Rural crime: Damage caused by crime is much more than financial, says victim

The morning after Patrick Fitzgerald attended a Christening and other members of his family were away at a month’s mind leaving his farm unoccupied for several hours, he discovered a nearly new cattle box had been stolen from the yard.

“I only had it less than a year,” he said of the double-axle, 12x6 box which was worth about €4,500 and used for carrying cattle from his farm outside New Inn in south Tipperary, a few kilometres from Cashel.

“There’s a passage further down the road from the farm gate, into the fields, and there’s a couple of rights of way that lads use. After the box was stolen you could see tracks in the field.

“The land was soft at the time and they might have been attempting to take the box or else just parked up there and watched the farmyard.”

A few of his cows from his herd of suckler cattle, were still to calve at the time and it was when his mother and sister went down to check on them the following morning that the theft was discovered.

Patrick and his wife and their three children — there’s another on the way now — were living in Dualla, on the other side of Cashel, at the time while their new house was being built on the farm.

“I reckon the boys that did it came and turned off the current going into the shed. All the trip switches were down and had never been down before… My mother and sister came down and saw that the gate was open. Then they copped the cattle box was gone and rang me and asked did I give it to someone.

“I came down at around 9am and rang the guards and they arrived at about 10.30am and took my details but I never heard from them since.”

No trace of the stolen cattle box was ever found and, obviously, no arrests ever made as a result. While the box was insured, Patrick didn’t get the full value back and the incident left a large mark that was more than just financial.

“I was depressed. The thoughts of someone in and around the place and you don’t know who. The farmyard is a small bit away from the house, about 200 or 300 yards, and you could be coming down to a cow calving and mightn’t know who’s there.”

The New Inn area in general is close to the M7 motorway, and probably can be reached from the Red Cow roundabout on the edge of Dublin in about 90 minutes, making it an attractive target for raiders.

Although Patrick Fitzgerald echoes the point made by IFA officials that, if no-one was out there to buy the stolen goods, maybe they wouldn’t be stolen in the first place.

“The fellas that are buying them are worse,” he says, adding that he’s been told that stolen trailers and boxes and other equipment are put up for sale on the internet.

Since the theft in early 2014, he’s added a Belgian Shepherd dog to the family as a deterrent to thieves and also upgraded the lock on his gate.

At the beginning of this year the young farmer, who took over the family farm from his father in 2004, registered with the IFA’s Theft Stop programme, adding his details to the growing database and marking his replacement cattle box and a quad bike with the stencilled spray paint.

“It makes them stand out,” he says in relation to the stamp. “We try and make it as hard as possible so they don’t come in. Like the difference between having a dog or not having a dog. I’ve a good dog this time!”