The other was the Kerry Babies case in which O’Carroll was among the gardaí who managed to acquire a confession for murder from an innocent family.

The man who reveled in the moniker ‘the sheriff’ served as a garda over a long career, beginning in the late 1960s and ending in 2000. He was for the first half of that career a member of the murder squad.

He was also associated with a group known as the heavy gang, although he denied the existence of any such gang. The heavy gang was a loose amalgam of gardaí who assaulted and intimidated suspects in custody, beating confessions out of them.

In subsequent trials, these gardaí habitually perjured themselves, often in an organised manner. O’Carroll was identified as one of the main culprits in this respect by various witnesses.

He was never charged with anything and always threatened legal action against any reporter or organisation which associated him with the heavy gang.

For some in An Garda Síochána, and in the media, he was considered a diligent and courageous cop.

Others saw him as corrupt in how he conducted his professional duties and an inveterate liar when he frequently addressed controversies in which he had been involved.

What separated him from others who were prominent during a time of serious garda controversies is that he engaged in a career in the media after retiring from the force.

For many years, he wrote a column in the Evening Herald and was a frequent commentator on radio and TV on policing.

This is standard fare for articulate former gardaí who often have a positive contribution to make to the media ecosystem.

The difference with O’Carroll was that, in light of Kerry Babies case, his credibility was highly dubious, and he continued to spout nonsense about that case which many considered highly offensive to the family concerned.

Starting off 

O’Carroll was born in 1940 in Listowel, Co Kerry, one of a family of 15 siblings. His childhood was, he would later say, marked by poverty but was none the worse for it.

“We took off our shoes in May and didn’t put them on again until September and times were indeed tough,” he said in an interview in 2006.

“But there was a lot of happiness too and we had the kind of freedom back then children now would never be given. We were lucky in that we weren’t put out to work by our father at an early age. Instead, my parents scrimped and saved and nine or ten of us actually went onto third level.”

He wasn’t one of them. Instead, he took the boat to England and worked on building sites.

After a while, the life of a labourer no longer held any attraction for him.

On a visit home, his father organised for him to get a place in Templemore. Fortunately for O’Carroll, he found himself directed towards a job that he would grow to love. Templemore fashioned him as a policeman. 

“It was a harsh regime and a lot of us developed a lifelong hostility to the misuse of authority in there but we got discipline,” he said.

Some who encountered him later in his career would have found it ironic that he disliked the misuse of authority.

Within the force, O’Carroll quickly developed a reputation for getting things done. 

He was assigned to the murder squad, which operated in the technical bureau of the gardaí. The squad’s principal tool of investigation was interviewing witnesses and suspects.

In 1976, O’Carroll was involved in the investigation into the rape and murder of two women, 22-year-old Elizabeth Plunkett in Wicklow and 24-year-old Mary Duffy in Mayo.

Two Englishmen, Geoffrey Evans and John Shaw, were suspected of crossing the country looking for victims.

They were arrested and O’Carroll was detailed to interview Shaw. The suspect gave nothing away for two days.

Then O’Carroll made what he said was “a heartfelt plea” to Shaw.

He retold this story many times, the last of which was last year when he was giving evidence in the Central Criminal Court in a separate cold case prosecution.

“I said, John, we’ll say a prayer together. It wasn’t the full rosary now but I said we’ll say a Hail Mary. I said, 'You’re a Catholic'. He said 'I am'. 

"I said, ‘You made your Holy communion, you wore a little rosette with a badge and your confirmation. Your parents were proud of you. You remember that John?’

"And he said, ‘Yes I remember very well, detective’. And I said, ‘And look at the monster you’ve turned into. We’ll say a prayer for you.’

"And he might’ve never said a Hail Mary in a long time…and the next thing he saw, what I’d like to put, the error of his ways and he broke down and wept and he said, ‘Yes, I’ve done terrible things and I’ve killed Mary Duffy and I killed Elizabeth Plunkett’. And he made a full statement that night.”

