WE all know what it is, of course: old people getting hit over the head in remote cottages; young men jumping over shop counters and making, off with the contents of the till; finding your car window broken again, only a fortnight after you got it replaced. That's crime. Happens more and more, doesn't it? Sure, anyone will tell you that.
Yet how often, when we think about crime, do we remember the explosion of the oil tanker Betelgeuse in 1979? Or the collapse of Patrick Gallagher's property, group? Or investigations into the beef industry, insider trading on the stock market, tax evasion ...?
It is to Ciaran McCullagh's credit that his book succeeds in one of its main aims to broaden the discussion of crime and our understanding of who we might regard as criminal. In a book which sometimes seems to deliver less than it promises, this is welcome.
Dr McCullagh, who lectures in the Department of Sociology at University College, Cork, devotes specific sections to the Bantry Bay disaster, the Gallagher collapse and other areas of what might broadly be called "white collar crime". In so doing, he highlights the limited view society chooses to take about what constitutes a crime, and what might provide an effective response to it.
There were no criminal prosecutions resulting from the 50 deaths at Bantry Bay, despite evidence that regulations for safe unloading of an oil tanker were either ignored or not in place. The Northern Ireland authorities successfully took legal action against Patrick Gallagher - whose property and banking empire extended across the border - but he was not prosecuted in this State. The Garda's annual report for 1994 shows that £56 million worth of property was stolen that year - about half the amount the EU has been trying to fine the State for the way in which it has run its beef industry.
But discussion of crime and an increase in crime rarely moves into these areas. McCullagh suggests that this is because the State apparatus for tackling crime is devoted to things such assaults and burglaries, and cares less for the sort of crime which costs society a lot more, at least in financial terms.
And society, in the way it views crime, seems to agree that this is how the State machine should proceed. One survey by a firm of accountants in Dublin found that three quarters of frauds discovered in companies were never reported to the police, even though a third of them involved amounts of £10,000 or more. The companies clearly did not want the embarrassment of having to admit that one of their employees was on the take, and to have details of their inadequate procedures revealed in court. Fraudsters tend to be quietly dismissed, perhaps even with a pay off to encourage departure. Quite a different treatment to that awaiting anyone caught taking £100 from a filling station.
McCullagh has useful chapters too on women and crime, and on the way Irish society is policed (is it more about reducing the public's fear of crime than reducing crime itself?). And his closing chapter on punishment and the prison system is also a valuable contribution to the debate about crime, outlining most effectively the argument that for a variety of social and practical reasons, more prison spaces do not reduce crime.
However, there are disappointments, too. The first is that the book is not an easy read. McCullagh sticks rigidly to logical argument, backed up by a mass of statistics. He generously gives credit to other authors and researchers for almost every figure and argument quoted. This approach is academically sound, and comforting for anyone working in the area of crime who plans to use the book as a source of information. But it interferes with the flow of the text and probably makes the book too dull for the general reader.
The second disappointment is that the conclusion to almost 250 pages turns out to be the thinnest section. McCullagh concludes that crime cannot be divorced from the question of social justice, that what is considered the typical criminal (young male, deprived background) is a product of the way society is organised and distributes - or fails to distribute - its wealth.
McCullagh says that in these terms, real justice "can only be achieved through the curtailment of the privileges of some in order to make opportunities available to others". But he adds that "there is little indication that the privileged are willing to make this concession, or that any political party is overly anxious to ask them to."
That may be true, but unfortunately the book ends at that point. Even if McCullagh's work is billed as a "sociological introduction" to crime, the reader has a right to expect more exploration of this critical issue. How would you go about taking more from the better off to help the less well off? Has it worked in the past, and what would work better in the future? Has anyone got any new ideas? Questions, perhaps, for Dr McCullagh's next book.