Latest murder statistics reveal that there have been twice as many killings in the police division based around Glasgow as in the whole of Northern Ireland this year.
The recent murders in Co Antrim and Co Down bring to 30 the number of killings in the north during what a leading academic has branded "an imperfect peace".
The figure remains virtually unchanged from the same period last year when 27 people were killed.
This contrasts with the number of murders in the Strathclyde Police area of Scotland.
In this division, which centres on Glasgow but has a population of two million compared with Northern Ireland's 1.7 million, there have been 60 murders since January 1.
The number of murders in Northern Ireland is also considerably less than in the Republic, where 47 people have been killed so far this year.
Eight of the murders in the south have been carried out in Limerick. Half of these killings were related to an ongoing feud in the city of 60,000 people. The Republic has a population of around 3.8 million.
The latest murder statistics for Northern Ireland represent a dramatic drop from the numbers of killings carried out during the worst of the Troubles.
In 1972, officially the worst year of the conflict, 470 people lost their lives. And just 10 years ago 91 people died as the result of the Troubles alone.
University of Ulster academic Dr Martin Melaugh, who is involved in the online conflict archive Cain, said it was important to put the number of murders in context.
"The thing that a lot of people remark upon is that compared with other conflicts there has been a relatively low number of deaths," he said.
"In fact probably over the whole period of the conflict from 1969 up to the mid-1990s we probably killed more than twice as many people on the roads, every year except 1972."
Dr Melaugh said there was some evidence that violence was returning to pre-Troubles levels.
"Traditionally the period prior to the Troubles in Northern Ireland would have had a very low crime rate compared to other regions," he said.
Dr Melaugh said it would be impossible to return to those levels but he said he believed that Northern Ireland could again have "one of the lowest rates in the UK for violent crime and murder".
He said that more than 30 years of violence had "almost decreased the price of human life".
"We are at a stage when Northern Ireland is trying to come out of a period of violence which appears to be taking much longer than people would originally have thought," Dr Melaugh said.
"It appears the conflict is over but this is a period of imperfect peace."
