Garda trauma: Sean was a garda for six weeks when he saw his first body

Sean* was only six weeks qualified as a garda when he saw his first body. A woman had been found murdered in her house in south Dublin city and it was his job to “preserve the scene”.

Garda regulations state a body found in suspicious circumstances cannot be left alone even for a second until a postmortem. This meant the young garda staying in the house for much of the night, alone with the remains.

“As a 20-year old, you’re not really used to dealing with dead bodies,” he recalls. “You’ve all of these sounds in the house and you’ve this body lying on the floor. That’s fairly traumatic.”

Winter Nights

It would be far from Sean’s last encounter with death in his 40-year career. Another incident that stands out in his memory is spotting the body of a man floating face down in a lake some years later. Sean waded out and, with great effort, pulled the body to shore.

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He turned the body over only to realise he recognised the dead man from the locality.

“That one did get to me alright because I kind of recognised the guy,” he says. “I came home after to get the dinner and I just couldn’t function for the rest of the day.”

In the mid-1980s he experienced a very different kind of trauma. Sean was authorised to carry a firearm at the time and he was called to the scene of an armed post office robbery. The robber emerged from the post office and pointed his shotgun at the waiting gardaí, causing Sean to open fire. The gunman was hit twice and survived.

Sean remembers being told to go home and “have a cup” of tea before returning to work that evening.

Then there was a double murder, also in the west of Ireland.

“It was a small, quiet, country house. And there was an old man lying at the bottom of the stairs; they had broken the stool over him. And I remember there was blood on every one of the four walls in that kitchen.

“When you go into something like that, you just have to get on with it and do the job. It’s only years later it affects you.”

Although each of these incidents left a lasting mark, Sean did not take any time off afterwards and received minimal support from the organisation. It was only with the death of his father that things came to a head psychologically.

Mixed in with the grief was a sense of deep panic. He ended up going sick for six weeks, the first significant sick leave he had ever taken. “I would wake in panic and just have to get out of bed, just have to get out of the house. I’ve gone out at four o’clock in the morning, just walking.”

He left the Garda in the mid-2000s and things are better now, he says, “except for the odd reoccurrence”.

Gallows humour

Sean is one of what is probably thousands of gardaí who have been impacted by the trauma of their work in recent decades. In interviews conducted over a two-month period, 15 serving and retired members have described their traumatic experiences to The Irish Times.

The incidents they detailed varied greatly, from road traffic accidents to suicides to sexual assaults, incidents involving both themselves and members of the public.

The impact of those incidents on their lives varied just as much. Some look back on incidents with a gallows humour common among those who have to deal with human tragedy as part of their jobs. Others turned for support to the comradeship of the force, the “band of brothers” as retired garda Eamon Walsh put it.

Others still relied on alcohol in various amounts. Some lost their homes or relationships. At least one considered suicide.

But there was a common theme among most retired gardaí: the support from the Garda organisation was either severely lacking or non-existent.

Thirteen serving gardaí took their lives in the three-year period between 2017 and 2019, a figure four times the rate among the general population. During the same period, 15 gardaí were granted early retirement on psychological grounds and 16,116 work days were lost due to mental ill-health.

Figures released by the Garda under Freedom of Information show significant resources are now being assigned to provide psychological support. Last year the force spent €467,000 on independent counselling services, more than double the amount spent in 2016.

And while almost everyone agrees psychological supports have improved, some worry the many young gardaí joining the organisation are not being adequately prepared for the almost inevitable trauma they will experience.

This is of particular concern given that, due to the pause in recruitment during the recession, about a third of gardaí are currently under 30, making it the youngest force in modern history.

“In many cases they don’t know what they’re walking into and they can get an awful shock,” said one serving sergeant based in Dublin. “You could be looking for bits of a body on a roadside or dealing with remains that have been in a house for weeks. And you could be doing that very, very soon after leaving Templemore. I think maybe a bit more could be done to get them ready for that shock.”

Cattle truck

Most of the incidents that stick in the memory of gardaí do not make the headlines. Suicides, car accidents, the location of someone’s body days or weeks after they died; these incidents are quickly forgotten by society, if they are noticed at all. But they often remain with the gardaí involved for many years.

“You never forget children,” says Eamon Walsh, who drove a Garda motorcycle for most of his career. “I was in the traffic corps, and we came across an awful lot of fatal accidents. Young people never leave you.

