The shooting happened at Berryfield Drive in Finglas and is believed to be linked to a wellknown drugs gang in the area. The gang is run by a leading Dublin criminal, who is currently in prison. The victim of yesterday's shooting was in a stable condition at the Mater hospital last night.

The latest gangland shooting follows a robust defence from Michael McDowell of his tenure as Minister for Justice, during which he claimed his record over the last four years was "second to none".

However, last night McDowell was accused of "failing miserably" in providing adequate resources for gardai to fight gangland crime. The comments came from PJ Stone, the general secretary of the Garda Representative Association.

"I am frankly not surprised at the deterioration that we see in relation to crime. The feedback I am getting from gardai on the street is of utter frustration at the lack of proper resources. We are rapidly losing touch with local communities and that has a major knock-on effect in terms of intelligence gathering, " Stone told the Sunday Tribune.

The justice minister is also under major pressure from the two main opposition parties over his handling of the growing problem of gangland crime and his failure to deliver the much-promised Criminal Justice Bill. Last Friday, McDowell accused Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbite of hypocrisy and scoring cheap political points. However, Fine Gael responded with a stinging attack on McDowell last night.

"The minister is clearly hurting because his policies are not working. On all the key performance indicators for a Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell has clearly failed. Serious crime has increased and detection rates have fallen, " a spokesman for Enda Kenny said.

McDowell plans to introduce into law the 2004 Criminal Justice Bill before the summer, a spokesperson for the minister confirmed to theSunday Tribune. The proposed bill, which will include tougher sentences for gun crime, was published two years ago. Since then, the justice minister has proposed 118 amendments to the bill, but it has yet to be discussed in any detail by the Oireachtas.

McDowell has publicly accepted responsibility for the lengthy delay in the bill coming into law.

"The minister is determined to have the bill at Committee Stage in the Dail before Easter and to have it into law before the summer, " a spokeswoman for the justice minister said.

Labour's Joe Costello last night questioned the new timetable. "It is extraordinarily optimistic, given how slow it has been to get this far, for him to hope to have the bill into law by the summer. The minister produced the legislation in 2004 and he has added all these amendments, so we effectively have a whole new bill.

This is not the way to produce such important legislation, " Costello said.

The gun attack in Finglas yesterday morning comes as gardai continue to investigate the shooting dead of hitman and drug addict Seamus Bradley, who was gunned down at Blackhorse Avenue in Cabra on Friday. Gardai have also renewed their appeal for information into last weekend's shooting of 22-year-old mother-of-one Donna Cleary, who was killed while attending a party in a friend's house in Coolock.

The fatal shootings of Bradley and Cleary bring to 14 the number of violent deaths committed since the start of this year, which is double the number of killing in the same period in 2005. The number of people killed by guns has increased fourfold in the same period.

New figures obtained by the Sunday Tribune show that the garda district where Donna Cleary was murdered has the highest homicide rate of all garda areas in the capital, despite having one of the lowest numbers of gardai deployed. Garda figures detailing serious crime rates in the Dublin area in 2005 indicate that two-thirds of all homicides in the capital occur in just two out of the six garda regions in Dublin, both of which are located on the northside of the city.