Antique pistol's owner in plea to save weapon

There was confusion tonight over the fate of a potentially historic antique pistol reluctantly handed over to gardai during a gun amnesty.

A man gave up the small pearl-handled lady’s pistol which had been in his family for almost a century after hearing about the amnesty deadline on the news.

Joe Dowling said he was told by gardaí the heirloom, passed down from his grandmother, would be destroyed. He claimed on RTE radio he was never advised the antique could be deactivated and kept in the family.

Speculation mounted as to the historical significance of the pistol after Mr Dowling regaled a family story about his grandmother being involved in a shooting incident with the Black and Tans during the War of Independence.

“The story we had in the family was that my grandmother was defending women and children down in the cellar in Moore Street when the ‘Tans’ were coming down through the town,” he said.

“She was a native of Dublin, born off Abbey Street, so that would have been her domain around that area.”

Stuart Cole, Director at Adam’s auctioneers, who specialise in the sale of artefacts related to the Easter Rising and the Troubles of the 1920s, said it was impossible to put a financial or historical value on the weapon without proving its provenance.

“It may be that there are statements pertaining to that woman (Mr Dowling’s grandmother) in the Bureau of Military History. It could be that she is mentioned,” he said.

“If that was the case and there is a story there then people would pay thousands of euro for something like that – if it was tied down to a particular event.”

He continued: “If it’s just an old gun – just being old doesn’t attach historical significance to it. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t need to be saved.

“But it’s very personal to the guy who owned it, in that it was his grandmother’s. I presume his point was that he felt he had to hand it up because of the amnesty. In actual fact, he could probably have argued the thing was antique.”

A spokeswoman for the Garda Press Office said she couldn’t comment on individual cases adding that none of the weapons handed in as part of the two-month limited amnesty which ended at midnight on Monday have been destroyed yet.

She said an order would have to be made by the Justice Minister Michael McDowell for the guns to be decommissioned.

However, the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform insisted it was nothing to do with it.

“It’s a matter between the gentleman concerned and the Gardaí,” a spokeswoman said.