"CLEARLY money has something to do with life," the English poet Philip Larkin wrote.
Larkin was familiar with the north, having lived here for several years while working as a librarian at Queen's University Belfast.
He didn't think much of the place, either Belfast or its environs. But then, reading his poems about a certain kind of hopeless Englishness, he didn't seem to think much of England either, or humanity.
He was right about money though, describing the futile and seemingly endless pursuit of it as "intensely sad".
We all need money, many of us want more of it, some of us will go to any lengths to get it.
In the last few decades, big money thefts have developed from armed bank raids, to tiger kidnappings, to security van robberies and now a spate of ATM thefts.
Barely a weekend has passed recently without news of another stolen cash machine - eight this year alone.
The process is generally the same - thieves scout out which building site is close to an ATM; steal a digger; use it to drag a cash machine from a wall; then load the ATM on to a trailer or vehicle whose roof has been sawn off. In most cases, the theft is carried out within just a few minutes.
The machines targeted are generally rural, generally housed in places where there are unlikely to be police patrols - in other words, soft targets. And the thefts are certainly lucrative, earning criminals thousands of pounds at a time.
What they aren't are victimless crimes.
Ireland has often suffered from the myth of the 'cute hoor' - a chancer who doesn't do anything truly harmful. There's the strange idea that, if it isn't an offence against the person and you can get away with it, sure what's the odds?
Unfortunately in every crime someone always pays. Large banks like the Danske branch targeted in Mallusk, Co Antrim, last month may have lost money but they have teams of security people and dozens of staff ready to clear up the mess.
Most of the ATMs hit so far have belonged to independent retailers already struggling to keep pace with changing customer habits.
With the widespread closure of rural banks and post offices, many communities can only access cash through ATMs provided through independent shops. And if those shops keep being targeted they'll decide that providing a cash service to customers is more trouble than its worth.
One shop on the Glenshane Pass, near Maghera in Co Derry, has already gone to the trouble of putting large concrete blocks outside its cash machine as a deterrent. Other shops across the north are sure to follow suit. Cash machines are attractive to passing customers and any decision to remove them will have a knock-on effect on business.
In the village nearest to my family home in north Antrim, the only available ATM is at a filling station. The machine itself charges a fairly high fee per transaction so if anyone in my family needs cash we travel into the next town to access a cash point. Once in town, we tend to spend our money there rather than in the village.
Some might say that ATM thefts are better than tiger kidnappings, which caused horrendous trauma to bank workers and their families, and security van raids which often put the safety of the public at risk. But the rise of widespread thefts which the police seem powerless to tackle is hardly much of an improvement.
Appeals for building site foremen to immobilize their diggers appear to have done little to stop crime gangs who seem to have no difficulty, in the case of last week's theft near Dungiven at any rate, in driving a stolen digger a mile down a relatively busy road before stealing an ATM.
While it's up to the police to catch those responsible, it does seem incredible that so many of these thefts have happened without any member of the public noticing. Criminals tend not to care about the shops they target but the shop owner's neighbours should.
If every rural shop decides to remove its ATM, it is the elderly and vulnerable in country areas and villages who will suffer.
In a capitalistic system, the demands of money will always influence us and our decisions. But let's not fool ourselves that no-one pays. It's usually us in the end.
