*Cyril Crowe. Photograph: Joe Buckley
A COMMUNITY EFFORT has been hailed with stopping a robbery from a Clare service station while increasing criminal behaviour is causing distress across the county.
On Tuesday evening, Crowe’s Shop at the Minister’s Cross in Sixmilebridge was subject to its third robbery in ten days. This time round, the community stood tall to ensure the perpetrator did not get beyond An Garda Síochána.
Store owner, Cyril Crowe told The Clare Echo that one local along with a mechanic from the MC Autos which is located adjacent to the store noticed a man coming out of the shop with a mask over his face and then took off after the individual. “He jumped into a ditch but they ran after him into the field and were able to flag Gardaí who were there within three to four minutes and they were able to apprehend the man”.
“A lot of people in the locality are disgusted with what is happening, everyone knows what is happening with these crimes. A lot of our staff are students trying to pay their way through college, we’re only from a small rural area where everyone knows the girls working behind the till and who their parents are”.
This may have been a win but the losses are mounting for business personnel such as the Crowe family who have incurred financial implications with in the region of “a couple of thousand euros” stolen.
Criminals are changing their habits, Cyril observed. “There was a stage two years ago when we had eight break ins over four months, this is the first time in 50 years in business where people have come on during a shift where people have been working, ordinarily the robberies happen when the shops are closed and people are not there but that has changed now and people have become very brazen”.
Such alternative tactics have had a traumatic impact on the staff on duty when the robberies have occurred. “An awful lot of our staff are students or young girls under the age of 24, they have been petrified over the last two weeks, they are worried coming into work for the night shift. A hammer was put to one girl and a knife put to another when they were demanded to empty the contents of the till,” Cyril stated.
Counselling has since been offered to staff members, he confirmed. “They all need jobs and for the students they need a source of income so we are doing everything we can to support them. Everything is open to them, they are off work and it will take time for them to feel uncomfortable in the shop again, some of them will never get that sense of security back”.
Crowe knows this only too well as he was able to recall an incident he was involved in twelve years ago. He had been at home when the alarm to the store went off, as he pulled into the Minister’s Cross, five men came towards the vehicle with machetes, a pick axe and a hatchet where they proceeded to break the windscreen of his car. “They ran from behind the shop in Sixmilebridge while I was in the car, they put a pick axe through the side and broke the windscreen, they had hoped I was going to just go straight to the door and open it but I had spotted them when I pulled in. I wasn’t right for about three years after it,” he admitted.
With levels of crime continuing to rise, it is heightening the need for a stronger Garda presence in the locality, he stressed. “It is incident after incident in Sixmilebridge and yet we’re still without a Garda presence in the area. The Gardaí have their hands tied, they have to be in the urban areas and don’t have the manpower to get out to us. Limerick City and Ennis are full of Gardaí, they should be redeployed to rural areas. The criminals know Sixmilebridge, Quin and Kilkishen don’t have a Garda presence at night-time so something will have to change,” the Fine Gael local election candidate added.
