Retail crime costing Irish businesses €4.4 million a day

Kenneth Fox

New analysis has found that retail crime is costing Irish businesses €4.4 million a day.

Stalwart Security combined official Central Statistics Office (CSO) crime data with industry cost estimates to reveal the true scale of the retail crime burden on Irish businesses.

The analysis sets the scale of recorded retail theft against the wider financial toll on the sector, painting a picture of a problem that is both relentless in volume and severe in cost. Discussing the findings, Adrian Twohig, Founder of Stalwart Security, says,

Stalwart Security’s analysis highlights figures from the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (ISME) which show that retail crime costs Irish businesses an estimated €1.62 billion a year.

That works out at roughly €4.4 million a day, around €185,000 an hour, or more than €3,000 for every minute that Irish shops are open and closed.

This estimate is supported by separate international analysis. For instance, the Global Retail Theft Barometer places Ireland's retail crime cost at €339.31 per head of population, among the highest rates recorded internationally, which points to a national cost of a broadly similar scale.

Official figures show the volume behind those costs, too. CSO recorded crime data records 33,913 thefts from shops in the year to Q1 2026, an average of more than 90 every day, with theft from shops accounting for roughly 6 in every 10 theft incidents recorded nationally. It is one of only a handful of offence categories still rising, even as burglary and robbery fall.

For an individual business, the burden is stark. The Retail Grocery Dairy and Allied Trades Association (RGDATA) has estimated that retail theft can cost a medium-sized grocery shop up to €100,000 a year, a figure that has been described as a direct hit to the bottom line that ultimately feeds into higher prices for shoppers.

Recorded thefts from shops are heavily concentrated in urban centres, but between Q2 2025 and Q1 2026, no part of the country is untouched. Dublin dominates, with the six Garda divisions covering the capital recording 14,906 shop thefts between them, led by the North Central division on 3,280.

Outside of Dublin, the highest totals were recorded in:

• Cork City: 2,804, the busiest single division in the country outside the capital
• Limerick: 2,010
• Kildare/Carlow: 1,932
• Louth/Cavan/Monaghan: 1,746
• Waterford/Kilkenny: 1,441
• Galway: 1,430, the highest in the west