Taking stock: The rise of brazen shoplifting and fight to stop it

Recorded shoplifting offences have risen by 60% in a decade, with retailers telling RTÉ Prime Time that repeat theft and intimidation are leaving staff afraid to intervene and, in some cases, driving them out of their jobs.

So, what will it take to curb the scourge of retail crime?

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The lady who comes into the Circle K shop is casually, but tidily, dressed. Probably in her mid-20s with her brown hair tied up in a bun and smart phone in her back pocket, she looks like a normal customer.

She has a backpack strapped on her front and a plastic shopping bag in her hand. She approaches a fridge and takes out one can of energy drink and puts it into her backpack. Then another, and another. Altogether, her hand goes in and out of the fridge 18 times as her backpack gets heavier and heavier.

She then moves to other parts of the shop, grabbing bundles of chocolate and other items. She fills her plastic shopping bag, too, and then walks out.

She has just stolen, perhaps, €200 worth of products. She is clearly identifiable beneath visible CCTV cameras but doesn't appear to care.

"This individual has made no attempt to disguise themselves in any way, shape or form, is not wearing a mask, but has come in believing that there's no repercussions effectively for carrying out this activity," said Mark Gannon, Circle K Ireland's Senior Manager for Health Safety and Environment.

The woman is part of what Circle K and other retailers say is a growing trend of brazen shoplifting.

"What we're seeing more and more of is individuals coming in and carrying out what we refer to as swiping activities. People come in fill their bags and walk out," Mr Gannon said.

Circle K instructs its staff not to intervene.

"We want to try and keep our staff safe," Mr Gannon said. "We don't want staff intervening in this type of activity because the individuals that are coming in, you would be unsure of what their reaction would be."

In cases where a shop worker observes criminality, they press a button to alert an offsite monitoring centre, which relays a message over the outlet's Tannoy system to remind customers that the shop is being monitored.

Sometimes shoplifters will desist, sometimes they don't.

Aidan Colgan, who runs three sports shops in Offaly, Laois and Kildare, has instructed his staff not to intervene during thefts after a staff member was injured while confronting a shoplifter.

Mr Colgan described how the staff member saw the shoplifter taking products and told him to put them down. Following that, the shoplifter picked up a hurley and struck the staff member.

The man then ran outside and used the same hurley to smash the shop front window.

When Prime Time filmed in late October, the Portlaoise shop had been closed temporarily for several weeks.

Mr Colgan was using the opportunity to refurbish, but the actual closure was caused by a staff shortage. A couple of staff had left, he said, partly because of "fear and intimidation" from aggressive shoplifters.

His Portlaoise shop is situated directly across from the town’s courthouse. Instead of this adding to the security of the shop, he says it takes from it.

"When the courts are on, that's when we find most shoplifting happens a lot of the time," Mr Colgan says.

"They would steal anything. A lot of them would go for the Adidas or the Nike, the top-end clothing," he notes. "If they want to rob something, they'll rob it."

On particularly busy court days, he sometimes closes his shop for an hour or two.

Like Circle K, Mr Colgan will contact gardaí and gather CCTV and other evidence.

Prosecutions often follow. An Garda Síochána told Prime Time that, up to 2 November this year, there have been over 16,000 charges and summons created for theft from shops.

Retail theft has been rising significantly in recent years.

From 2016 to 2025, the number of recorded shoplifting crimes jumped 60%, according to figures from the Central Statistics Office. That was four times the rate of population increase.

"They get sentences that they don't serve, and they get fines they don't pay," says Limerick retailer Shane Gleeson.

Shoplifting cases are typically prosecuted under Section 4 of the 2001 Criminal Justice Act.

Courts Service figures supplied to Prime Time show that of 22,000 Section 4 theft cases finalised last year in district courts, the great bulk of which were almost certainly shoplifting cases. 17% ended in imprisonment.

However, many will only serve a portion of their sentence because prisons are overcrowded - Irish Prison Service figures show that on 10 November, prisons are operating at 114% of capacity.

Overcrowding creates difficult conditions for prisoners, but it also means that non-violent prisoners are often released early to make space for other, more serious, offenders.

"If the prison governor has to make the difficult decision as to who has to be released" due to overcrowding "the prison governor will always go with the individual who isn't a violent risk or isn't a sex offender, or isn't serving a very long sentence," Senior Counsel Lorcan Staines said.

"The person that falls right into that category is the shoplifter because… it's considered relatively low level."

Before a case gets to trial, those accused of shoplifting crimes - even repeat offenders - can be confident of getting bail.

"What we're seeing is the revolving door," says Circle K’s Mr Gannon.

"If the individual is arrested and is put in front of the courts, the revolving system at the moment means that individual could be back on the streets and back in a Circle K site within a number of hours carrying out the same activity," he added.

Ireland has seen a surge in the number of crimes committed by people on bail, new garda figures supplied to Prime Time show.

