Month: April 2023

I was out walking before the clocks went forward recently. It was early in the evening, but it was just starting to get dark. As I passed the local garda station in Cobh, I noticed the building was in complete darkness. From the quayside, it looked like nobody was home and for some reason I felt a little pang of sadness.

For those not familiar with Cobh, the garda station is adjacent to the railway station and behind the Heritage Centre if you know where that is. It’s a modern building, originally designed to roughly resemble the shape of a ship when viewed from the sea.

Back when it was built twenty or so years ago, it was heralded as a state-of-the-art facility. Minister of State for Rural Development at the time, Ned O’Keeffe, former TD for Cork East, described the location as being eminently suitable.

He also said, “The garda station in Cobh was extremely important when the town was the main emigrant centre and one of this country’s most important ports which is why the station achieved the status of being a superintendent’s headquarters. It was a most influential place.”

He added, “Now Cobh garda station, in common with all those situated along Ireland’s coasts, is assuming strategic importance once again – this time in the fight against drug smuggling. I am sure the new facility will be the ideal base for all the activities of a modern garda force.”

It was to accommodate 40 personnel including a superintendent, an inspector, four sergeants and about 30 gardai. It is catering for a smaller group now having lost its status as a District Headquarters. The superintendent is long gone. The strategic importance assigned to the garda station in Cobh by Ned O’Keeffe has been given less credence by those who came after him.

Mr. O’Keeffe was right to be enthused by the location of the new station. It has an unobstructed view of the harbour with plenty of space for parking but on the downside, it removed the gardai from the centre of town.

The old garda station was located in Westbourne Place, a few doors up from the Commodore Hotel and across the road from The Promenade. It was a hub of activity and a prime location in the heart of the town. The building was old and had become unsuitable from a policing perspective but maybe a renovation project could have remedied that issue but in any event, it was vacated in favour of a new build.

As a teenager I remember that premises being at the centre of things. There was always someone coming and going, and it was normal to see gardai walking around the streets. I reckon that’s how many of us who later joined An Garda Siochana, first got interested in the job. From watching these guys in action on a daily basis. We knew them by name too – they were familiar to us.

Times have changed. It’s rare to see a garda on the beat anywhere these days and Cobh is no different. The manpower isn’t there in the first place and, and garda management has other priorities for the men and women in blue.

Yet, according to their website, An Garda Síochána is in and of the community and community policing is the key to and at the core of the ethos of the organisation. That sounds great but I’m not seeing any evidence of that ethos at the moment.

Maybe the concept of community policing has changed dramatically since I retired, but in my experience, over 35 years, the essence of community policing was engagement. That meant being out and about and mixing with the community. That’s not happening currently but maybe we could turn it around.

The present garda station is underutilised and under resourced and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change. It would make a perfect spot for a hotel. It’s a quiet location with great views, buckets of room for parking, easy access to the railway station and within walking distance of the town and it seems the timing couldn’t be better.

According to a report in the Irish Examiner, a former bank on South Mall is to be converted into a hotel “the likes of which Cork has never seen.” It is one of five planned hotels in the city which between them will add over 700 beds.

Cork City is experiencing a hotel building boom, with a new €45m, 190-bed Premier Inn nearing completion on the former Moore’s Hotel site on Morrison’s Island. On Camden Quay, across from the Opera House, work is well advanced on transforming another building into a 150-bed hotel and the owners are planning to open a Moxy Hotel and Residence Inn on the site, the first Marriott-branded hotel in Cork City.

Planning permission was also granted for redevelopment of a property on South Terrace into a 103-bed aparthotel and a fifth project has plans for a 220-bed hotel and offices on the site of the former tax office on O’Sullivan’s Quay.

All this activity suggests there is a demand for hotel beds. A recent Fáilte Ireland survey said hotel occupancy levels in Cork County reached 86% last June, at the height of the summer months so how about this?

Let’s take advantage of this boom and convert the present garda station into a hotel. That would provide additional accommodation for visitors to the area and the proceeds of the sale could be used to purchase a suitable premises in the centre of town. A building that could be adapted to function as a police station with a reduced garda workforce.

It would also relocate the members of An Garda Siochana back among the people and may even inspire a return to community engagement.

