Former Garda commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan has said she joined the force “kind of by accident”.
Ms O'Sullivan, who retired from the Garda last month, was speaking at the launch in Dublin of screenwriter and actor Stefanie Preissner's book, Why Can't Everything Just Stay the Same?
Ms O’Sullivan said she had a job in a vegetable shop and was working in an insurance company while training to be an accountant. Her friend wanted to join the Garda and she had gone along with her when she was being measured.
The sergeant who was measuring her friend said to her ‘I’ll measure you as well’, she recalled. Some time later a letter arrived in the post about joining the Garda, which Ms O’Sullivan’s mother opened.
She recalled her mother saying: ‘what do you think you’re at, you’re going to join the guards and go to Templemore, what kind of a crazy plan is this?’
“And what do you do when your mother tells you you’re doing something crazy? You go right ahead and do it.”
Speaking at the launch in Nando’s in Dublin 2, Ms O Sullivan said that if her mother had not opened her post she “might well be an accountant”. She did not answer questions from reporters ahead of the launch.
Mutual friends
Preissner, the creator of RTÉ series Can't Cope Won't Cope, has written about how she wanted to be the Garda commissioner as a child and for this reason she asked Ms O'Sullivan to launch her book. The two have mutual friends.
“When she asked me to the launch the book - I suppose I was in a different place, I was Garda commissioner,” Ms O’Sullivan said.
“I know there’s lots of speculation about what’s the commonality between Garda commissioner and launching a book for Stefanie Preissner.
“Well, as anybody knows that read the book or gets the opportunity to read the book, Steph had a great desire not just to join the guards but to go straight to the top and be Garda commissioner.
“When I was no longer Garda commissioner the first thing I did was picked up the phone and I rang Stefanie and I said ‘Stefanie, you asked me to launch your book, I absolutely get it if you don’t want me to launch it anymore’.
“What I didn’t know and what I didn’t get was the marketing of books - obviously it’s much better to have a used-to-be Garda commissioner than to have a real Garda commissioner.”
Preissner said that following Ms O’Sullivan’s retirement that she thought the former commissioner was “not going to want to do it”.
“Turns out she wanted to do it and I thought is there anyone better to launch a book about the challenges that come with change and how challenging change can be,” she said.
