Bank chiefs face pressure from Ahern over raids

JUSTICE Minister Dermot Ahern will pile pressure on banking chiefs today to take more robust measures to prevent bank raids amid concerns individual bank staff are being allowed to handle excessive amounts of cash.

The move follows the latest tiger kidnapping which saw a Kilkenny Bank of Ireland employee, his wife and their three young children, suffer a terrifying ordeal at the hands of an armed gang who tried to force the father to take €3 million from the bank where he worked.

Mr Ahern is keen to prevent gangs from stockpiling their drug and gun empires with the proceeds from the recent spate of tiger kidnappings.

In a high-level meeting today, chief executives from at least seven banks, Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy and Mr Ahern will meet to discuss the recent kidnappings.

Concern will be raised as to why individual employees like Adrian Ronan, the bank worker targeted in Kilkenny, are in a position to get their hands on huge sums of cash in branches at the demand of gangs.

Mr Ahern wants serious restrictions put on accessing huge amounts of cash: “I think we again need to look at that issue that individual bank officials, or indeed a number of bank officials, can’t just deal with a large level of cash and get it out in a relatively short space of time without notification of the gardaí,” he told RTÉ radio yesterday.

Today’s meeting was arranged last month following a separate tiger kidnapping in Lucan in which a Bank of Ireland worker’s children were held captive.

The use of children is a sinister development that will be of particular concern in today’s discussions.

The Irish Bank Officials Association are expected to hold a separate meeting with Mr Ahern next week over concern about their members’ safety.

IBOA general secretary Larry Broderick yesterday outlined the difficulty in balancing security arrangements in banks with the ordeal an employee faced when their loved ones were being held captive. He added: “Somebody knocks on your door and then you open the door and then you find yourself with a gun to your head ... and then they come in and take your spouse, partner, children, and this is the most distressing thing of all, that children are being used in these situations.”