My mother-in-law, Moyra Swords, celebrated her 100^th birthday at a function in Cobh in 2019. Her party was held in a local hotel, and she was one of the last to leave in the early hours of the morning. She was very fortunate to have enjoyed amazing health right up to the time she died in her 101^st year. Not everyone is as lucky but that could be about to change.

Advancements in medicine, science and engineering have us all living longer. Early detection and successful cures for the various illnesses are vital for our survival. The medical profession no longer relies upon human and animal excrement as a cure-all remedy for diseases and injuries. No longer is donkey, dog, gazelle and fly dung celebrated for their healing properties and their ability to ward off bad spirits.

I’m not sure how they considered it to be good for us in the first place, but I would want to be seriously ill before I’d let anyone smear me with poo regardless of where it came from.

Insects are in the news again though in relation to medical matters. I read recently that scientists have discovered ants may be able to detect cancer in urine at an early stage in patients. Apparently, some cancers alter the smell of piddle and ants can pick up on it.

According to the experts, ants are fast learners and easy to train and could be used to determine whether you have a tumour or not. So far, experiments have shown that ants were able to tell the difference between mice who had cancer and those who didn’t by smelling their urine. We’ll see how that works out.

Hordes of scientists around the world are constantly searching for cures for our ailments and it’s only a matter of time before they find a remedy for cancer. Professor Luke O’Neill, the man we all came to know during the Pandemic, speculates that there will be a treatment for many of the diseases that we’re afflicted with as we get older, like arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease and heart problems.

He reckons they might be close to discovering something else too. He said scientists working in Harvard Medical School have discovered what they claim is effectively an ageing clock that can speed up or reverse the ageing process in mice. This discovery is causing a lot of excitement in the research community.

They have also reversed ageing in human cells grown in the lab so that suggests what they achieved in mice might also be possible in humans. So, it would seem it’s no longer a question of if rejuvenation is possible, but more a question of when.

Luke poses an interesting question though. If it was possible to take twenty years off your age and make your skin look twenty years younger while at the same time returning your muscle strength to what it was twenty years ago would you opt for it? If your vision and hearing could also be restored to what it was decades earlier, would you be tempted to take a chance? I’m not sure I would. It seems to me like tempting fate.

It’s a bit like ‘clocking’ the odometer in a car. Not so long ago it was common practice for unscrupulous car sellers to turn back a car’s mileage. Knocking a few thousand miles off the clock made the car more desirable because it gave the impression there was less wear and tear on the engine which would give the new owner extra years of trouble-free motoring.

I’m not sure if it still goes on with the modern cars but it is an offence under consumer protection law for a trader to give false, misleading or deceptive information about the history of a car and there’s good reasons for that.

Buying a clocked car could turn out to be expensive as well as dangerous. If you don’t know what the proper mileage is, then you can’t judge the real condition of the car, and parts that you think should be in good working order might be at the point where they are about to fail.

So, basically, if you purchase a car with the mileage reversed, you don’t know what you’re buying. You could be letting yourself in for a ton of trouble, so it makes sense not to do it. That seems similar to reversing the aging process. Trying to cheat the body into believing it’s younger than it actually is doesn’t sound very inviting to me.

There’s something else to consider too. I came across an article in the Times UK about scientists who are trying to build new appendages for the body from extra thumbs to third arms and even tentacles that can be attached to and controlled by humans.

Researchers have already developed an extra thumb that can be fitted to a hand and controlled wirelessly by your toes via pressure sensors, allowing its wearer to unscrew a bottle, thread a needle, or peel a banana. They believe the future of prosthetics could lie not only in creating replacements for lost or injured limbs, but also in creating augmentations to help humans perform tasks more easily.

Scientists have already created neuro-prosthetic hands which can be linked to the body’s nerves, allowing the wearer to control the movements of the fingers and grasp objects using only their thoughts. Most of the extra appendages under development are controlled by the feet or via breathing.

So where are we headed? Well, there was a time when our average life expectancy was three score and ten, but we’ve seen how that has changed already. Reversing the ageing process, eliminating terminal diseases and replacing damaged organs with manufactured ones could keep us going forever.

Not sure I like that idea.

Is there A Drug Problem in Cork? That was a question posed at a meeting held in the Metropole Hotel in Cork city back in 1983. It was a meeting of the Cork Speakers Club which was a kind of forerunner of the Joint Policing Committee (JPC) meetings we’ve become familiar with in recent times.

