A family was held hostage for several hours last night when a Co Longford post office attached to the family's house was raided.
Three men wearing balaclavas and armed with iron bars entered the adjoining house between 2am and 3am at Ballymahon, Co Longford, last night.
The family was threatened for several hours before the raiders left with a quantity of cash.
The family members, who were not injured in the raid, managed to raise the alarm at around 8.30am.
Gardaí at Ballymahon have appealed for anyone who saw any suspicious or unusual activity late last night or early this morning to contact them.
This is the second attack on a post office in the past week and the latest in a spate of robberies and attempted robberies on banks and post offices.
A raider attempted to rob a post office on Dublin's Botanic Avenue on May 6th. A customer, believed to be an African preacher, foiled the attempted robbery and knocked the armed robber to the ground.
Just days earlier, two men were arrested following an attempted armed robbery on the Bank of Ireland at Main Street in Tallaght, Dublin.
On May 3rd, a Cork family was held at gunpoint when raiders took over their home at Mount Oval Village in Rochestown.
On May 2nd, armed and masked raiders escaped with an undisclosed quantity of cash from a pub on the main Galway-Dublin road. The raid took place at Paddy Ryan's pub at Horseleap, between Kilbeggan and Moate on the N6.
Six people appeared before the Dublin District Court on April 29th in connection with a series of security van robberies and the kidnapping of a Dublin family.
More than 20 people have been questioned over the kidnapping of the Richardson family and the subsequent robbery of around €2 million from the Securicor cash transit company.
Around 300 gardaí - along with the Criminal Assets Bureau, the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the Garda Fraud Squad and the Garda National Bureau of Immigration - were involved in a series of raids in Dublin and Meath during which the arrests took place.
Fine Gael's justice spokesman Jim O'Keeffe called for an increase in the level of "covert surveillance" of criminal gangs following the latest kidnapping.
"This latest incident in which a family was held hostage by raiders provides concrete proof that criminal gangs have a new working method: taking hostages. It's one thing to attempt to steal money, but it's far more serious to take hostages, and the law needs to reflect this."
"The simplest step of all would be to provide gardai with the manpower and the resources to deal with this growing threat. The gardai have shown that when they are resourced they can deliver real results in the fight against crime. This is evident from their record in the detection of murders, and we see it on a weekly basis in the level of seizures of illegal drugs."
Labour's justice spokesman Joe Costello said it was clear that there are criminal gangs operating who are "specialising in this type of activity".
"Minister McDowell will have to, as a priority, address this latest crime spree as a priority by providing extra resources for the gardai to put these gangs out of business."