This is the season when people believe strange things, but your urban myth is a funny old business the whole year round.
My mother refuses to leave her car keys on the hall table because she is convinced that people will come in the night, stick a fishing rod through the letter box, hook her keys, fish them out and then drive her car off into the darkness.
I have laughed her to scorn over this. To me pushing a fishing rod through a letter box hardly seems the sort of diabolical act normally inspired by a Nissan Micra. My father laughs at her as well, when she tries to get him to hide his car keys.
Last week we were Christmas shopping in Dundrum Town Centre. We were just making good our escape when we stumbled upon a very nice female garda, who was handing out leaflets about home security. You know the type of thing: lock all your windows and cancel all your newspapers if you are going to the shops for a pint of milk. Install a burglar alarm, the code for which only you can remember, thus sending your adult children crazy and very probably deaf and so on.
Giving my mother brochures on home security is like giving Enda Kenny advice on presenting shamrocks at the White House — she knows the territory and she’s dying to talk about it. We were straight into the fishing rod through the letterbox routine. I expected the garda to reassure my mother and tell her that she had nothing to worry about, but instead she responded by saying: “They’ve magnets on the end of them now.”
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In the past I have had cause to have doubts about the scientific impartiality of the gardai. These doubts first started years ago when I rang to report the theft of a heavy clay window-box. The garda at the other end of the phone was sympathetic. “It’s the Travellers,” he said.
The Travellers, he was adamant, were driving around in open-backed trucks looking for nice window boxes to steal. You have to say it sounds unlikely, but he seemed convinced.
Some weeks later I rang the same garda station to report the theft of a bicycle — yes, it really was about a bicycle — and again the garda at the other end of the phone was very sympathetic. Actually I think it was the same garda. “It’s the Rumanians,” he said.
Apparently the “Rumanians” had a tight cartel who were shipping decent Irish bikes to the UK . “That bike will be on the boat tonight,” he advised.
The idea that one particular group could be deemed responsible for each crime was a bewitching conspiracy theory, but I was never really convinced. There are so many urban myths, particularly about crime. Remember all those ducks being stolen from Stephen’s Green by members of the Chinese/Latvian/Lithuanian communities?
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To prove my mother and the female garda in the shopping centre wrong, I decided to speak to more gardai. I started at the garda press office. Oh yes, said the spokesman there, the fishing rod routine is commonplace. Or, to quote him directly: “That wouldn’t be a new phenomenon.”
Yes, but had he ever seen someone actually charged with sending a fishing rod through a letter box?
Well, he said, the charges seem to be criminal damage, that type of thing. “I work in the garda press office and I hear about these cases right across the country, ” he said firmly, adding that he had been burgled twice.
A female garda at Donnybrook garda station also believed the fishing rod story. “It’s not a myth. It’s quite prevalent,” she said. These implements, she explained, are not only fishing rods. People buy things on eBay, like telescopic drain cleaners, for example.
“They’re fairly easily got. People are found in possession of them,” she told me.
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I also put the fishing rod myth to the garda who answered the phone in Dundrum garda station.
“That is completely, one hundred per cent true,” he said. “It’s like a large bamboo stick with a very strong magnet attached. Then the keys are gone and the cars are gone. It happens between 2 and 6am. It’s been quite prevalent in the last six months.”
Furthermore this garda was an eyewitness: “I’ve gone to a call where a rod was left hanging on the letter box. The criminals had been disturbed at their work,” he added.
Finglas garda station didn’t want to comment, but at Raheny another garda was also very much au fait with the whole letterbox trick.
“Janey Mac, I arrested a guy and he had a golf club with the hook from a clothes hanger taped to it . . . It’s ingenious because in most houses it’s only three or four feet from the front door to the hall table,” he said.
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During the calls, a couple of the gardai did point out that I’d have to apologise to my mother — now that’s community policing. Although, it must be stressed, that nobody mentioned a Nissan Micra being the target of this nefarious practice which, I now have to admit, does seem to happen in the real world.
As part of my research, I also came across some cynics who said that the phenomenon is a blessing in disguise, because it means the bad guys don’t have to break into your house to get the keys to your BMW, but I find that hard to believe.