The name comes from the patience involved. Tiger kidnappers stalk their target for days or weeks beforehand, learning routines and family members, the way a tiger stalks prey. They strike at home, take hostages, and use the threat against the hostages to force a bank or post office or cash centre employee to commit a robbery on their behalf. The employee opens the safe and walks the money out under no obvious coercion. It is the perfect crime against an institution that has invested heavily in protecting itself against direct armed robbery but not against the slower psychological violence of someone you love being held with a gun to their head. By 2009, tiger kidnappings were happening in Ireland, in the words of Teachta Dála Charlie Flanagan, 'at a rate of almost one per week.' What set the College Green job apart was the sheer scale: most tiger raids took hundreds of thousands of euro; this one took millions.

Travers reported to work as normal. The gang had drilled him on what to do. He accessed cash holdings at the College Green centre and removed the money. The bank's own internal procedures had not been followed - the Garda Síochána, Ireland's police force, were not informed at any point until after the cash had left the building. The minister for justice at the time, Dermot Ahern, was publicly furious afterwards, describing the failure to alert Garda as a breakdown in 'established protocols' and questioning how a single junior employee could have access to such a vast sum. The bank's chief executive Richie Boucher, who had been appointed only two days earlier, wrote to all staff the following day to remind them of the procedures and to make clear that staff safety came first. The system, in other words, had worked exactly as the gang intended: a young man, terrified for the people he loved, did precisely the thing the rules existed to prevent.

By the next day, 28 February, the Garda had recovered 1.8 million euro of the stolen cash, found scattered across various Dublin locations. Seven people - six men and one woman, all believed to be members of a north inner-city Dublin gang with connections to a major Dublin gangland figure - were arrested in raids that sealed off a house in Phibsboro and searched ten others. Five cars and a van were seized. On 2 March the arrested appeared before the High Court to challenge their detention as unlawful; two were released that day. Nearly a year later, in January 2010, an unidentified bank employee was arrested on suspicion that the robbery had been an inside job, a tip-off from within the bank itself. One man eventually received a five-year sentence for handling the stolen cash. The bulk of the money - close to six million euro - was never recovered. Where it went, and who ultimately ordered the job, remained unanswered in the open record.

Context matters. February 2009 was the absolute pit of Ireland's economic collapse. The property bubble had burst eighteen months earlier; the country was about to enter a deep recession that would lead to an IMF bailout the following year; unemployment was rising sharply; banking confidence was already shredded. The Bank of Ireland itself, alongside Anglo Irish Bank and AIB, had been bailed out by the state weeks earlier. A 7.6 million euro robbery, in any other year, would have been a financial outrage. In February 2009 it landed in the middle of a national mood already convinced that the banks were institutions where vast sums of money could disappear into private pockets without consequence. The robbers had stolen money that, in the strange logic of the moment, the public was already convinced the banks had been losing for years.