Last year, 46,402 crimes were committed by those on bail for other alleged crimes. That is a rise of 15% compared to the year before and a jump of 31%, compared to 2022.

Dublin accounts for a greatly disproportionate percentage of those crimes. Although it has 28% of the country’s population, Dublin city and county accounted for 57% of all offences committed by a person on bail.

The largest single category of those offences was theft, accounting for 29% of the offences.

"What we've seen is that people when they're arrested and they're out on bail... they feel they're free to commit any other crime they want because all the crimes then get rolled up into one sentence," Mr Gleeson said.

"We see people that have been arrested just go bananas shoplifting, because they know there's no additional penalty for it. Now, I realise in the legislation, it's supposedly not the case, but the reality on the ground appears to be that those people believe it's the case," he added.

As a general legal principle, bail used to be typically refused only if a judge believed an accused might interfere with witnesses or not show up for their trial. It was never a mechanism to stop further offences.

However, in 1996, Ireland voted to change the Constitution to also allow for the refusal of bail if a judge reasonably considered the accused might may go onto commit a serious crime. The key word is serious.

Serious offences are defined in the Bail Act as those punishable by a prison sentence of five years or more.

Therefore, technically, shoplifting falls under the serious category, Mr Staines said.

"If someone goes in and steals a Mars bar from Spar, they have committed a Section 4 theft. Technically speaking, the maximum penalty for that is 10 years imprisonment," he added.

In reality, he says, because - technicalities aside - shoplifting is not considered a serious offence, bail is typically given, even in cases where an accused is a repeat offender with multiple offences.

"If they come before the court seeking bail, for that particular offense, they are presumed innocent.

"You may as a citizen suspect that they most likely did [the new alleged offence], but nonetheless, on that individual charge, they're entitled to the presumption of innocence," Mr Staines said.

Last year, Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan appointed Mr Staines to review the efficacy of Ireland's bail laws. One peculiarity is that gardaí, in almost all cases, do not have the power to arrest someone on the spot for breaching bail conditions.

If, for example, a garda sees someone who is breaching a bail condition to stay out of a particular area, the garda "doesn't have the right to go ahead and arrest that person for breach of their bail conditions," Mr Staines said.

Instead, they have to embark on a "cumbersome" process to "find a lawyer to assist him or her to swear an affidavit, go into a court, get an order from the court for the issuing of an arrest warrant, and then go and arrest that person."

In his report, Mr Staines recommended that gardaí be given the power to arrest, without a warrant, for breach of a bail condition.

Minister O'Callaghan was asked about such a proposal on Tuesday night's Prime Time.

"If we have to change the bail laws, that will be done," he said.

Minister O'Callaghan also told Prime Time that he was considering exclusion zones to prevent repeat offenders entering parts of towns or villages where they had repeatedly stolen from shops.

"I want to see stronger measures in place to protect retailers," he said.

He also said he planned to bring a Retail Crime Strategy to Cabinet in late November or early December. That strategy has been long awaited by retailers who spoke to Prime Time.

Several complained that the Government has been slow to produce it despite it being promised in its January 2025 Programme for Government.

In his report on bail law, Mr Staines also recommended the introduction of "an adult bail supervision scheme... with the necessary supports and services to ensure the proper management of recidivist offenders."

In its statement, the Department of Justice said that "Initial work" has commenced "within the department on a bail support scheme specifically designed for women, and extending this to encompass a broader cohort is being considered."

There is also a potential option of a more old-style approach - more gardaí on the street.

Three years ago, Prime Time filmed with Limerick retailer Shane Gleeson.

Then, things were "absolutely awful," he recalls. Referring to one of his Spar shops in Limerick city centre, Mr Gleeson says, "we had 11 or 12 incidents every single day, frequently involving violence, pushing, shoving, not always involving theft. A lot was just simply anti-social behaviour coming from a very small number of people."

Things changed after gardaí introduced a high visibility policing policy in the city last March.

That involves consistent patrols of particular areas between the hours of 8am and 4am every day. Those patrols involve up to 15 gardaí - seven on daytime patrols and eight on evening patrols.

Mr Gleeson is delighted with the results.

The garda response time to incidents in his shop, he says, has gone "from three hours down to four or five minutes.

"The net result is our crime has fallen dramatically. So, from up to 12 episodes a day, we're now gone down to four or five episodes in a week - roughly a 90% reduction in our shoplifting levels," he said.

Aside from Limerick, high visibility policing initiatives have been initiated in the cities of Cork, Dublin and, most recently, Waterford.

For Mr Gleeson, a greater sense of street security has also spurred new investment.

"On foot of what the guards have done, I've opened a new business. I took my father's old shop beside us here and I converted that to a coffee shop."

Most of the seating for the café is outside, something that may not have been practical previously due to "the level of harassment we were receiving from these people up and down the street."

"I could not have done that before the gardaí came back on the street," Mr Gleeson said.