After the horrific murder of Anne Widdecombe in her Devon home last Thursday, the British police quickly announced that they had a man in custody.

The original suspect, they revealed, was aged 26 and a ‘white British national’. 

He was released without charge and another man was arrested last Saturday. He is 28 and has also been described as ‘a white British national’.

There were two reasons why the British police revealed the ethnicity and nationality of the suspect in the 78-year-old’s murder, which is now being investigated by counter-terrorism officers.

The first was to dispel any suspicion the suspect might be a foreign national, and so to prevent any extremist conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant sentiment fomenting unrest across the UK.

Similarly, in February 2023, the gardaí revealed the suspect in a rape in Finglas was a white Irish male, as rumours that the perpetrator was a black asylum seeker had begun to gather pace.

The problem for the gardaí, however, is that they’d accidentally set something of a precedent with that move: from then on, they couldn’t withhold information about the ethnicity or nationality of a suspect in a major crime without fuelling the very manner of rumour that they had sought to quash.

For the British police, though, this decision was a far easier one. The second reason why they revealed these details about Ms Widdecombe’s suspected killer is because they routinely record ethnicity and nationality in their crime statistics. 

Here, however, we do not.

And that is why, in the aftermath of Jamey Carney’s murder in Killarney last week, the gardaí could only tell us that there was a ‘manhunt’ for a ‘person of interest’, whom they believed had fled the country before the 43-year-old American woman’s body was found.

The sole clue, in the early stages of this unfolding story, was that the gardaí had pointedly not described the suspect as a ‘white Irish male’.

But they couldn’t tell us the nationality or ethnicity of the man they were seeking the public’s assistance to hunt. 

Meanwhile, it was reported yesterday that Ms Carney’s boyfriend, Ahmad Al-Saqar, has been detained in Jordan – the country from which he had fled to seek asylum here.

Two years ago there was a surge in asylum applications from Jordan, although there is no war in the country, which was attributed to a bureaucratic loophole allowing easy access to Jordanian nationals.

We’re little more than halfway through 2026, but so far eight women have been murdered in this country. 

And here is another fact that cannot be ignored – none of the known suspects, in any of these killings, is an Irishman. 

That may, of course, be a complete aberration, and there’s no doubt that ‘white Irish males’ have been responsible for some of the most appalling murders and familicides of recent decades.

But if gardaí are to have any hope of preventing and investigating serious crimes, particularly as women here are more likely to be the victims of murder than any gangland figures, they need accurate profiling and information about the perpetrators of similar incidents in the past.

And as our population becomes increasingly diverse, it is surely time that we followed the lead of police forces in other jurisdictions, including Germany, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, and began recording the nationality, and perhaps even the ethnicity, of the perpetrators of violent crimes. 

Earlier this year, Garda sources indicated they were ‘in favour’ of recording the nationality and ethnicity of crime suspects, and those convicted of serious offences such as rape and murder. 

Sinn Féin TD Fionntán Ó Súilleabháin recently asked the Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, if he had any plans to ‘follow the example of countries like Sweden’, and publish anonymised annual statistics on the nationality and immigration status of people convicted of sexual offences here. 

And it’s hard to argue with his view that this would assist with ‘transparency, objectivity and better-informed policy decisions’.

In response, the minister pointed out that while nationality is ‘generally recorded’ on the Garda PULSE system, the Central Statistics Office did not compile crime statistics on the basis of ‘nationality, ethnicity or citizenship’. 

But why not? Surely the public is entitled to this information, and gardaí should have access to all the information they could possibly need about perpetrators and their victims, with nationality and ethnicity being at least as important as age, gender, address, education or employment history. 

Profiling of suspects based on previous patterns allows investigators to rule out certain cohorts, and focus their overstretched resources on those groups from whom the culprit is more likely to have come.

It’s difficult to understand the resistance of many left-leaning politicians and commentators, while purporting to be horrified by the rise of violence against women in this country, to a measure that might assist in preventing and prosecuting these crimes. 

So long as we fail to record and publish the nationality of suspects and convicted persons, we’re not just rejecting a potentially useful investigative device – we’re also fuelling the conspiracy theories of those extremists who are quick to pounce on every new outrage with rumours of immigrant involvement.

Ironically, I suspect that they may also be quite happy to leave these statistics unrecorded, since the last thing these agitators want is hard and fast data to disprove their theories. 

Figures which show that Irish women are still at most risk from their own compatriots certainly wouldn’t suit their purposes at all.

But without this information, we’re creating a vacuum in which suspicions flourish, resentment grows and social cohesion is undermined. 

From whichever extreme of this debate the greatest resistance is coming, refusing to ask a question because you fear you might not like the answer is never a long-term solution.