"Crime-Talk", Security and Fear in the Countryside: A Preliminary Study of a Rural Irish Town and Its Hinterland

Abstract

Property and violent crime against older people in rural areas have become recurring themes in media representations of rural Ireland. This is also marked in the closure of rural police stations which might exacerbate the sense of abandonment amongst rural dwellers, hence, feeding a greater fear of crime. Top down crime-talk has stressed the need for 'smart policing' and state-led strategies have involved short, intensive policing operations to halt the mobility of urban based burglars; and a growing number of communities engaged in Community Alert Schemes and Text Alert Schemes. In this article, we report preliminary findings of our research conducted in a small rural town and the surrounding community in SouthEast Ireland. The research sought to capture crime-talk in a rural locale to reflect upon broader themes and identify issues for our ongoing research agenda. Data were obtained through a small number of in-depth semistructured interviews with members of the community. Our observations centre on the nature of adaptation to a felt sense of risk, fear and insecurity.

The victimisation of farms in Ireland: fear of crime, social isolation and crime prevention

“…The farmer’s attitudes about safety, security and the threat of victimisation were complex and present a dichotomy: fear of victimisation was relatively high, yet few participants reported having been victimised, and there was a perception that agricultural crime was high in Ireland but low in their locality. This finding parallels a case study in another part of Ireland by Pytlarz and Bowden ( 2019 ). Participants were asked questions specifically about farm crime; however, many drifted into discussions around wider rural crime issues.…”

“…Both centred on the unequal streamlining of public services and meshed into a general feeling of disconnect from the state and perception that their rural community is forgotten by, and excluded from, the predominately urban government. Such perceptions have been reported elsewhere in Ireland (Houses of the Oireachtas 2019 ; Pytlarz and Bowden 2019 ) and Australia (Anderson and McCall 2005 ).…”

“…Participants appeared most concerned with thefts of small machinery, fraud, illegal dumping and trespassing, rather than thefts of expensive machinery and livestock which they felt was rare. Violent coercion connected to fraudulent work, often directed at older farmers, was a particular concern of many participants (also Pytlarz and Bowden 2019 ): With older farmers it is money, fellas coming in to do a job, charging exorbitant prices for the job and threatening the farmers if they won’t pay up (R.2). R.6, an elderly farmer, reported how aggressive door-to-door selling and theft were related: The lads that called here trying to sell me stuff were very aggressive, and I didn’t buy from them.…”

“…Second, most participants identified crime prevention as something they alone were responsible for. Preventive tools, such as Text Alert, fed into the felt responsibilisation of rural communities and heightened feelings of isolation from the state (also Pytlarz and Bowden 2019 ; Holmes and Jones 2017 ): It’s not just up to the Gardaí to keep us safe, we must be willing to guard ourselves and others... A lot of people are careless – leaving quads at the entrance to the farms is careless. We are the guardians over our own property.…”

“…The literature on agricultural crime in Ireland runs to three studies: a theoretical paper (Windle 2022 ), a qualitative case study (Bowden and Pytlarz 2020 ; Pytlarz and Bowden 2019 ) and a larger survey (Walsh and Walsh 2017 ). While criminological research is relatively new in Ireland (Lynch et al 2020 ; Windle et al 2022 ) this lack of academic attention remains surprising: there were approximately 137,500 farms operating in Ireland in 2016, with around 10% of the working population employed in the agri-food sector (Teagasc 2020 ).…”