€390k for garda forced to quit

A former garda sergeant, who has lived in the shadow of a gunman for almost a decade was yesterday awarded more than €390,000 compensation for severe post-traumatic stress disorder and loss of career and social and family life.

Mr Justice Bernard Barton told ex-sergeant Seán Walzer the experience of seeing a masked man point a gun at him in the darkness of a lonely laneway had already cast a long and intrusive shadow over his life.

In a reserved judgment on a Garda compensation hearing in the High Court, the judge said Mr Walzer, of Mullinahone, Co Tipperary, had been confronted at gunpoint in Kelly’s Lane, Mullinahone, by a man wearing a balaclava.