“I suppose the worst was a young fella [who] came off one bus and went under another. I remember every single child I dealt with.”

William Horgan, who served from 1976 to 2009, recalls a car accident in the early 1990s involving a family car and a cattle truck. “The entire family was wiped out. Even talking about it now is difficult enough.”

After arriving on the scene, Horgan spotted a young girl among the dead: “I knew she was dead but I went down to check for a pulse.”

He and his colleagues watched as body parts of British soldiers were removed from the trees

It was only later that he found out the mother in the car was pregnant. “I remember for months afterwards I would get up in the middle of the night and look into the rooms of my own children, just to check on them.”

Just a few months before that incident, he was the first responder to a fatal crash that killed five young men in Ravensdale, Dundalk. “I could hear one of them moaning from within the car. That stayed with me too.”

Horgan had been one of the first gardaí on the scene of the Warrenpoint bombing in 1979 where he and his colleagues watched as body parts of British soldiers were removed from the trees. At one stage the uniformed gardaí were worried that the British reinforcements were going to shoot them. (The ambush was launched from the south and the British had already shot dead an innocent person over the Border.)

“That was a bad situation,” Horgan says.

But the traffic accidents were worse. For some gardaí it is the small details of these tragedies that stick in their minds. Walsh remembers responding to reports of a car acting suspiciously in Dublin. Inside the car they found a young firefighter who had taken his own life.

“I will never forget Chris de Burgh was on the car radio playing Don’t Pay the Ferryman. It’s the little things like that that you remember in the night.”

Many of the gardaí who spoke to The Irish Times said experience and knowing what to expect made it easier to deal with traumatic incidents. But this is not universal.

Tony Chearnley, who retired from the Garda seven years ago, says he will always carry the memory of an elderly man who took his own life in a particularly violent way.

By that stage in his career Chearnley was a “well-seasoned campaigner” and he was accompanied by a sergeant with 30 years’ experience. “He immediately vomited and I had to help him back to the car,” Chearnley said by email. “The meticulous preparation the poor man had made to carry this out has particularly stuck in my mind,” he said. “Even typing this brings it all back.”

Different time

Many of these traumatic incidents have been forgotten by everyone except for maybe the victims’ families and the gardaí involved. Some are even more private still.

When she joined the Garda in the 1980s, Marie* was one of the few women on the force. As a probationer she was sexually assaulted by a more senior garda. She never made a formal complaint – “the ’80s were a very different time,” she recalls. But she did request to be taken off her attacker’s unit.

“They probably dealt with it as best they could but I would still meet him on the steps of the station.”

I always had it at the back of my mind. Did he go on to reoffend?

Marie says she became “very, very depressed. I took a career break. I was going whether he [the commissioner] signed off on it or not. I ran and ran. I never got counselling.”

The impact of the attack was not helped by the fact that when Marie returned to the Garda she was assigned many of the rape cases that came in to her station.

“In the 1980s the female guards got all that stuff to investigate,” she says. “I used to live in dread on a Saturday night that a rape would come in because I found it so traumatic.

“I could always tell from talking to them for half an hour whether it happened or not because everything was there that I went through, all the stress and trauma and everything.”

Later Marie learned the officer who had assaulted her had been accused of other sexual assaults. The prosecution did not go anywhere but the man was ordered to resign. “That was my biggest issue. I got over the other stuff but I always had it at the back of my mind: Did he go on to reoffend?”

She pauses before continuing: “I wasn’t fit to do anything about it then.”

At gunpoint

There is a pattern in the stories of many of these gardaí. They suffer a traumatic incident that affects them in some way. But they persevere. Then, sometime later, another incident occurs, often much less serious that the first. This causes the initial trauma to resurface and causes them to break down completely.

When he was a young garda in Co Cork in the early 1980s, Michael* and his colleagues were held at gunpoint by a terrorist gang who tied them up and stole their uniforms. The gang fled and after a few hours the gardaí managed to free themselves.

“I did not suffer any negative effect. I did not suffer from any PTSD and continued on duty that day and the following day. It was a very serious incident that left no mark.”

He's grinding his teeth, he's snapping, he's biting, he's kicking

Sixteen years later Michael was involved what he calls a “far less serious” incident. While trying to calm a mentally disturbed youth, he was punched in the face and knocked to the ground. Michael got up and chased the 15-year-old before catching him in a housing estate.

