits, known as KnifeSavers in some UK cities, following reports that Dublin’s Mater Hospital recorded a 68% increase in knife-related injuries in its Emergency Department over the past five years.
In March of this year the Cork North-Central TD also called for an increase in targeted high-visibility deployment of Garda members to monitor and patrol areas of his constituency that have suffered from a dramatic increase in anti-social and knife related crime.
Deputy O’Flynn added, “The information we are reading about today from the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine (IAEM) confirms what we have all long known to be the case anecdotally; that knife crime is now a violent virus that has exploded across rural and urban communities.”
“This trend is clear from the information provided by the Gardai regarding the number of knives seized. In 2015 there were 65 knives seized in Cork City but by 2024 that number had increased by over 93% to 126.”
“I have to say however that I agree with what the IAEM are saying; that despite such alarming figures, the true extent of the problem may be under-reported because many patients treated and discharged from Emergency Departments are not captured in national data, masking the real toll of knife violence in communities.”
“Our country has become far more violent in recent years. Everyone can see it despite the best efforts of the hug a thug NGO brigade to attribute the cause to poverty or some other social factor. There was plenty of poverty in this country for decades and we never witnessed the kind of rampant normalisation of extreme violence that we now see on display in town centres and cities.”
“We also need to have a serious debate around the potential for certain communities and ethnicities to be overrepresented in these kinds of crimes as we have seen in the UK and elsewhere. Burying our heads in the sand serves no one and that certainly includes any approach to policing that places political or cultural sensitivities ahead of zero-tolerance enforcement.”