THE firing of two shots at an armed car thief in south Dublin yesterday morning is only the latest episode in a saga of life threatening driving, the theft of "executive" cars and Garda chases which is played out almost nightly while most of Dublin sleeps.
Youths, in this instance possibly from Ballyfermot, stole two high powered saloon cars in south Dublin and cruised between Ronanstown and Tallaght until they spotted a Garda squad car.
Officers on night duty said they were aware of the stolen cars from around midnight, when they were being driven at high speed in different locations.
The vehicles were what gardai call "UTs", short for the "unauthorised taking" offence with which the young car thieves are usually charged. Given the record of dangerous young drivers, gardai are loath to chase such vehicles for fear of precipitating an accident.
The thieves are also aware that the gardai treat "UTs" in this way, so to provoke a response - the members of this gang rammed Garda cars. At this stage they became a threat to life and the gardai were obliged to try to arrest them.
However, the odds are stacked against the gardai. Ordinary family saloons with barely half the acceleration of the stolen cars are no match for very powerful vehicles weighing 1 1/2 tons or more.
The car thieves operating early yesterday morning also had high frequency radio scanners which allowed them to listen to the conversations between the squad cars following them. The youths were also in contact with each other through the "hand free" mobile phone sets in both cars.
The phones were GSM units which could not be intercepted, so, while the car thieves could listen to the gardai, the gardai could not listen to them.
During the two hour chase around south west Dublin from Ronanstown to Tallaght, along the six mile stretch of the M50 and then into Terenure and Rathgar, the youths were seen to be reacting to Garda broadcasts and operating in unison.
During the chase, they clearly tried to cause as much damage as possible to the 109 or so squad cars eventually involved in the chase.
According to officers on duty, when the youths heard anything over the Garda radio frequency that irritated them, they would break and reverse into the nearest pursuing Garda car. At one stage they boxed in one of the pursuing cars and rammed it from the front and rear.
The youths were wearing balaclavas and are known to go armed, usually with a sawn off shotgun. Gardai report that this was produced and pointed at officers when one of the cars eventually crashed at Rathgar at around 2 a.m. A detective who was pursuing the cars at that point fired two shots at the youth with the shotgun but missed and the youths escaped in the other car.
The one eventual benefit from the Garda's point of view was that when the pursuing squad cars were assembled in the Rathgar area, they were able to catch four youths in another stolen car, a white saloon, which has been cruising around south Dublin at night since last month.
So called joyriding has been a problem for the Garda in Dublin since the early 1980s, but the offenders appear to be becoming bolder.
Almost every type of high powered "executive" car on the market has now been stolen, despite alarms and immobilisers.
According to one industry source yesterday, almost every model of one expensive Japanese car in Dublin has been stolen, some more than once.
One high powered Scandinavian car, with a speed that exceeds 130 m.p.h., has been particularly targeted since its arrival in Ireland.