Local criminals – not ‘motorway gangs’ – responsible for 15% rise in rural burglaries

Date Published: 20-Jun-2012

The significant rise in rural burglaries is down to criminals based in the community, using local knowledge to identify soft targets – and not roaming gangs who are making the most of the new motorway.

That’s according to one of the top Gardaí in the county who was commenting after she reported a 15% rise in burglaries in rural areas when she addressed this week’s meeting of the County Joint Policing Committee.

Superintendent Marie Skehill said that most of these burglaries were caused by people with local knowledge – and not gangs from outside of the county.

“Most of the offenders that were brought before the courts were from the local areas. There has been an assumption for some time that there are roaming gangs coming off the motorway. However this is not the case. For the most part, it’s down to local youths and local repeat offenders,” she said.

She went on to say that travelling criminals were only involved in the odd isolated incident and the majority of incidents are not caused by these groups.

The number of burglaries between January and May this year was 198 compared to 166 last year and Supt Skehill said that although this figure was high, it was down on last year’s increase of 17 per-cent and much lower than the national average increase of 23 percent.

“I think there is a huge issue there in terms of local people feeding criminality. In the case of the recent break in Williamstown, a number of people that lived each side of the gentlemen were away at a wedding on that particular day,” said Tuam Councillor Michael Connolly.

“It’s no coincidence that in my own area of Moylough, Kilkerrin and Cooloo that when people were away to see people in hospitals or wherever, that they came back to find their houses ransacked. There seems to be local knowledge feeding criminals and they know what times people are out of their houses. The Burglaries seem to take place at those times,” he added.

See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.