The Cork Examiner reported on that meeting, and it seems all the movers and shakers in the city were there along with a panel of speakers with only one question to answer. Does Cork have a drugs problem? While the answer was yes, the seriousness of the problem was a matter of divergence and overall, the general impression was that alcoholism was a far more serious issue.

As far as the garda representative at the meeting was concerned, there was a growing drug abuse problem in Ireland, especially in Dublin, and while the problem could not be classed as alarming and was not out of hand, he agreed it did appear to be growing.

The Medical Council Research Board, an independent body, had found that the drug problem in Galway, Dublin and Cork was minimal while the Southern Health Board had found it “minimal and containable.”

Professor R. J. Daly, Dept. of Psychiatry, U.C.C., and Clinical Director, Southern Health Board, said Cork had a problem with the national panic about drugs and with the gross misinformation concerning the levels of illegal drug abuse and appropriate responses on the part of the community and health services. He questioned the sources of this information on the levels of drug addiction describing it as hot gossip.

It’s easy to be critical in hindsight but there was a limited understanding of the seriousness of the growing drugs problem back then. You could argue that what was happening in other jurisdictions abroad, and in our own capital city, should have created more awareness, but there was one man at that meeting who was more informed than the others.

The then Lord Mayor of Cork, Mr. John Dennehy, disagreed with previous speakers and suggested they were facing a very serious problem. He pointed out that at least six people had already died from drugs in the Cork area.

He was right to be concerned because we were heading into an epidemic. Dublin was awash with drugs and that scourge wasn’t going to remain within the Pale.

When I went to Dublin in 1980 as a young member of An Garda Siochana, I was immediately struck by the extent of the illicit drug problem in the capital. The Dunne family were the main criminal gang at that time, and they controlled the heroin market. The stuff was everywhere.

Heroin was destroying communities to such an extent that President Hillery vowed to make the dangers of drug abuse the main focus of his second term of office when he was sworn in in 1983. He said his background as a medical doctor made him acutely conscious of the problems of drug abuse and he intended to concentrate on that issue.

He planned to invite the various interest groups involved in fighting the problem of drug abuse to a meeting in order to forge closer links between the different bodies. He wanted doctors, the gardai and social workers to meet him in Aras an Uachtarain to work out a strategy which would give them a common bond in combating the drugs problem in this country.

I don’t know if that materialised or not, but it did show that he was progressive in his thinking. He obviously had an awareness that the drug situation was escalating and presented a serious risk to communities everywhere. 

Fast forward forty years to 2023 and we are still dealing with the issue. As reported in The Echo, Chief Superintendent Tom Myers, speaking at a meeting of the Cork City Joint Policing Committee addressed concerns regarding the visibility of drugs in the city centre.

He acknowledged that drug dealing in Cork City continues to represent a “big challenge” to gardaí, and vowed to continue to target the individuals who are “destroying our communities”. He accepted that drugs are in every corner of the city now.

Fianna Fáil councillor Colm Kelleher said he witnessed open drug taking in the city centre on a Sunday afternoon on Patrick Street. He has been steadfast in his support of a supervised injection centre (SIF) for Cork City and said his faith in the idea was further solidified following a recent visit to a city in New York.

Mr. Kelleher discovered a supervised injection facility in Rochester in Upstate New York, and since it was delivered, they’ve seen an 84%-85% reduction in open drug use within their city.

Cork City Council chief executive Ann Doherty suggested that a meeting could be sought with the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Hildegarde Naughton, with a view to progressing the matter.

Back in 2011, through my involvement in community policing, I started a conversation around introducing a supervised injecting facility to Cork city. I gathered the main stakeholders together and we had a series of meetings. Progress was slow because the topic was controversial. There were many potential pitfalls from a policing, political and health perspective but we drove ahead. In 2013, I went overseas with the United Nations and as far as I am aware, those meetings petered out.

There is no magic wand solution to the drug problem, but we can mitigate the effects with supervised injecting facilities. A SIF is a clean, safe, healthcare environment where people can inject drugs under the supervision of trained health professionals which will help to reduce HIV infection rates, overdose deaths, and drug-related prison convictions. They have been successful elsewhere.

Maybe it’s time to stop talking and move on to action.