“He’s grinding his teeth, he’s snapping, he’s biting, he’s kicking,” the retired garda recalls. The teen’s friends then arrived and surrounded him. With no back-up and after being assaulted again, Michael released his prisoner and escaped in a passing car.

“I was later taken to the hospital. Tears are there. Anxiety is there. There is obviously clear signs of PTSD, even though I knew nothing of that at the time.

“I’m released home after 12 or 13 hours. There’s nightmares. I’m reliving the ordeal. There was the realisation afterwards I was in a serious life-threatening situation. That PTSD that I didn’t have with a machine gun to my back. Suddenly it’s there, it’s visible. It’s instant.”

For Marie, the garda who was sexually assaulted, the breakdown came many years later when she was attacked by a young teenager she was escorting to custody.

“I don’t know why it affected me so badly. I was only off sick for about six weeks but I had a lot of crying and flashbacks and that sort of stuff.

“You might expect being out on Saturday night getting a slap from a drunk or whatever but a child doing it was particularly distressing for me because I had children that age myself.”

For the rest of her career as a garda, Marie remained in a “heightened state of alertness”. “It followed me. If you went to a call on your own you were weighing up what were your chance of getting assaulted, how long would it take help to come to you.”

Horgan, who was at the scene of the Warrenpoint bombing, eventually took sick leave some years later after seeing silhouettes of men outside Jonesboro Station in Co Cavan. The station had been attacked before and Horgan worried the men were armed.

“Events over time will stack up, and it will get to the stage that even something fairly minor can have a huge effect on you,” he said.

Counselling services

In the early 1990s, Garda management sent a survey to members to assess how much stress and trauma were affecting the organisation. They could scarcely believe the results.

“It came back with a nil report. Nobody reported stress,” says Brian*, a now retired garda who was involved in setting up the force’s early counselling services.

“At that time they didn’t talk about it. Everyone just went out sick. They wouldn’t put it on the cert that it was stress because they might be transferred. If they were in an armed unit they wouldn’t be allowed carry a gun. It would adversely affect your career.”

Some of these fears were well-founded. Brian remembers assisting two colleagues in his highly specialised unit who were under “extreme stress”. His superior demanded to know the names of the two men.

“It was supposed to be a confidential service. When I refused to give the names he made life quite difficult for me for a number of years.”

Horgan remembers going to a garda surgeon suffering from stress. He had recently had a heart attack and his wife had just started chemotherapy.

“I made a comment to him that there is very little done for people who are suffering from stress. And he lit on me. He said: ‘How dare you make such a general statement.’ I was making an honest assessment of what could be done and I was basically ridiculed for it.”

A recent internal survey of gardaí found up to 63 per cent have experienced some trauma in their work and about 17 per cent suffer from PTSD. It is reasonable to assume both these figures are actually higher as, according to one study “many members” believe there is still a stigma in admitting psychological injury.

Mark Smyth, president of the Psychological Society of Ireland, and a reserve garda himself, says this stigma is likely due to a combination of factors “including difficulties admitting weakness, denial, or an assumption that you need to be perceived to be emotionally in control and a fear that seeking psychological support would be a barrier to promotion opportunities”.

People are also less likely to seek help if the support on offer is inadequate or not trusted, Smyth says.

Escorting cash deliveries is usually handled by armed officers, sometimes even with the support of the Army. However, in 1992 in Longford it was the job of Stephen*, an unarmed garda using a private car.

He recalls the postmistress getting in his car with the £38,000 she had just taken from the bank. “The next thing, a car banged into us, blocking me in. Three lads got out in full army gear, balaclavas, a Kalashnikov, the whole lot. One came with a handgun to my door, stuck it into the side of my head and said, If you f**king move you’re dead.

“The other went to the other door to take the money away from the postmistress. She was a strong girl and played football so she stuck the money under the seat and wouldn’t give it to him.”

As the woman struggled with the man, Stephen noticed the gun pointed at his head was beginning to wobble.

“I said ‘you c**t ya, you’re going to f**king pull it. And to make it worse, I knew the little b****rd. I knew his eyes.”

The postmistress started to cry and asked the garda what she should do. Stephen chuckles slightly as he recalls how he responded. “I said give them the f**king money.”

The raiders fled with the cash and the keys of the garda’s car. Stephen flagged down another car to give chase but was unsuccessful in catching them.

That night he went drinking: “I was drinking brandy from 8 o’clock, and I was as sober as a trooper at 4am. I couldn’t get drunk.”

