Children as young as 8 stealing clothes from charity banks

CHILDREN as young as eight are being used to steal clothes from charity clothing banks.

So far this year about 72 tonnes of clothing worth about €40,000 have been stolen from various charity clothes banks. Enable Ireland has also spent €40,000 repairing the damaged containers.

The children are put into the containers by adults to pass bags of clothes out to them. In most cases, the containers are wrenched open but some thieves are using very young children.

Enable Ireland’s retail operations manager, Ann Kelly, said the charity was doing everything possible to make the banks more secure and tamper-proof.

But it is the use of young children to steal the clothing from the banks that is most worrying because of the danger of them getting trapped inside.

Enable Ireland recently hired investigators to monitor clothes banks in Dublin regularly targeted by thieves. In one incident two men were seen wrapping an eight-year-old in a duvet and lowering him into a recycling bank in Dublin. The child was pulled out of the container once he had passed the bags to the thieves.

The investigators concluded that a more extensive surveillance operation was needed to catch the thieves. It is believed that the clothes are exported abroad.

Ms Kelly pointed out that while gardaí were notified, there was little that could be done to stop the thieves.

Enable Ireland is now working to change the design of the banks to make them tamper-proof. Ms Kelly stressed that the charity relied on clothing donations to help fund its activities and urged people to continue donating.

“We would ask the public to persist in making donations directly to our shops or to our clothing banks in the knowledge that we are doing everything we can to make our banks more secure and tamper-proof,” she said.