Call for tougher firearm checks to tackle violence against women in NI

By Claudia Savage, Press Association

There should be more checks on gun owners in an effort to tackle violence against women and girls, MLAs have heard.

Elaine Crory, a women’s sector lobbyist for the Women’s Resource and Development Agency (WRDA) said coercive control by men can be “exacerbated” if there is a firearm in the household.

Thirty women have been killed since 2020 in Northern Ireland, seven in the period since the Stormont Executive launched their violence against women and girls strategy in 2024.

Crory launched a report titled “The Role of Firearms in Violence Against Women and Girls in Northern Ireland” which called for a number of measures to bring Northern Ireland in line with guidelines in the rest of the UK.

They include requiring applicants for a firearms licence to provide at least two referees; enhanced disclosure including all previous convictions and offences, cross referenced with any reports of domestic abuse with a current or past partner; and new “full cost recovery” fees for firearms and shotgun certificates, significantly increasing costs for licences and renewals.

Crory told MLAs on Northern Ireland's Justice Committee there are currently around 53,000 active licences in Northern Ireland, corresponding to over 100,000 firearms, and 97 per cent of firearm owners are men.

However, due to the ongoing impact of paramilitaries in the region and general criminality there is “an unknown quantity of firearms actually circulating”.

Crory said for women facing domestic abuse at the hands of a man “the coercive control is intense, and so we can only imagine that’s exacerbated if there’s a weapon in the house”.

Chairman of the Justice committee, DUP MLA Paul Frew, said he had “concerns” about the research as a representative of the rural constituency of North Antrim and said the police are “super sensitive around this”.

“If there’s a pink flag raised by a member of the public, ringing Crimestoppers, or 999, or 101, those firearms, 99 times out of 100 will be lifted before any other conversations had,” he said.

“And so I do think that at the minute, I would be content out there with regards to the regime, the way the police respond, and quite legitimately, I must say, when there is flags or concerns.”

He added: “There’s real passions going on here and people love their sport and their guns. I see the current licensing system as one, as being really robust.”

Crory said the licensing regime as it stands “considers the fitness, physical and mental of and it considers that person’s criminal record, but it doesn’t consider do they live with somebody who perhaps has reported domestic abuse”.

SDLP MLA Patsy McGlone said Crory wouldn’t want “a message going out, you’re demonising legitimate firearms holders”.

“Many of whom are passionate about their sports, passionate about their guns, passionate about what they do, and also are among the most law abiding in society because they do not want to jeopardise their sport,” he said.

The researcher responded that her report has “no intention to demonise anyone” and the majority of licence holders “have never so much as squashed a fly on purpose”.

“The issue is, are there loopholes that are allowing people to fly under the radar, I suppose, and use to cover the fact that we have a system by which you can acquire a firearm legally, to hold in their in their possession, the means to coercively control their partner or children, in many cases, in some of these reports, for decades and centuries,” she said.

The rate of violence against women and girls in Northern Ireland has been compared to other countries in Europe and across the UK.

Sinn Féin MLA Emma Sheerin said “the real cause of femicide here is misogyny, the hatred of women” and asked what impacts of being a “post-conflict society and the normalisation of violence has had on that”.

Crory said she would love to have “the force of the university and the reach of the university and funding of the university to do a piece of work on this” and her resources were limited to the “cost of printing reports”.