The present Government has closed 39 rural police stations over the past year and is set to make further significant cuts to the remaining 700 stations around the country. Due to a lack of personnel, a large majority of these police stations now open only on restricted hours.
Templetuohy loose telephone wires to scrap metal merchants.
Recent statistics, released through the Central Statistic Office, state that 80% of police stations record only one or less crime per day and 40% record only one crime per week. However these statistics totally distorts the true crime figures, since when a crime is committed in any garda catchment area, because these stations are on restricted hours, they are not necessarily attributed to that particular local police station.
Government statistics while being used to justify continuing cuts to garda personnel and their budget, is not an indicator of the true level of crime committed or the fact that many people currently residing in isolated areas of rural Ireland are now living in real fear.
Rural Ireland Now Living In Fear
In recent days on the isolated Johnstown road running from the rural village of Templetuohy here in Tipperary, thieves cut down strategic telephone poles in order to obtain the valuable copper telephone wire which these poles supported. The wire and poles were then removed from the scene, the insulation burned off to access the wire and same was then taken to scrap metal merchants, latter who appear not to ask question as to the source of such material.
While this is not an isolated incident over the past two years and nothing new on our less travelled roads here in County Tipperary, local rural dwellers are being left without communication of any sort for up to five days. It is these same rural areas where mobile phone signals are weak and access to internet depends solely on land line telephone links.
The unemployment rate in Ireland was last reported, in September last, at around 14.8%. In the past from 1983, to date, Ireland’s Unemployment Rate averaged 10.8%, reaching an all time high of 17.3% in December of 1985 and a record low of 3.7% in January of 2001.
This latest criminal activity must be viewed as a case of “grab what you can before this country sinks further into the mire,” and which sees, currently, one well educated, highly skilled person emigrate abroad in search of a future, every five minutes.
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