HALF of the cash stolen in Ireland’s largest ever bank robbery has been recovered after a high-speed motorway chase.

Police have arrested seven people and seized around €4 million taken during the ‘Tiger’ kidnap heist on the Bank of Ireland.

The two bails of money were recovered following a car chase along the M50 motorway around Dublin last night.

A smaller amount of loose cash was found in another car at Philsboro in the north of the city.

Six men and a woman, aged from early 20s to late 30s, were arrested during a fast moving operation after Garda officers identified a north Dublin crime gang as prime suspects for the £6.2 million heist at the Bank of Ireland.

The ‘tiger’ kidnapping took place on Thursday night when six armed-men forced their way into the rural home of Stephanie Smith, the girlfriend of bank-employee, Shane Travers, while the couple were watching TV.

They took Smith, her mother Joan and Joan’s five year-old grandson hostage at gunpoint and bundled them into the back of van.

The next morning Travers was forced to drive to the bank, on College Green, and take €7 million in fresh notes from the safe before it opened.

He handed the money over to the gang at Contarf railway station, while the Smith family were released in the Ashbourne area of County Meath at around 7am.

The seven suspects can be held under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act for up to 72 hours before they have to be charged or released.

They are being questioned at five Garda stations across Dublin - Blanchardstown, Bridewell, Finglas, Mountjoy and Pearse Street.

Five cars and a van seized during the Garda operation are being examined by forensic experts and ten houses have been searched.

It is the second tiger kidnapping, in which robbers stalk their target for before seizing their loved ones at a vulnerable moment, in the area in recent months.

In December, at least five raiders entered a house and threatened a husband, wife and one adult daughter in the house. The gang broke into the home of Peter Nevin, a director of cash-in-transit firm GSLS.

He was taken from his Co Kildare home to his work premises in the Bluebell area of Dublin, where more than a €1 million was reportedly stolen.

In December 2004 the Provisional IRA carried off £26.5 million – the largest cash raid in British and Irish history at the time – from the Belfast headquarters of the Northern Bank in a tiger kidnapping.

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