Limerick is the most heavily policed urban area in Ireland. Its complement of 625 gardai is the highest per head of population in the country.

For eight years a gangland war has waged in an area covering just a few hundred acres. CCTV cameras have been installed throughout many of the troubled housing estates. The emergency response unit (ERU) and a new armed regional support unit (RSEU) are on permanent deployment.

“I believe this is part of the reason why the emotional response to Shane Geoghegan’s murder last week has been so large,” said Paul O’Mahony, a criminology lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin. “People regard this murder as a dreadful failure of the system because a total innocent has been killed despite all the efforts of the state.”

The outrage on the streets of Limerick last Wednesday was palpable as Geoghegan’s coffin was carried into St Joseph’s church. Thousands of mourners watched the 28-year-old rugby player’s coffin, draped in the flag of Garryowen rugby club, carried into the church. Among a congregation of politicians and rugby personalities was Willie O’Dea, the defence minister, an aide-de-camp representing the taoiseach, the mayor of Limerick and senior gardai.

Tens of thousands of others had paid respects online, leaving anguished tributes and angry messages on a website established by the Limerick Leader newspaper.

Geoghegan was shot dead in the early hours of Sunday morning after being mistaken for a local drug dealer. The killers, said to be members of the city’s Dundon-McCarthy gang, approached Geoghegan as he walked home having watched the Ireland-Canada rugby match at a friend’s house. Their victim tried to run away but his attackers were too fast and shot him dead with a semi-automatic pistol not far from his front door.

The murder prompted the deployment of armed detectives on the streets, and led to a highly charged debate on organised crime in the Dail in which one opposition TD described it as “an obscenity that cannot be tolerated in a civilised society”.

Dermot Ahern, the justice minister, called the killers “scum”. The public outrage approached levels not seen since Veronica Guerin, the crime journalist, was murdered in June 1996.

But is Geoghegan’s murder really a seminal moment in the fight against organised crime? Or just one those killings — which happen about every two years — that briefly shock the public out of its complacent belief that gangland crime doesn’t involve innocent bystanders? Because if it is, we can expect the swelling of public anger quickly to subside.

EDWARD WARD, 24, an apprentice mechanic was shot dead alongside Brian Downes in Walkinstown, Dublin, in October 2007. Downes was shot seven times and Ward four times by a killer using a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.

Downes, a drug dealer, was the assassin’s target, but his employee was killed so there would be no witness to the crime. But Ward’s death did not provoke the same level of public outrage as Geoghegan’s. Nor have several other murders of innocent people with no involvement in organised crime. So why has this recent murder claimed so much public attention?

“Everyone accepts that all murders are awful and undeserved, but the level of outrage and emotional engagement by members of the public varies,” said O’Mahony.

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