The next day Stephen was working in the bog when a patrol car drove up and he was asked if he would speak to a counsellor who had come up from Dublin. The meeting did not go well. The woman asked him what happened. “I said do you not know what happened? Nobody bothered their arse to tell you?

“I was out in the bog and I was quite happy. I said ‘I’m not going over all this f**king thing again to suit you’, and I walked straight out.”

The force tried several more times to get Stephen to talk about the incident with a professional. “I didn’t want it. I couldn’t be listening to that sh**e. I wasn’t ready to listen.”

Few pints

“We as members often used our own ‘welfare system’, a few drinks after work!” says Chearnley, who retired seven years ago. This was a common theme among members who spoke to The Irish Times, especially those stationed at the Border during the Troubles where there was little else to do.

“The way we handled it was we used to go out and have a few pints. There was a great network. The lads were very good, the band of brothers. But the authorities were useless,” says Walsh, the retired motorcycle garda.

For some gardaí this camaraderie was an effective, if imperfect, support structure. For others, the trauma they suffered on the job infected their private lives, their families and their physical health.

Arthur O’Hara was a garda sergeant with 32 years’ experience when, in 2004, he was attacked in Summerhill, Co Meath by a drunk man who had been setting off fireworks. O’Hara’s cervical spine was badly injured and he was told by doctors he would be in a wheelchair within a few years.

A ray of hope came in the form of a London surgeon who thought he might be able to fix O’Hara’s spine. The operation would not be cheap. “I had to beg, borrow and steal but he done a fantastic job on me. I was a full seven years recuperating. The pain was unbelievable but I made a great recovery.”

The psychological injury was harder to heal and was made worse by the massive financial pressure O’Hara was under. “Then when the financial crisis came along they took an awful lot of money in our pension off us.”

He could not meet his mortgage repayments and the bank tried to repossess his house. The worst year for O’Hara was 2017 when his mother died and he suffered a stroke. “I was stressed out all the time, panic attacks, sleepless nights and just not being able to see the good side of things.”

In the middle of all this, O’Hara’s wife left him.

“She had enough of it.”

Today O’Hara “feels a little bit of wellbeing coming back”. But he is still waiting for compensation from the Garda for the 2004 attack.

Psychological supports

Almost all serving and retired gardaí who spoke to The Irish Times said the psychological supports for gardaí have vastly improved in the last decade.

Garda management is eager to point out various initiatives introduced in recent years, including a 24/7 confidential counselling service. The most recent initiative is the Psychological Support Services, which was launched in September and is aimed at gardaí most likely to be exposed to traumatic incidents. These include personnel from the Cybercrime Bureau, who have to view child abuse imagery; the Protective Services Bureau, which deals with sexual and child abuse offences; and specialist interviewers who have to interview children and other vulnerable witnesses.

For the first time, such members will have to undergo mandatory counselling on entering and exiting those units and at regular intervals in-between. Additional voluntary sessions are available “during and post-assignment”, a spokesman said.

“I have a feeling the present commissioner is more in tune with these issues,” says Brian, the garda who helped set up the first counselling supports. “When you have a boss who is supportive, it goes all the way down. On the other hand, if you’ve got a boss who’s anti that sort of stuff, that works its way down too.”

However, there is still cause for concern. According to figures from the Policing Authority, there have been 247 spitting or coughing attacks on members during the Covid-19 pandemic, and data obtained by The Irish Times suggests Covid-19 related stresses are already affecting the welfare of gardaí.

The 24-hour counselling helpline received a record 59 calls per month between July and November. This is up from an average of 41 calls a month between July 2019 and July 2020, and 36 a month during the previous 12-month period. And in October 2020, 486 workdays were lost in the Garda due to mental illness, the highest all year.

These figures also show that younger gardaí are more willing to seek help. Unlike older generations they are no longer willing to just “suck it up”, Marie says. “Our generation were stoical. We were tough. The women in the job had to be one and a half times as good as the men probably to get into the job.

“You sucked it up, really, and you put up with it. The new crowd don’t put up with it.”

* Some names have been changed. If you are affected by issues in this article you can call Pieta House 1800 247247 or text “HELP” to 51444, Contact Aware at 1800 80 4848 or supportmail@aware.ie or the Samaritans at 116123 or jo@samaritans.ie. You can also text  “HELLO” to 50808