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Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly said a team of specialist units has been set up to police burglary gangs, who seemingly randomly target towns or housing developments near major motorways.

Speaking at the Garda Community Engagement Stand at the National Ploughing Championships in Screggan, Co Offaly, he said “a lot of energy and resources” have been thrown at addressing the issue.

Mr Kelly said: “This is absolutely horrendous behaviour by some of these individuals, and these are, let’s face it, career criminals.

“They don’t care about the law. They don’t care about enforcement.

“They don’t care about their own communities, and we all know over the years we’ve had some absolutely terrible crimes that some of these individuals have been involved in.

“So our job is obviously to target these, and the best way that we do that is on an intelligence basis.”

Mr Kelly said that a unit of around 200 specialised members are trained in “stopping vehicles in dynamic situations” and are employing “big operations” to target gangs.

He said: “All the time, every day, we have operations targeting these people, and what we obviously try and do, we try and get ahead of them.

“We’ve had numerous successes with some of those gangs, and for us, obviously, the priority is to catch them, prosecute them, get them off the streets.”

Legislation is expected to be brought in by the end of the year which will see people convicted of driving the wrong way on the motorway facing a longer prison sentence.

It comes following several high-profile incidents involving wrong-way driving on Irish motorways.

Mr Kelly said: “As you can imagine, they often don’t want to stop for us, but we’ve got members who are trained on how to deal with this, and I suppose the problem for us is it’s often very dangerous, very difficult.

“We often have guards injured, guard vehicles damaged, but we’re determined to tackle these gangs, and we certainly cannot cede the motorways and the communities to some of these individuals.”