Obituaries

Gerry O’Carroll obituary: A controversial member of the Garda’s so-called Heavy Gang

O’Carroll and other members of the squad always denied the use of excessive force and rejected the nickname

Gerry O'Carroll was a central figure in the Kerry Babies scandal. Photograph: Collins Courts

Sat Jan 20 2024 - 06:00

Born May 9th, 1946

Died January 2nd, 2024

Gerry O’Carroll, who has died aged 77, was a middle-rank officer in the Garda Siochána whose career became synonymous with a period and a style of policing that remains deeply controversial.

To his supporters, he was one of a small number of gardaí whose muscular approach to those responsible for politically motivated violence and criminality in the 1970s and 1980s helped prevent the State descending into the horrors then so visible, mainly across the Border in Northern Ireland. To his critics he was part of a group which personified brute force, confession-only based prosecutions that paid little regard to the rights of suspects, a view that was shared by several human rights organisations, not least Amnesty International.

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In the end, O’Carroll will be best remembered not for what emerged about the treatment of any of the so-called hard men of republican paramilitarism, but for how he and other garda colleagues treated a young and bereaved single mother and her family in his native Co Kerry.

Gerry O’Carroll was born in Listowel in May 1946, one of 15 children to parents James and Mary Ellen (née Moloney). After attending St Michael’s College in the town, the young O’Carroll enlisted for An Garda Síochána, entering Templemore training college on December 29th, 1966.

[ Retired detective Gerry O’Carroll rejects claims of murderer Noel Long ]

His first posting was to Rathfarnham, then still a village on the edge of suburban Dublin. Promotion saw him become a detective, attain the rank of sergeant, and later inspector, serving in both Sundrive Road Garda station, the Crime Task Force, and, from the early 1980s, in the Technical Unit at Garda Headquarters in the Phoenix Park, known colloquially as the Murder Squad.

The Squad, led by the late Det Supt John Courtney, also a Kerry native, came to the attention of Amnesty International, and others including the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, as allegations were made, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, of garda brutality relating to the treatment of politically motivated suspects while in custody. The Squad had become known within the Garda Siochána as the Heavy Gang and was the subject in February 1977 of ground-breaking, Irish Times investigative reporting by Don Buckley, Joe Joyce and Renagh Holohan.

Members of the Squad, including O’Carroll, always denied the use of excessive force and rejected the Heavy Gang nickname. Nonetheless, it was as a member of the Squad that O’Carroll’s notoriety emerged and clung to him for the rest of his life.

The then government, a Fine Gael-Labour Party coalition led by taoiseach Liam Cosgrave, was determined that paramilitaries in the Provisional IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army had to be faced down if Irish democracy was to survive. Speaking many years later, O’Carroll suggested that Squad members took their cue from something the then Garda commissioner, Edmund Garvey, said to him in October 1976 after the IRA murdered garda Michael Clerkin.

Use “every means at your disposal ... do whatever you have to do ... to stop it [terrorism] and bring the people that do outrage like this to justice”, Garvey said, according to O’Carroll.

[ Detective Gerry O’Carroll owes Joanne Hayes an apology ]

Courtney, O’Carroll and others from the Murder Squad, descended on north Kerry in April 1984 after the body of a baby, stabbed 28 times, was found on White Strand outside Caherciveen.

A 25-year-old single mother, Joanne Hayes, who had been pregnant but was no longer, was brought to Tralee Garda station for questioning, along with her brothers Edmund (Ned) and Michael, sister Kathleen and an aunt, Bridie Fuller.

After questioning, the Hayes family signed what were alleged to be confessions, admitting in detail, some of it graphic, to killing the baby. Joanne Hayes’s explanation for her own non-pregnant condition – that she gave birth to an apparently still born infant and hid it on the family farm – was not properly followed up.

Rather, she signed a confessing statement. No solicitor for the family had been present during the questioning. After the “confessions”, she was charged with murder, and her sister and brothers with concealing a birth, having allegedly flung the baby’s body into the sea.

Later, in a broadcast interview, Hayes said she signed the “confession” because the gardaí told her they were going to charge her mother with murder too, take away her other baby (a daughter) and put that girl into an orphanage “and they were going to sell the farm then as well”. One of her brothers claimed that during questioning, gardaí thumped him in the back, lay him on the ground and knelt on him.

However, within days, Hayes’s baby was found on the farm (the baby died of natural causes) and blood tests proved that she and her boyfriend could not have been the parents of the Cahersiveen baby.

O’Carroll and colleagues then expounded ever more implausible theories as to how both babies – the one found on the beach and the one on the farm – were in fact hers. Joanne Hayes, they postulated, had had sex with two different men, almost one after the other, and become pregnant by both.

When the extraordinary story of the confessions that could not scientifically be correct emerged in public, again through reporting, this time in the Sunday Independent, a tribunal of inquiry was set up to explain how the confessions had come into being.

However, counsel for the gardaí turned the tribunal into an inquisition of Joanne Hayes, suggesting she was sexually promiscuous and a liar. It sat for 82 days, and asked 61,000 questions of 77 witnesses, including Hayes, who was grilled for five days, at one stage breaking down and running from the courtroom to vomit in the ladies’ toilet.

[ Former Garda inspector Gerry O’Carroll ‘loved every second’ of his career, funeral service hears ]

A report by tribunal chairman Mr Justice Kevin Lynch made other claims about the Hayes family which have since been discredited and repudiated by the Government, which compensated them financially.

Officially, the Garda Siochána apologised to the family. But O’Carroll was unrepentant. He had treated Joanne Hayes like she was a member of his own family, he maintained. “I did not raise my voice. Not once,” he said.

O’Carroll said in a recent interview that the gardaí involved felt the tribunal was putting them on trial. He said their approach was “that we’re here lads and we’re fighting for our career, for our families and our reputation most of all”.

Only in recent years, when DNA evidence proved conclusively that Joanne Hayes was not the mother of the Cahersiveen baby did O’Carroll accept this fact. His only remaining thoughts were, he said, for the two babies in the case.

In retirement, he became something of a media figure, writing a column on crime for the Evening Herald. He was a consultant to the film-makers of The General, the story of Dublin criminal Martin Cahill, and on When The Sky Falls, a film about the murdered reporter Veronica Guerin. He wrote an autobiography, The Sheriff, a title based on his nickname within the Garda, something in which he revelled.

O’Carroll, sociable, gregarious and a natty dresser, spoke a good story and was not shy when it came to a sing-song, a favourite being his version of Waltzing Matilda. A brother, Fr Joe O’Carroll, officiated at his funeral ceremony.

Gerry, said his brother, “firmly believed he was always right”.

Gerry O’Carroll is survived by his wife, Kathleen; sons, Conor, Philip and Brian; daughters, Margaret and Eleanor; daughters-in-law; son-in-law; six grandchildren; brothers Vincent, Denny, Michael, Fr. Joe and Philip and sister Annie Claire and a large extended family.

He was predeceased by his parents James and Mary Ellen, brothers Tom, Tony, Bob, Liam and Louis, sisters Dympna, Sr. Ella and Genie.

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