A senior garda described as "wholesale drunkenness and savagery" a night when he was sent to police the town of Raphoe a decade ago. Supt Philip Lyons, who was an inspector at the time, was assigned to Border duties in Donegal, policing cattle movements during the BSE crisis.
He told the tribunal yesterday that he was assigned to Raphoe on the first weekend of July, 1997, and said he understood that "in the weeks previously, a major public order problem had evolved". Supt Lyons had a complement of two sergeants and 11 gardaí, on foot patrol, in patrol cars, and in a personnel carrier on the night of July 4th.
"The town was quiet. It was the same as any other rural town in Ireland, until 2am," Supt Lyons said. However, after a crowd of 800-900 people left Frank McBrearty snr's nightclub, "immediately it was clear there was going to be trouble," he said.
Mr McBrearty claims the Garda launched a campaign to harass his family and put his nightclub out of business in the year following the hit-and-run death of cattle dealer Richie Barron, which was wrongly treated as a murder inquiry.
Some of those who left the nightclub were as young as 15 or 16, Supt Lyons said, and "very drunk". "There was a bad atmosphere all of a sudden, it wasn't a happy atmosphere," he said.
"There was young girls getting sick, vomiting in the street. There were girls rolling on the ground fighting." Gardaí made five arrests during the night.
"We needed everybody that we had that night and we could have done with more gardaí," he said. Supt Lyons blamed a promotion at Mr McBrearty's nightclub, where patrons paid an entrance fee of £1 and all drinks were £1, for the trouble.
In a report, he wrote that "anything including serious injury and death is possible" if the scenes were repeated. The next night, he inspected Mr McBrearty's nightclub, and he said things were much calmer because there was an older crowd, but he believed alcohol was served after hours.
"The shutters were pulled down, but there were staff inside yet," he said. "I saw a man tendering a £10 note through the shutter. He asked us to leave, that he wouldn't get served while we were there. There were no public order problems, no assaults, it was a normal well-run premises, except for the serving of alcohol."