Two unarmed men and a Mad Dog

I was sitting at home two weeks ago when I got a text message telling me that an ex colleague of mine in Blarney had died. Dan Ahern, a man I spent many hours sharing a patrol car with had passed away. I was completely stunned because I didn’t even know he was ill.

We worked together for a few years and got on well. Dan was a reliable character. He was someone you could depend on in a jam which was important at a time when uniformed gardai carried nothing but a timber baton for protection.

They have something more substantial now, but the pieces of hickory we had, didn’t offer much protection so it was important to have someone you could trust beside you when things got a bit sticky. And they sometimes did.

Dan Ahern would never let you down. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad shouldered and as strong as a bull. He never got over excited either as I discovered one night, back in the eighties, while we were on patrol in Watergrasshill.

In those days, Watergrasshill was part of the Blarney garda district and fell into our area of responsibility. That didn’t make a lot of sense geographically and when the boundaries were reorganised in later years, Watergrasshill went in with Midleton which made more sense.

Anyway, that’s how we came to be in that neck of the woods. It was around midnight when we got a radio message that Dominic McGlinchey had driven through an armed checkpoint near Silversprings Hotel in Tivoli and was heading east.

That got our attention because this guy had been on the run in Cork for a few weeks and was dangerous. For those of you who have never heard of Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey, let me give you some background information courtesy of journalist, Cormac Looney.

Dominic McGlinchey was the head of the Irish National Liberation Army, and he was on the run in the Republic for 18 months. He and his gang were rampaging around the country, pursued by gardai.

‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey claimed to have killed 31 people, including a child, and was wanted for the murder of a 77-year-old woman, Hester Mullan, in Derry after his fingerprint was found on the roof of the car used by her killers.

In 1983 he tortured and murdered fellow INLA man, Eric Dale, from Armagh believing he had slept with his wife, Mary. He was insanely jealous and believed Mary had an affair while he was in Portlaoise Prison previously.

Two months later McGlinchey and Mary together murdered two other south Armagh men, Patrick Mackin and Eamon McMahon, a brother-in-law of Eric Dale.

As tensions mounted within the INLA, McGlinchey and Mary struck again, this time with the brutal murder of Gerard “Sparky” Barkley, 27, from Belfast. The couple lured Barkley to their home where McGlinchey shot him through the back of the head as he sat watching television.

They dragged him to the back yard, slit his throat and drained his body of blood to make it lighter to carry and dumped it near the border in a secret grave. On another occasion when Mary was present McGlinchey and his henchmen tortured an INLA man for hours, roasting him on an Aga cooker.

But the Bonnie and Clyde, gun-toting couple also became heavily involved in smuggling and extortion in the border area. Now they were in Cork.

They were heavily armed with automatic assault rifles, a pump-action shotgun and handguns. On two occasions his car was stopped at garda checkpoints and on both occasions, they overwhelmed gardai with their firepower. At Cobh, McGlinchey had to restrain his wife after she threatened to murder two gardai.

The gang robbed a bank in Foynes and were eventually located at a house in Newmarket. As teams of detectives approached the house, McGlinchey opened fire from an upstairs window.

A gun battle ensued as firing continued from inside the house. In the exchange, a detective was hit in the shoulder. They forced their way into the house and McGlinchey then called for a priest and surrendered after the priest arrived.

While McGlinchey was in prison in 1987 gunmen burst into his family home and murdered Mary as she was bathing her children. They shot her nine times in the head.

McGlinchey was released in 1993. A broken man, he still tried to fall in with criminals in Dublin and the border area, but they betrayed him to his former INLA enemies, and they shot him dead in Drogheda the following year.

So that gives you some idea of what we were facing in Watergrasshill all those years ago when this gang was on the run in Cork. Dan and I were driving along this narrow road, in the middle of nowhere, when we came across their car.

It was abandoned in the middle of the road with the lights on and the doors wide open. The engine was still running but there was no sign of anyone.

We weren’t about to tackle these characters with our little batons. We had no idea where they were anyway. For all we knew they could have been watching us from a ditch, so we beat a hasty retreat and there was only one way to go; backwards.

Dan was behind the wheel and he was very good driver. He slapped the car into reverse and I was lucky I didn’t get whiplash from the speed he drove up the road, not knowing whether we were driving into danger or away from it.

As it happened, they were gone but we weren’t to know that. The incident only lasted a couple of minutes, but I found it a bit unnerving. It didn’t bother Dan too much.