The 40-year Garda career of Christy Mangan began in Dublin on the streets of early-1980s Crumlin, where Ireland’s “first generation lost to drugs” were carrying out three or four robberies every day and where drug deaths were due to overdoses or suicide, and it ended in Drogheda, Co Louth, where illegal drugs fuelled “a murderous feud and a town on the brink of destruction”.
Cocaine consumption in Drogheda – Ireland’s largest town with a population of 44,135 in the 2022 Census – was “a multimillion-euro business” and “the criminals involved were close to taking control from gardaí” when Mangan was appointed chief superintendent in Co Louth in 2018, he writes. He estimated that 150 people in the town were involved in its sale and supply and that there were at least 300 daily cocaine users whose annual consumption amounted to more than 100kg.
One of only 12 gardaí in the history of the State to have been awarded two Scott Medals for exceptional bravery and risking his own life while on duty, in addition to more than 40 commendations for excellent police work, Mangan was undaunted by the challenges he faced in Drogheda. He cancelled all Garda annual leave, successfully lobbied the taoiseach for extra resources and oversaw 888 searches of homes and premises and the arrest of 313 people for the sale and supply of drugs in the area. He led the prosecutions that resulted in several convictions for false imprisonment and for facilitating the murder of local 17-year-old Keane Mulready-Woods, whose dismembered body was dumped in two locations in Dublin in 2020.
Mangan, who retired early last year, is the most senior former garda ever to write about his career, his publishers say. He comes across not just as a very brave, skilled and clear-sighted policeman, but also as an exceptionally compassionate one in his dealings with crime victims and also with convicts and their families. “The so-called ‘war on drugs’ has not worked nationally or internationally, and it is up to the state to offer alternatives to what the drug dealers provide,” he writes.
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“In Ireland”, he adds, “we have lost a generation to cocaine usage because there has been no concerted effort regarding drug dealers in the towns and villages across the country. What happened in Drogheda could happen in any densely populated area in Ireland. The appetite for cocaine and many other drugs is currently insatiable, with young teenagers to people in their seventies consuming illicit drugs.”
A decade before moving to Drogheda, Mangan, a native of Dunshaughlin, Co Meath, had set up the Garda’s first Serious Crime Review Team, the cold case unit. It helped solve the 2005 murder of Irene White in her home in Dundalk; of Nancy Smyth in her home in Kilkenny city in 1987; of Rita Ponsford in Limerick in winter 1984/1985; and of Brian McGrath in Coole, Co Westmeath, in 1987.
A cold case killing whose resolution eluded Mangan and his colleagues was that of Catholic priest Fr Niall Molloy in a married couple’s house in Co Offaly in summer 1985. The absence of the original investigation files and the plethora of anonymous letters and wildly inaccurate newspapers reports spawned a number of conspiracy theories, but the four people who were in the house on the night of the killing are dead and the case remains unsolved.
The book’s longest chapter recalls the hunt for the killers of a Kenyan man known as Farah Swaleh Noor, parts of whose dismembered body were found in the Royal Canal in Dublin in March 2005. Two sisters, Charlotte and Linda Mulhall (dubbed inaccurately ‘the Scissors Sisters’ by some newspapers), were convicted of his murder and manslaughter, respectively, and their mother, Kathleen, was convicted of concealing evidence relating to the murder.
The breakthrough in the case came when Linda Mulhall gave a lengthy, voluntary statement to then inspector Mangan at her home a fortnight after she and her sister and parents had been released without charge, on the directions of the Director of Public Prosecutions, after 12 hours of questioning in Garda stations. More than half of this chapter is devoted to verbatim transcripts of graphic statements that the Mulhall sisters made to gardaí, making the author’s criticism of the “media frenzy, the sensationalist reporting and the gruesome details” sit uneasily under the headline: Me and Charlie Took Turns Cutting Him and Breaking His Bones.
This is an otherwise important and clearly written chronicle of coalface crime-fighting in Ireland over the past four decades. The people who most ought to read it are the country’s lawmakers and the top ranks of An Garda Síochána.
