Green & Blue Project
Peter Sheridan Interview
I suppose my, the first contact with the Garda I would have was as a uniformed constable, up along the border, where when you’re out on night duty you might have met you there purely by coincidence or you’d have been there, or maybe there was a pre-arranged time to meet them then, so you’d have met them there at the border for just a chat, I suppose there was guys in uniform from one side to the other Then I had a sergeant at the time who was my sergeant when I was in Derry who was from Ramelton in County Donegal during night duty he was very friendly with the sergeant in Letterkenny, so we used to drive across the border toBurnfoot Garda station and they would have drank tea and other things, and there was two sergeants in the place, and I would have been the driver and we would run back again then in the morning time! All completely illegal of course, andpolice cars and so on, but these two guys got on well, and shared what was happening, completely informally and that but it was so I would have been exposed to all of that sort of very much informal, but friendships with people who were friends. This was from 1978 to around 1981 it would have been the hunger strike in ’81, so you were very much in the middle of it, in fact I remember one night they had a windy up ‘phone in the Garda station, still and there was a fire going upstairs and we were sitting in a room upstairs about three o’clock in the morning and the ‘phone rings and my sergeant lifts it and answers it and it happened to be the communications officer in Strand Road in Derry, coming across about a stolen car and thought he’d hit the wrong, flicked the wrong switch on it, because it was who it was answered by! But it was very much that informal basis of it, nothing formalised and I remember you know as a young fella it struck me that to get any communication with the Guards what you had to do was to go back to, you had to radio in to Strand Road, who rang across, to Letterkenny who radioed out to the Garda car, so there was never any radio contact, direct. In fact we tried for years, through the Anglo-Irish Agreement and everything else to try and get that properly established.That there would be radios on both sides of the border, they had what was called back-to-back radios, which worked about two hundred yards at one stage, but completely cumbersome and useless, it was almost a feeling that there was, they didn’t want to do it.
Well, I was the operational planning sergeant in Strand Road from, 1982 or ’83 on to about ’88 so I’d quite a lot to do with the Guards on a regular basis of planning joint operations across the border. I would have literally jumped in my own car and gone across with somebody else and met my opposite number.We were supposed to be planning joint operations, mirrored operations, so they might have covered one part of the border on a night and we would cover the other part of the border, I had regular contact and meetings with the Guards during that time, and then from 1988 to’93 I was the operational planning inspector in Strabane, so there was quite a lot of murders along the Castlederg-Strabane border down there, so again a lot of contact with them, almost daily, weekly basis and so got to know quite a number of them, and in fact that that’s what helped later on in life, because we both appeared at more senior levels in the organisation, so relations had sort of been, shall we say developed and trust built.
Very little do I ever remember about ‘ordinary, decent crime’, vast, the vast majority, ninety nine point nine per cent of it was terrorist related, certainly I would have recalled it, might have been the odd things about stolen cars, and so on, but again there’d be on the grounds that in case they were being used for terrorism purposes.
I think, maybe initially it was the uniform that’s what it was, and there was that sort of, you know uniforms, I think that gets you in the door, and that but eventually then that becomes built on the personalities and trust and knowing the individual and knowing that you cantrust that person or indeed that you like them or get on with them, or whateverhowever and make friends with people in it that there’s some people you just liked, and got on with them, and built a relationship with, the policing was always I suppose if you like the golden thread through it that give you the purposes to be in it, but it was like meeting guys in your own job, you’d eventually like them or got on with them, so there was a relationship built on that basis.
Well, because likemyself, some of them went up through the ranks in Donegal, and so you met at a more senior level. I kept thinking I was probably unique in, in that in Derry I stayed for twenty five years, so I was almost a constant, the Guards are pretty more constant like at senior levels ‘cause they get married and they live in and they stay in the same place, one was almost a constant on the other side, whereas in the north it was always, two-yearly changes and people changed, so I was probably a bit more unique than most and there was a small number of us who stayed along the border, and remained there. So you had built that relationship to the extent that , I’d been in their privately, or been in their homes, would have had their home numbers and all that sort of stuff.
