In the early hours of November 1, Lorcan Rooney-O’Reilly was stabbed in the heart and killed while trying to intervene in a row at a Halloween party in Dublin’s Oliver Bond flats.

His killing was one of seven stabbing incidents in the capital city that night.

Speaking at Mr Rooney-O’Reilly’s funeral today, Meath Street parish priest Fr. Niall Coghlan condemned knife crime, saying using a knife on another person “is the greatest act of cowardice.”

Speaking to Newstalk Lunchtime, Fr. Coghlan said “there’s something wrong with the picture” when in Dublin, a city of some 1.8 million people, there were seven stabbings, while on the same night in London, with a population of over eight million people, there was one reported stabbing.

He believes “we have lowered the bar” in Ireland regarding our expectations on what constitutes an acceptable level of crime and safety.

Listen: Fr. Niall Coghlan

“The first day that the person had to put an alarm on their house the Irish people should have been on the streets, the first day we had to put an alarm on our cars we should have been on the streets ... we’ve dropped the bar too low,” he said.

In the wake of the spate of stabbings there have been calls for harsher sentences for those convicted of knife crimes, however Fr Coghlan suggested that longer prison sentences may not be the solution, as they have yet to show any correlation in improvements of safety in wider society.

“If the punishment isn’t working then you have to change the punishment and I’m not sure longer prison sentences are going to do it ... sending people to prisons doesn’t seem to work.”

The Herald has reported that a 15-year-old suspect in the stabbing has handed himself in at Kevin Street Garda Station. However, gardaí did not take a statement from him as they aim to collect more evidence before formally questioning him.