As Christmas shopping ramps up in Carlow and Kilkenny Gardaí warn that you mind your valuables

You’re being warned not to leave invitations to thieves in your cars.

The Christmas shopping days are a prime time for break-ins to cars with freshly bought presents, hand-bags, phones, and cash all being stolen from parked cars at this time of year.

Garda Joe Reville says never leave anything on view, telling KCLR “People almost have a tendency to leave handbags on footwells in front seats or rear seats, jackets, sat navs on view, laptops in bags, computers and all that or if they take cash from ATMs they leave it in the glove box of the vehicle and I know it’s happened in the past that people have been followed to see where the car was stopped and they knew they have the cash in the glovebox when the person parks up the person comes along and smashed the window to steal that cash”.

He has this advice “Any valuable property in the vehicle when you’re parking up the car take it out, either put it in the glove box and lock it if your car has that feature or else put it in the boot and lock it away in there at least they can’t see it and any boot covers you have just pull them across so people can’t see in and remove the temptation, also cars are broken into if you leave them unlocked, lock your car when you go away from it, I check the door myself even though I know there’s central locking is working just to be sure, basically to remove the temptation from thieves, especially coming up to Christmas people have a lot of cash on them lot of banks, lot of presents, and expensive items, put it in the boot and hide it away so that they can’t see it”.