Good detecting more effective than bullying
As if abuses, or alleged abuses by gardaí, were phenomena unique to the northwestern portion of our island.
The tribunal certainly brought back many unhappy memories for me. But none of these related to dear old Donegal. I am reminded, as I listen to the daily reports from Dublin Castle, of events in my own life 20 years ago.
When I heard about that chair that was allegedly thrown across an interrogation room, I remembered a night back in 1986 when I sat before a desk in a garda station facing two plainclothes detectives. I had been arrested under the Offences against the State Act (Section 30) on suspicion of having released hares from a coursing compound, threatening coursing club officials via postcards, and having caused malicious damage to a coursing field.
I had no involvement in the alleged offences and I have never been convicted of any crime in a court of law.
But the interrogators appeared to be convinced that I was guilty. My high profile association with a campaign to ban hare coursing made me a suspect, or so I was told at the outset of what turned out to be a 36-hour ordeal of psychological torture.
When I refused to sign a prepared statement admitting guilt - not one that I had given or dictated - the chair I was sitting on was kicked from under me. My continued refusal to admit to offences of which I had no knowledge whatsoever, never mind being guilty of, resulted in further aggressive and humiliating acts that pushed me to the limits of my endurance.
It was suggested to me that my father, who had suffered a stroke some years earlier, would be out of his mind worrying and might not be alive when I got home if I was detained for much longer. That comment, or threat, was especially troubling, and it came back to me very forcibly when I read about that alleged threat by a Donegal garda to have a woman’s children “taken into care” if she didn’t cooperate with her interrogators.
The opinion was expressed by one witness at the Morris Tribunal that foul language was the norm during serious interrogations.
A murder investigation is certainly serious. But I was being interviewed about anti-coursing activities. So you might expect at least the language to be a bit less offensive than when matters of life and death were at stake.
Towards the end of the interrogation, I was warned by the two public servants that they would ‘probably roll over every b****** c*** of a hare on the road for evermore’ after listening to a ‘complete f****** spacer for two days’.
Good detective and forensic work will serve our society better than the kind of bullyboy tactics that should have died decades ago.
John Fitzgerald
Lower Coyne Street
Callan
Co Kilkenny
