Catherine Clancy is a rarity. She is a superintendent in An Garda Sioch ana, one of only two women to hold the rank, and the first to take charge of a district in the capital. As head of the new "Q" District covering Lucan and Leixlip, she is responsible for the policing needs of one of the fastest-growing areas of Dublin. Despite the fact that there are about 1,000 women in the force, accounting for almost 10 per cent of its strength, women are very poorly represented in the higher ranks. The occupants of the 56 top posts - from the 44 chief superintendents up to the commissioner - are all men. Supt Clancy and Supt Phyllis Nolan at Garda headquarters share their rank with 160 men.
Supt Clancy says equality is "not an issue" in the force. There are equal opportunites, "but you have to look at the rate at which women put themselves forward", she says. She points out that in her experience, women do well when they seek to advance. Of the four women who applied to be an inspector when she did, three made the grade - "that's a 75 per cent success rate. The point I want to make is that we haven't been too good at putting ourselves forward for interview to the higher ranks".
Clancy says she has encountered virtually no prejudice against women since she joined the force in 1975. Her father had been a sergeant in their native Donegal but after school she enrolled at the catering college in Cathal Brugha Street in Dublin, to learn catering management. A feeling that it might not be the right career for her coincided with her father pointing out a newspaper advertisement announcing that the Garda was recruiting. She enrolled and was sent to Templemore for the 22-week training course, joining nine other women and a couple of hundred men. "I suppose we had a bit of a novelty value - we were the first large group of girls to join for about 10 years." They were accommodated separately, in the "officers block", but in all other respects were treated like the men.
"I never got the impression that any task in the force would be closed off to us. You'd get the odd time someone might say `what use would you be in a row?' but I would say `maybe I would defuse a row quicker by my presence'."
Firearms training amounted to firing an old Webley revolver. "I was terrified of it. I remember my hand shaking the first time I picked it up." But she soon got used to it. "It wasn't so much that we would be expected to use guns. We were being trained in the safe handling of them, so we'd know how to make one safe if we came across one."
She graduated in February 1976 and was posted to Pearse Street station in Dublin. At the time women gardai were posted only in the major cities. When country divisions began to take them, she went to Naas in Co Kildare.
In 1979 she was made a detective and joined what was properly termed the investigation section of the Garda technical bureau, but which was more widely known as the murder squad. For eight years Clancy travelled the country, moving from one murder case to the next. The system was that a superintendent ran the murder investigation in his own district, and the murder squad personnel arrived from Dublin to "help". Clancy was the only woman in the squad, but remembers only one instance of a superintendent getting the wrong idea.
"When we arrived he said `Oh good, you've brought a typist!' He was soon put right," she says.
The murder squad had an impressive success rate. "I learned everything that you can possibly learn about investigating there," she says. "How to organise a search team, how to run an office, how to write a report, talk to prisoners, how to deal with victims."
The part of the job which made the deepest impact, she says, was encountering people who had committed "spur of the moment" murders. "It was very difficult to observe them making an admission and realising the enormity what they had done. As well as your pity for the victims and the bereaved, you'd have to feel pity for some of these people and their own families.
"With some of these `spur of the moment' people - not all of them but some of them - you could see that somewhere in their lives something had gone wrong. If they'd had a different upbringing, or hadn't had bullying . . . but of course we didn't study people as much then, did we?"
The history of murder investigation in the force was not without controversy, but Clancy says she heard and saw nothing untoward, and nothing which suggested what the media termed the "heavy gang".
"With all the people I worked with, I never felt embarrassed by them or compromised by them. They were extremely dedicated and had a very difficult job."
After eight years in the Central Detective Unit Clancy prepared a study for the force on its response to child abuse, before being posted as a sergeant to Ballyshannon in Co Donegal. "That's where my father was a sergeant, and now I was there a sergeant. That was a terrific feeling."
In 1993 she volunteered for service with the UN contingent in Cambodia. The most harrowing memories of her career are from this time.
"Sometimes it was dangerous and frightening. There was a time we went to another village where 33 people, including women and children, all Vietnamese, had just been massacred by the Khmer Rouge. They just went in with AK47s - there was one whole family of six wiped out."
There were some better moments. "I remember the time we went to arrest a Khmer Rouge. Well, he kind of allowed himself to be arrested because he wanted to defect. So we arrested him and took him to court and the judge didn't show up, so that was OK."
Her happiest day was when she and her parents went for tea in a Donegal hotel. Her father, now deceased, was a picture of pride when she took a telephone call which confirmed she was on the list for promotion to inspector. "To see his face when I got that 'phone call."
As the uniformed superintendent of the new "Q" District of Lucan and Leixlip, Clancy is responsible for an area with a population of 40,000, expected to grow close to 60,000 over the next 10 years. Her last district, around Dungarvan, had a population of only 26,000.
She has had management training and it is, she says, mainly a management job. First there are the practical responsibilities - establishing the district office, filling the staffing needs - about 60 staff in total, including four civilians, will be based in the two stations. Then there are the responsibilities of managing people - encouraging them and congratulating them for good work.
Officers help each other, she says. She could not be expected to know every intricacy of an unusual legal procedure, but "you have a network of people you build up over the years. I could ring up another superintendent, or someone more senior or junior, if I want help. And they can ring me, if it's something they think I might know about. That's how you operate and survive. I may not know all the answers, but I know where to get them."
To relax she likes to travel, plays golf and enjoys classical music. She is not married. Could that have made it easier for her to spend extra time at the job and reach her rank? "I suppose I have had more time . . . but no, I would have been just as committed to the job whether married or not."
She says the Garda's job is to focus on its own role in the criminal justice system, and not be distracted by debates about the system's failings.
"Our job is to get offenders to court. It's not to get bogged down in arguments about revolving doors or things we can do nothing about. We're not policymakers. Our job is to concentrate on what we're paid to do."
