Garda Commissioner: Refusing to buy bread was ‘best career move’
The first woman commissioner told a conference in Dublin Castle on the advancement of women’s rights and empowerment that her career path was a bit unusual.
“I got to power and decision-making through a combination of factors that nobody would ever put on a curriculum vitae if they wanted to get to the top of a police service,” she said.
She landed in the Garda Commissioner’s office more out of accident than anything else. When she arrived almost 35 years ago in Store Street Garda Station in Dublin as an ambitious young recruit, she thought she was going to be a “policeman” and make a real difference.
But it did not turn out to be quite what she expected.
“If anybody asked me then where I would be in two years’ time, I probably would have said: ‘Anywhere but here’.”
One day after being brought in on overtime to cover a specific event, she got a call to come back to the station.
“When I arrived back at the station, I was handed some money by a female sergeant and asked to go to the Kylemore shop on Talbot Street and buy some bread and ham to make sandwiches,” she said.
“So I said no. Not a really a good idea if you are a recruit in a police organisation,” she said.
The sergeant was taken aback and a superintendent, Tommy O’Reilly, since deceased, asked the then Garda O’Sullivan to account for herself.
“And very quickly he handed me some money and said: ‘Will you please go and buy some bread?’ and I said: ‘No, I’m sorry, I can’t, sir. And he said: ‘You can’t or you won’t?’
That day, she learned the difference between ‘can’t’ and won’t’ and has reminded her children of it every since. Luckily, the superintendent understood the difference.
“To be honest, when the superintendent told me to go home while he thought about it, I was more afraid of my mother,” said the commissioner.
“When I went back to work the next day, I really wasn’t sure whether I was going back to be sacked or not.”
The superintendent called her into his office and said he had heard she had been doing some work with some of the guys in the undercover unit and had some ideas.
A couple of weeks later, she began working with the first-ever garda undercover unit. As an undercover officer, she saw how families had been ravaged by drug abuse in the inner city.
“It was the mothers and grandmothers struggling against all the odds in those communities in the 1980s that drove me in my ambition to be the best I could be,” she said.
