ONE of Ireland’s biggest tiling firms is calling on gardai to shut down black marketplaces where criminals are earning tens of thousands of euro by flogging stolen power tools.
Brian Stacey has been running his BS Tiling company in Co Kildare for the past 20 years and has been targeted four times alone in 2017 by tool thieves who nicked more than €10,000 worth of equipment.
Last month, Brian managed to capture a number of brazen robbers raiding his van on CCTV and uploaded the footage to Facebook.
And he has been inundated with messages from construction workers across Ireland and even Britain who have fallen foul of these thugs.
He told the Irish Sun: “The video was our fourth van this year to get robbed. I didn’t realise how widespread this situation with van theft was until I put the video up.
“People have been contacting me from all over the country with the same problem. Everyday they are sending me messages, even as far as England. It’s a big deal.
“This is happening every day. The number of tools that have been taken is ridiculous. We’ve had about €10,000 worth of tools taken this year and during the week one of the lads who works with me had €900 worth of gear taken out of his van.”
The video has been viewed more than 270,000 times and shows a gang pull up behind one of his vans in a silver Peugeot 307 in Royal Canal Park, Ashtown, in Dublin.
One man pries the lock on the van open with a screwdriver and two of the thieves empty the back of the vehicle before speeding off.
Brian believes these raids are crippling some businesses and is calling on gardai to tackle the marketplaces where stolen tools are sold.
He also called on all construction workers in Ireland to boycott these markets and never buy their tools from someone who cannot prove where they got them from.
He said: “The first time it happened this year they broke into our van in Galway and then set it on fire.
“I gave the registration of the car to the Gardai and they sent me a letter two days later saying they were still investigating.
“Two days after my van was broken into, a fella contacted me on Facebook saying the same car had robbed his van overnight in Cabra and he got the registration and everything. The Gardai don’t want to know about it.
“A garda told me that the best thing I could do is to go to the markets because that’s where my tools were gone.
“It’s not good enough. These markets — they should have to have proof of where they got the stuff from. Something has to be done.
“I can’t walk into some of these black marketplaces and say ‘they’re my drills’ because what are these lads going to do but stab me or something.
“I just can’t see why the Gardai can’t do more than they are doing about this.”
Garda stats show tool theft fell in 2016 but has increased so far in 2017. Overall €7.7million worth of tools were stolen in the past 12 months — with 13 incidents per day of tool theft.
Almost half were swiped from vehicles while saws and drills were mostly stolen.
A Garda spokesman said: “Industrial/power tools are the most common items stolen from building sites and An Garda Siochana would encourage workers to mark and uniquely identify their property to discourage these thefts and to aid in their return should they be recovered by us. All property should be stored securely.
“We would encourage those involved in the building industry to purchase materials, tools and machinery from appropriate outlets.”
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