Áilín Quinlan: What the theft of my lovely hat says about Irish society today

I felt like kicking myself.

Why did I rush, I thought, when I actually wasn’t in all that much of a hurry?

Strange, isn’t it, how some of us get into such a habit of being under pressure that when daily life slows down and loosens out a bit ( which it must inevitably do at some stage) we needlessly continue to scurry around. But anyway.

’Twas a small thing to get annoyed about, but there you go. We’re all only human after all, and it was a bloody good hat.

Heavy and warm, it was an off-white Aran knit with a big bobble and a cosy fleece lining.

It never rode up on my head above the ears in that frustrating habit beloved by so many hats. It was also, for reasons I won’t go into here, of sentimental value.

I dropped it on a wet, mucky street without noticing.

However, my hat was rescued by an honest person, a member of what statistics will tell you is the large percentage of people who would never steal anything.

This Good Samaritan, I learned later, picked it up from the muddy pavement just outside the door of the pharmacy and brought it into the shop, where it was decided that the best option was to place it on the windowsill outside so that the owner might see it.

It’s a common enough thing in this country to put lost hats or gloves or a forgotten child’s jacket on a wall or a windowsill or even over a gate close to where they’ve been found.

My hat was placed on a windowsill adjacent to where it had been dropped.

And from there, alas, it disappeared.

I hadn’t even realised it was missing ’til the next morning, at which point I retraced my walk of the previous day, and called into any shops that lined my route.

I eventually learned that a hat matching my description had been found and placed on the pharmacy windowsill, but like I said, when I checked, the windowsill was empty.

Here’s the interesting bit.

Annoyed with myself for being so careless with it, and a bit taken aback that somebody would actually take a hat that (a) very clearly belonged to somebody else (b) had been lost, and (c) had been found and placed on a windowsill for its owner to find, I decided to do a bit of research into the psychology of stealing.

What I learned is that around 90% of people would never steal.

It seems that my hat was initially lucky in that it was picked up by someone in this category, a person who went to the trouble of placing it on the pharmacy windowsill for me to find.

However, the research also shows that around 10% of people will steal at some point if the opportunity arises. Which is where, I suspect, my hat’s luck ran out.

Somebody in that category possibly happened along after my hat went on view on the windowsill.

‘Ah,’ they thought, ‘there’s a nice, warm-looking hat. I’ll have that.’

Of course, my hat could also have fallen victim to the behaviour of the group of people who steal to sell something on, or to pay for some kind of addiction.

Although, in fairness, one would have to ask, what would you get for a well-worn, second-hand and somewhat muddy hat?

Perhaps my hat was picked up by someone who has kleptomania, snatched, perhaps, by one of those people who, the studies say, get a kind of ‘high’ from the simple act of stealing, in much the same way that, say, drug addicts, get a high from their substance of choice?

Women, if you’re interested, are as likely to steal as men, while around a quarter of shoplifting incidents involve children or teenagers.

The thing is, stealing in this country generally seems to be getting worse.

There’s been a cascade of warnings about a ‘pandemic’ of shoplifting in the last couple of years, which some retailers attribute to a perceived lack of any consequences to getting caught.

No such thing here in Ireland as getting your hand chopped off by an axe for taking something that doesn’t belong to you.

Shoplifters are reportedly getting more brazen, are increasingly aggressive, and don’t seem to care about getting caught, which makes sad sense if they don’t think there are any consequences to being caught thieving.

So there you go.

This is the society we live in today.

What’s it all down to, then?

Well, the decline of religion is probably a factor.

Parenting likely comes in here too. Do all parents place the same strong emphasis on children never taking what doesn’t belong to them?

Thirdly, is there any real societal emphasis on the sheer wrongness of stealing in day-to-day life?

The lack of consequences or deterrents is certainly a factor.

And, of course, that mean-spirited sense of entitlement that has infested almost every aspect of today’s society has to be somewhere in the mix.

But at the end of the day, my friend, it’s really a matter of personal choice.

As is stealing someone else’s hat.