In the initial stages they did not come North, no but in later stages, yes, saw them regularly and again was the relationship was developed to the extent that they did come across pretty regularly, I think they were a bit more uncomfortable not least going in and out of the police stations in the north, it always had the possibilities of something going wrong, so I think there was always an element of that in it but they would have came across and we would have met them, met them mostly in hotels
I was a member of the International Police Association and they had an International Police Association. I remember going on a train journey to Dublin this was Guards and RUC and we’d taken a carriage in the train from Derry to, to Dublin to see Riverdance, I guess it was at the time, and so we had a full carriage to ourselves, so there were social events, and I got invites to their Christmas dinners and things like that and in fact even at the seventy fifth anniversary of the Guards, they had a big event in Sligo and there was four or five of us down at it. We did cause them some concern when they had a, there was a special, it was Dave Fanning who was the RTÉ journalist at the time, so it was going out on the air, part of it, but there was a, unknown to everybody in the audience, I think there was about two thousand people at it, there was a ticket under your seat and there was a special draw so that, so they drew numbers, the third place, second place and first place was me, and you could just see their faces! Because you were called up onto the stage and he was asking, ‘so what do you do?’ and ‘where do you work?’ and so you could just see the blind panic on their faces, so when I got up onto the stage, they did ask me where I lived and I was from Enniskillen so I was able I’m just across the border from Sligo in Enniskillen, and ‘what do you, what are you working at?’ and I could just see them turning white then in front of me! The Commissioner and so on, so I said ‘well, just at the minute I wasn’t working’ which was true, I was down there to socialise, so I got away with it. They put us up, they didn’t put us up in any of the, the main hotels around the place, but they put us up in a guesthouse, obviously one that they were content with, but there was no bar in this guesthouse, so a Garda had arrived down and he wanted to know did we want some alcohol and that, so we told him whatever we wanted, whiskey and beer, so he went away to get it, and then he brought it back, in the meantime we had gathered up some funds to give him, and so we went to give him the money, he says‘oh, there’s no charge, no charge’... ‘what do you mean there’s no charge?’ and he said ‘well, it was the, when I went to the pub they asked me was it for the seventy fifth anniversary, and all I said was “same circus, but different clowns”’! So, on that basis we had an evening’s free alcohol to us. So, there were all sorts of things that happened I had... some very strong links with Guards across the... on a personal basis.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement, being able to say ‘we’re doing these things’ it wasn’t much different, except thatthere was formal minutes and paper, but in some ways those formalised meetings, you’re not going to do any real business at that type of meetingand there are all sorts ofconcerns and issues, what’s written down and... what’s said and what can you release, but what they were good at I suppose if there was any positive thing come out of it, was that they, they ensured that there was a regular meeting so there was, there had been different levels, so it ensured that that regular meeting, which allowed that contact, allowed that relationship to build up, but the reality was... there wasn’t a lot of important business done at them.
There were always lunches or dinners built around them afterwards, and so that... created that network opportunity, which was much more important than the, the formalised meetings, which I guess is not much different than a G8 or anything else, a lot of the business is done on the, the fringes of it but it gave the, I suppose the impression of things being done.
Well, for a regular, for an operational constable or operational Guard, it would have been great to have joint radios that I could have been on the radio to a Guard, and but anybody that reads the minutes of those meetings, that we seem to have been frustrated somewhere away down the line that this radio system, this long promised radio system that I think was even talked about in the Anglo-Irish Agreement, was never delivered. Never delivered to any satisfaction, but you had what, they were called x-ray sets, sort of across the border sets, but they were of limited value, limited range and ultimately reverted, going back to your own, ringing your own base, who rang the Guards, who radioed out to their car, a kind of a cumbersome way of communicating
It almost said to me that if they were really serious about this along the border that would have beenin terms of operational policing, to have the ability to communicate, because I think most of the public out there thought we could, so but most of the people who were involved in terrorism probably thought we could.
Mobile phones would be easier probably, or better, but it still, I think it was indicative of yes, we’re cooperating, but some of it was about the optics of cooperation, as opposed to genuinely... cooperating.
Since I left the police, the relationships that I had with people in the police I would still see quite a number of the Guards frequently over the year at events and dos, and functions and I still get the odd invite to some of their Christmas parties and as I said there, as part of a project in Cooperation Ireland we took quite a number of who I knew to, to Áras an Uachtaráin for an event, soif I wanted to lift the ‘phone to the Joe Lynches of this world, I could do it quite easily, but we’re not in contact every week or every month.
If we were at a dinner, dinner dance or something, my wife came along, some of their wives were there, but there was never any... that sort of interaction didn’t happen to that extent.
And I’m sure internally inside the Guards, they’d have known each other’s wives and so on, but you know that was something I hadn’t thought about but no I don’t remember it being...
