City burglars and urban myths steal our peace of mind

THE BURGLARIES are back, like the packed lunch and Strumpet City and the shoulder pad, to remind us that we have entered tough times.

There’s a new urban myth to accompany the return of the city burglar, and it goes like this. A woman is lying in her bed late at night, listening to a burglar going through her house, taking her things. She pretends to be asleep. The burglar comes into her bedroom, and she still pretends to be asleep. When he’s swept up her belongings, and he is heading for the bedroom door, he leans over her bed and says, “I know you’re awake”. End of urban myth. Beginning of calls to locksmiths. And of a lot of stories about houses being robbed.

And perhaps a little psychoanalysis, because it is quite possible that the rate of burglaries stays steady, and that only our perception of it changes as our fears and anxieties fluctuate.

For example, it can hardly be true to say that there were no robberies during the boom, but it felt like it. Even though Eircom tried its best to terrify us all into fitting burglar alarms, with their blood-chilling radio advertisements about how there was probably a man standing behind you with an axe at that very minute. And how it was quite possible that you might die screaming on your own landing on a sunny afternoon.

It would be nice to think that those advertisements were laughed to scorn. It is more likely that they filled people, particularly old people who spent the majority of their day at home, with horrible and unnecessary worries. Even among the young and healthy, burglar alarms themselves became a universal nuisance, being set off most frequently by cats. It got to the point that no one could leave their house or enter it without a quick dash to the cupboard under the stairs, frantically trying to remember the code for the alarm, while kicking their way through accumulated shopping bags and umbrellas.

On the whole, though, during the good times burglaries were no longer the householders’ obsession they once had been, back in the days when jobs were scarce and heroin was plentiful – in other words the 1980s and early 1990s.

The break-ins we concentrated on during the boom were of a different order altogether: old people in rural areas being terrorised, sometimes horribly beaten, and robbed. These had replaced the almost routine nature of robberies in Dublin during the 1980s and 1990s. Then it was absolutely commonplace to find your car had been broken into or stolen altogether.

Flats in the city centre were robbed all the time and there was no silver left in the suburbs. Handbags were a particular target. The urban myth from that time comes from Liveline back when Marian Finucane was presenting it. Someone rang in to say that a woman they knew had been stopped at lights in the inner city (as it was then called) and a rat had been thrown in the open window of the car. And that in the ensuing hysteria the lady's handbag had been stolen from the front seat. Finucane asked the perfect question: "A live rat or a dead rat?" It had been a live rat, the caller said. It took the country days to recover from that. But now we're talking about our houses being robbed, and not at night either.

The first reports of robberies in this very safe neighbourhood came through last autumn. A student house was robbed in the early afternoon. The lock on the front door was forced. The laptops were taken. The parents had to shell out yet more money.

On the whole, though, the parents were just relieved that none of the young female students were in the house at the time.

One of the girls had gone out, for a short time, just minutes before. She wasn’t going far – she didn’t put on the Chubb lock.

No adult acquaintance in the area could admonish the girl, given that they had lost the key to their own Chubb lock years ago. So many years ago, in fact, that they didn’t realise that Chubb (est 1818) had been bought over by Assa Abloy. Slogan: “Assa Abloy, the global leader in door opening solutions.”

Then a more responsible and conscientious neighbour was watching television at seven in the evening. A man forced the lock of the front door. She confronted him, accidentally, in the hall. He ran. The strange thing is, as anyone who has been robbed will tell you, that it’s not the stolen items that rankle. There are items of real value whose disappearance hurts. One does think of the woman who had all her dead mother’s jewellery stolen in a robbery at her apartment in New York. The jewellery was of no financial value whatsoever. But few other stolen items could have meant so much to their rightful owner.

For the rest of us losing televisions, laptops and even cash does not upset us as much as the break-in itself; unless there is irreplaceable work stored on the laptop. Rather it is the feeling of trespass that a burglary leaves behind it. Not to talk of the sheer mess and inconvenience of it all. And the fear that stalks the land.