The majority of crimes detected by gardaí last year involved suspected offenders with a criminal history, according to new data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
Reoffending was most common among criminal incidents relating to trespassing and burglary, in which 87 per cent of incidents were linked to suspected offenders with a prior criminal history.
This was followed by theft-related incidents (84 per cent), and public order incidents (83 per cent).
Overall, 61 per cent of the crimes detected and recorded on the Garda Pulse system last year involved suspected offenders with at least one previous criminal incident detected, up from 57 per cent in 2019.
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One in five (20 per cent) crimes reported during 2024 were connected to individuals involved in a separate criminal incident less than one month prior.
When broken down by Garda division, the lowest percentage of reoffending last year was recorded in the Tipperary division (44 per cent), while the Dublin Metropolitan Region (DMR) North Central had the highest (78 per cent).
DMR North Central also had the highest number of detected incidents last year (17,091).
The data separately shows that women offenders were more likely to reoffend, with almost two-thirds (65 per cent) of detected incidents involving women linked to previous criminal incidents.
This compared to 61 per cent of men. However, this was mainly due to higher rates of women involved in dangerous and careless driving incidents (33 per cent) than men (28 per cent).
There was also a higher rate of women involved in vehicle maintenance and duty of care incidents (41 per cent) than men (36 per cent).
Overall, however, men had higher reoffending rates in 14 of the 19 incident categories, including sexual violence (70 and 50 per cent), coercion, intimidation or exploitation (87 and 77 per cent), and assaults or harassments (76 and 65 per cent),
Less than a quarter (23 per cent) of the total reoffending incidents detected (102,211) involved individuals under the age of 25.
The majority (73 per cent) of the reoffending incidents (20,617) linked to men under 25 related to five incident categories.
Some 4,986 incidents fell under dangerous, careless driving or vehicle neglect, followed by drugs (4,511), theft, fraud, robbery and deception (3,420) and public order (2,070).
Half of the overall reoffending incidents last year involving women under 25 (3,127), meanwhile, were linked to theft, fraud, robbery and deception (1,192) and public order (366).
While the overall rate of reoffending typically ranged between 70 to 90 per cent last year, it was significantly lower for vehicle-related incidents, ranging between 29 per cent for dangerous driving incidents and 37 per cent for incidents concerning vehicle maintenance.
This was due to the exclusion of a proportion of vehicle related incidents such as speeding offences, the CSO said, which were managed by the Fixed Charge Processing System.
