A CLAIM THAT Dublin is the ninth “unsafest” city in Europe has been shared online, despite no reliable evidence that this is the case. 

The finding was published by an online betting company’s ranking of casino destinations and appears to have been based solely on surveys asking people about their “perception of crime levels”, “perceived safety”, and other non-objective measures.

“Dublin ranks among the top ten most dangerous major cities in Europe,” one Facebook post reads. Since being posted on 21 May, that post has been shared 798 times, and has been viewed more than 754,400 times.

An almost identical Facebook real (a short-video), posted the next day, has been viewed 66,500 times.

This result was taken from a ‘study’ by online gambling company Online Betting Guide which claimed “to reveal the safest and unsafest major destinations in Europe”.

It has become a trend in recent years for companies to put together survey results in the hopes of getting media coverage. In this case, the gambling company said that it was compiling the figures because ‘it’s important to stay safe when partying in another country’.

The ‘study’ ranked 50 European cities by a ‘safety score’, calculated by using data from a Serbian company called Numbeo, which describes itself as “a crowd-sourced global database of quality of life data”.

Dublin featured ninth from bottom on the list – but Numbeo itself said in a disclaimer that none of its data has “necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise” to provide “accurate or reliable information”.

“Use our content at your own risk,” the disclaimer says.

“There is absolutely no assurance that any statement contained on the website is correct or precise.”

It notes that data on crime is “derived from surveys conducted by visitors to our website,” rather than from facts.

Conversely, this year an international insurance provider, ranked Ireland the second-safest country to work and live in, citing its falling crime rate.

However, deciding which, if any, of these claims is correct is difficult. It is unclear what is meant by safe: would a city with low murders but high traffic fatalities count? And data is difficult to compare across countries.

Certain crimes may be under-reported in some countries due to local factors, like distrust in the justice system, while countries with different criminal justice systems may have different ways of gathering data because of the ways that crime is tracked.

However, The World Health Organisation collects data on the death rate by homicides and assaults across different countries. In 2022, Ireland had a rate of 0.5 deaths per 100,000, which is lower than the average for countries in the EU or European region (0.6 and 1.6 respectively).

Similarly, UN stats on intentional homicide indicate that Ireland (at 0.65 per 100,000, or 0.52 in Northern Ireland) is one of the safer countries in Europe.

However, people are more likely to be serious hurt in traffic accidents than in violent crimes. How does Ireland fare here?

The WHO gives Ireland a road traffic death rate of 3.1 per 100,000 people which is, again, lower than the average of countries in the EU (5.6) or the wider European region (7.4).

The claim that Ireland, and particularly Dublin, has become exceptionally dangerous is widespread online, though much international data does not reflect this, and new Garda figures indicate that violent crime is decreasing.

These claims of danger, as well as a screenshot of a headline describing the Online Betting Guide safety rankings, have been pushed in particular by anti-immigrant groups, who wish to imply that higher immigration leads to higher danger or crime (despite what the reliable statistics say).

Conor McGregor shared the headline in February on X in a post seen more than 2 million times, shortly before a St Patrick’s Day visit to the White House where he claimed Dublin had “gone from one of the most safest cities in Europe to one of the most dangerous”.

The Journal has recently debunked other videos of crimes in other countries that were shared with descriptions indicating it was filmed in Ireland. Almost all of these were shared to denigrate immigrants or non-white people.

These include a video of a woman being attacked in a church; black men beating up a white woman and smashing screens in an airport; as well as videos and images that supposedly show the arrival of large numbers of migrants. All of these were said to have been taken in Ireland — none of them were.

Since the start of the year, The Journal has debunked multiple claims of crimes by migrants, including baseless claims of attempted child abductions by non-white people in Cork, Cahir, Dundalk and Enniscorthy; as well as warnings over Asian men approaching children in Sligo that Gardaí called “fake news”. 

While it is hard to rank each European city in terms of how dangerous it is, WHO and UN data on violent crime, homicide, and traffic deaths all indicate that Ireland is one of the safer countries in Europe. A contrary claim that Dublin is one of the most dangerous cities in Europe is based on a survey of subjective impressions, and whose own researchers said was not assured to be “correct or precise.”

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