The Garda College is officially described as the national centre for police training, development and learning within the Irish State. It’s a modern campus structure on eight acres within the town of Templemore, Co. Tipperary. Back in 1979 when I joined An Garda Siochana it was known as the Garda Training Centre.

Not only has the name changed, but the entry requirements have also been altered too. According to GardaEntry.ie there are now three stages to the recruitment process.

Stage one invites applicants to complete a series of online assessments which are completed at home in an unsupervised environment on a laptop or PC. Stage two is a competency-based interview which is a structured interview designed to establish if the candidate is suitable to serve effectively as a member of An Garda Síochána.

The third stage is the Physical Competence Test (PCT) & Medical Examination. This is described as the final stage and is not considered to be a major obstacle for candidates who are fit and healthy, but it cannot be taken for granted.

The medical examination was always tough and rightly so. In 1979 when I was going through the application process, the medical examiner noticed a scar on my abdomen. It was a throwback to surgery I had as a five-year-old child. When the records for the operation could not be located in the hospital, I had to undergo tests to satisfy the authorities that the problem had been successfully dealt with. Fair enough.

There was no physical test at entry level back then but there is now and while they say it’s generally not a major obstacle, it does seem to be causing some controversary. Fianna Fail T.D. Jim O’Callaghan told RTE that the fitness tests were too demanding and were blocking a recruitment drive and one-sixth of garda applicants last year failed the test.

The Physical Competency Test (PCT) comprises of a shuttle run (bleep test) and push-ups. Following a two-hour break, trainees must then overcome an obstacle course and the push–pull machine, which recreates a physical row. Some 55 of 315 of the garda recruit candidates who took the fitness assessment last year failed.

Mr O’Callaghan said the obstacle course must be completed three times in under three minutes and 20 seconds and if you fail any component, you must repeat the whole test. He expressed concern that the fitness test is too demanding, out of step with other jurisdictions and is blocking recruitment.

This could pose a problem for the Government’s plan to recruit one thousand new gardai. I learned recently that fifty-two potential candidates were invited to participate in the PCT but only thirty-seven turned up. Of those who turned up, twenty-five failed the run and only twelve passed all aspects of the test. At that rate, enlisting a thousand new recruits this year seems like a daunting prospect.

It seems to me that this fitness test could be preventing good candidates from applying for An Garda Siochana and eliminating candidates with good potential simply because they can’t negotiate an obstacle course or pass a bleep test.

You could take that a step further with a marching test and eliminate any candidate who can’t march in formation. For their graduation, students will be required to perform a complicated routine on the Parade Ground while keeping in step. It’s not easy and they wouldn’t have a hope of achieving that on day one without lots of instruction and hours of practice.

If that PCT had been in existence back in 1979, I reckon a sizeable number of my intake of 90 or so recruits would have been sent packing early on. I know for sure I would have struggled. Some of the lads were fit like Matt Connor, who played football for Offaly at the time, but I certainly wasn’t. I had other strengths though.

There were ropes suspended from the beams in the high roof of the gym. We had to climb these, touch the beam and shimmy back down again. I had spent years working on building sites with my father, climbing up and down scaffolding so I had strong arms and shoulders. I could scale these ropes while others struggled. Horses for courses.

By the time I left Templemore I was a lot fitter than I was when I went in thanks to instructors and training. I even marked the late John Egan, the well-known Kerry footballer, in a soccer match shortly before we passed out. Although the less said about that the better. He smiled and said hello to me before we started the game, but I didn’t see much of him after that. He was all over the place and left me for dead. He was like a ghost.

I’m not objecting to the fitness test, just the timing of it. Once a person is certified as being medically fit, they should be capable of reaching the required level of physical fitness with the necessary training. A PCT would be more appropriate at the end of that training to assess their progress.

Placing such emphasis on physical fitness before even being accepted into the organisation seems strange given that for the rest of their service it won’t be an issue. Their level of fitness will never again be measured in the course of their service unless it is required for a specialist unit.

I was very fortunate during my thirty-five years to have worked with some of the finest policemen and women the Force had to offer. Like me, many of them wouldn’t have worried Sonia O’Sullivan in a sprint and wouldn’t have qualified for Ireland’s Fittest Family either but they gave distinguished service all the same.

For me, the character of the person is the most important attribute.  Everything else can be taught.