The Azure Forum for Contemporary Security Strategy, with the support of the British Embassy Dublin, has published a new report on Serious and Organised Crime across Ireland and the UK. Authored by Dr Alexander Chance, the report, “Exploring Serious and Organised Crime across Ireland and the UK: Towards a Shared Understanding of a Shared Threat” provides a strategic-level, qualitative assessment of serious and organised crime as it operates within and between Ireland and the UK. The report focuses on three key criminal activities that impact individuals, communities and societies in both countries: modern slavery and human trafficking, drug trafficking, and economic crime. The report also examines the cross-cutting ‘enablers’ that facilitate most contemporary forms of serious and organised crime.

Key findings from the report include:

• Many organised crime groups and networks treat the island of Ireland as, in effect, a single market for illicit goods and services whilst simultaneously using the different legal and policing jurisdictions to their advantage.
• Links between organised crime groups in Great Britain and the island of Ireland remain important but Britain increasingly represents a ‘waypoint’ for drug consignments en route to Ireland from the Netherlands and Belgium.
• There remain gaps in the understanding of human trafficking within and between the UK and Ireland. Shared understanding of human trafficking across the island of Ireland is hampered by differing protocols for the collection and analysis of key data.
• Despite recent multinational successes against criminally dedicated secure communications platforms, encryption presents a serious, ongoing challenge for law enforcement in the UK, Ireland and beyond.
• Though Irish organised crime groups appear to remain largely wedded to cash-based money laundering, crypto-assets are increasingly used as a means to launder the assets of offline criminal activities in the UK, and may become more commonplace in criminal circles in Ireland.
• Corrupted transport workers are central to several forms of serious and organised crime in and between Ireland and the UK.
• Any change to legitimate maritime trade flows to the UK is likely to have a knock-on effect on drugs flows to and between the UK and Ireland. Such a scenario is likely to see greater use of corrupted port workers in both countries being used to retrieve drugs from maritime containers, with a risk that drug-related crime and violence may then extend into surrounding areas – as it has in some continental European port cities.
• Organised crime groups in Ireland and the UK are typically quick to respond and use global crises, conflicts or significant political or economic changes to their own advantage. Such shocks include shifts in trade following the UK’s exit from the EU, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Taliban’s assumption of power in Afghanistan.
• The war in Ukraine is likely to create even more profound effects for criminality in Ireland, the UK and broader region, including through the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable refugees, attempts to use the humanitarian crisis as an opportunity for cyber-enabled fraud, and – over the longer term – a significantly increased pool of weapons entering the European criminal marketplace for firearms.

The report’s recommendations include:

• The compilation of a regular strategic threat assessment of serious and organised crime in Ireland, with the suggestion that this could be coordinated not only with existing cross-border (North–South) analysis but also with a periodic East–West threat assessment, produced on a bilateral basis between UK and Irish authorities.
• That a more constructive public conversation on this topic is warranted, with independent, all-island research on serious and organised crime proposed as a means to help inform a coherent ‘whole of society’ response to such threats.