I would have been aware that there are Guards who came from Derry I don’t think I ever met them, apart from, not that I can recall, but I would have been aware of... that some people from Derry and had joined the Guards
I would say that there was probably awarmer relationship between the police and the Guards than maybe, I’d say there was probably a bit more suspicion from the Guard’s side of the RUC, because of the politics of it but I think there was a high regard for the Guards by the vast majority of RUC officers, who would have had a very warm or strong support for the Guards in it, may have been slightly different in, it’s only my own impression, but it was slightly different from the other side in it, just a slight wariness or edginess about concern around simply because of the politics of it.
I’m sure it did within their police stations, but also for the Guards coming across, they had to cross through the border checkpoints at the time, with the [British] Army and who wouldn’t have really understood what it was about or who they were, or anything else, so there was an inconvenience about it as well, like frequently if, once we knew they were coming and they told us, then we would have made sure that the messages were left with their car numbers and all that, if they were coming on any formal basis they would be escorted from the border in, and likewise we would have been escorted from the border out. Though frequently I would have brought my own car and in my own time once I got, because I was bordersuperintendent for a number years so I’d covered from Donegal right down to Monaghan the whole way ‘round, so just purely out of convenience I would have went myself.
Harry Breen and Bob Buchanan, I’m sure there but for the grace of God go I, at times and because I was in and out of Letterkenny, it was a northern registered car and then policing, my face would’ve been reasonably well known byGuards in Donegal.
In Monaghan, went down to Monaghanto a lesser extent Dundalk, but sometimes Dundalk... Letterkenny, Manorhamilton andBuncrana, and then sometimes for meetings we had them further afield so the Dunfanaghys and safer places orthe Guards would have had them more remote places but you’d always be escorted from the border in.
I mean I remember a time seeing Irish Army guys who escorted the Guards, but they very much kept their distancethey might have been hundred, two hundred yards down the road in their wagons and I don’t recall on any occasion having any interaction with the Irish Army.
There was no military involvement, no I think we were always conscious that’d be more difficult for the Guards.
I suppose that whenever we were at an event in again it was down in Sligo and there was a Special Branch Guard who was given the job of looking after us and he did a good job and everywhere we were he was there, but I think he was fond of a drink anyway and he insisted he take us into the pub one morning before it opened at ten o’clock, and he used to go up, buy the first round and his first round would all, the first, the round would have been a glass of red wine or whatever you were having, a gin and tonic, a pint of Bass, a blonde with a black skirt and a fiver out of the till was and then some of us would get up to buy the next round and he would say, ‘no no let me buy one more, one more’ and of course, it’d be the same round again, and the blonde with the black skirt and a fiver out of the till was always in this round, and we, you know maybe five or six rounds later, and you still hadn’t put your hand into your pocket because every time so, he insisted definitely this’d be the last time... so we discovered after some time that the blonde with the black skirt was a pint of Guinness for himself, and the fiver out of the till was that the bar was paying! All of the time! And you know, that’s not a relationship we would have ever had up here with bars or that but this guy, he was far worse for wear, and he had a wee fisherman’s round like Barbour type green hat on him and we said to him, ‘look you, we’ll get away from the bar, we’ll be fine’ so he said ‘right, right, right’ so anyway we go out to go up to the Garda station to get our car and you’d only have to look over your shoulder two hundred yards down the street and you’d see this wee green peaked hatit obviously was, he was still going to make sure he done the job, but what still sits in my mind was his car, his car was covered in bird’s S-H-1-T from one end of it to the other and there was, you could say it was an inch thick on it, and the wipers had cleared a bit in the middle of it... and it was only when we got back up to the Garda station we realised why, ‘cause it was Sligo Garda station had very little parking, so they’re parked all over the place, except we were down, and there was a number of spaces kept for you... but there was a space right up beside the aerial mast that, the radio mast, and nobody was there because you could see the ground was covered in it, but this guy, every time he came in, he just come in he just pulled his car, so it was like a record, so he deliberately kept his car covered, so that and so we as we drive out the road, thinking ‘well that’s the end of him’ didn’t we see him behind us , so as full of alcohol as he was he seemed to be able still to remember what his job was! And he told me that when he joined the Guards he was lodging in a house in Sligo and it was three pounds a month he was paying so in nineteen, so the seventy fifth anniversary was what, ’97 would that have been? So what was he paying in 1997, same lodgings? Three pounds. I think he’d maybe had an arrangement with the landlady of the, of the house or something, but anyway so there’s a pile of, you know umpteen stories you could tell, funny stories and human stories that are around the place like.