Robberies net €7m in 10 months

Criminals stole more than €7m in raids on cash-in-transit vans, individuals and institutions in the first 10 months of last year.

Gardaí have initiated nearly 350 prosecutions in relation to the robberies, and obtained 60 convictions but only €33,000 has been recovered.

Fine Gael TD Bernard Durkin, who obtained the figures in a Dáil question, said they were startling.

“If crime doesn’t pay, surely the profitable exploits of a select band of criminals in the past 10 months shows at least a reasonable return on their investment.”

Cash-in-transit robberies accounted for more than half of the €7.25m stolen.

Last March, a criminal gang held the family of a Securicor driver hostage and forced him to drop 50 bags of cash containing €2m into a skip in Dublin.

It was followed within two weeks by the robbery of €2.7m from a Brinks Ireland cash transit van, as the van’s crew bought coffee at a north Dublin petrol station.

Justice Minister Michael McDowell has since introduced a voluntary code of practice to improve the security of cash-in-transit deliveries.

But Mr Durkan said there was still huge scope for the provision of more resources to put the crime gangs out of business.

“Obviously organised crime is alive and well and showing a healthy profit, despite the protestations of the Minister for Justice, who has obviously failed to live up to his commitments to increase the strength of An Garda Síochána in line with election promises.”

According to the most recently available statistics, gardaí detected 33% of the 2,617 robberies that were carried out in 2004.

There were more than 1,000 robberies of institutions such as banks, 62 robberies of cash-in-transit vans and more than 1,400 robberies of individuals.