Shaw and Evans were convicted of murder in 1978.

Shaw died in prison in 2012, and Evans is still serving a life sentence.

O’Carroll was involved in up to 70 murder investigations. He undoubtedly did some good work, brought killers to justice and solace to bereaved families. He was, as he was wont to proclaim himself, good at the job.

As part of the squad, he investigated paramilitary activity, including murder, kidnappings, and robbery. And it was the threat posed by the paramilitaries that appears to have prompted some in the gardaí to take the law into their own hands.

'Heavy' allegations 

The ‘heavy gang’ was centred on the unit in which O’Carroll served.

There were numerous allegations of assault in custody, many of them showing a pattern, as a means of extracting confessions. O’Carroll, and other prominent gardaí such as John Courtney, always maintained that the allegations were baseless.

Despite that, the evidence mounted that their interrogation methods went way beyond legitimate inquiry.

Then in 1984, along came the Kerry Babies case. In May the body of a baby was found on the white strand, near Cahirciveen.

The baby had been stabbed multiple times. A few weeks later, the gardaí discovered that Joanne Hayes, a single woman living with her family in Abbeydorney, 70km from Cahirciveen, had been pregnant but was now without child.

She, her three siblings, and an aunt were brought into Tralee garda station and questioned by O’Carroll and others.

Joanne told O’Carroll that her baby had died at birth and was buried on the family farm. Beyond a cursory examination, nobody was sent to search the farm.

After hours of interrogation, Joanne admitted murdering her baby and her siblings admitted colluding in the murder and disposing of the body into the sea from Slea Head.

This would have accounted for the baby ending up in Cahirciveen on the next peninsula over.

Joanne was charged and remanded in custody.

She told her solicitor where her baby had been buried and the body was found. Now there were two babies.

Blood tests showed that neither Joanne nor her boyfriend Jerimiah Locke could be the parents of the Cahirciveen baby.

Joanne was released, the charges dropped and a tribunal set up to find out how a family could have admitted to a murder they couldn’t have committed.

According to the Hayes family, Joanne had been severely intimidated in Tralee garda station, and her two brothers claimed to have been assaulted.

The tribunal was a chance for a judicial body to expose the ‘heavy gang’ culture. Instead, tribunal chair judge Kevin Lynch turned his guns on the Hayes family, accusing them of lying.

The report completely avoided dealing with the central issue and to the greatest extent exonerated the gardaí involved.

For instance, Lynch’s report said statements given by the gardaí but subsequently shown to be erroneous “are not barefaced lies (as regrettably is the case with members of the Hayes family) but they are an exaggeration over and above the true position, or a gilding of the lily of wishful thinking elevated to the status of hard fact.”

The judge also had this to say about the gardaí targeting the Hayes family.

“It is tenable for some gardaí to suspect that Joanne Hayes is the mother of the Cahirciveen baby despite all the scientific evidence but it is not tenable for any of them to say they are certain, or virtually certain, that this is the true position.”

At the tribunal, lawyers representing O’Carroll and his colleagues raised the possibility of “superfecundation”, a process by which a woman has sex with two different men in quick succession and gives birth to twins.

It was a ludicrous theory and grossly insulting to Joanne Hayes, but O’Carroll dined out on it for years after to justify how he had conducted himself in Tralee garda station.

Consequences

There were two serious consequences for O’Carroll following the publication of the whitewashed tribunal report in 1985.

He was confined to desk duty after garda commissioner Larry Wren reported to the government that “the officers conducting the investigation into the death of the Cahirciveen baby were grossly negligent in their handling of the case".

For the rest of his days, O’Carroll claimed that he was scapegoated.

He had some justification for such a gripe. The case had presented the opportunity to investigate the culture in which the ‘heavy gang’ had operated for the preceding fifteen years, yet instead just portrayed the Kerry Babies case as an aberration in which a few gardaí were shoddy and unprofessional.

O’Carroll had been up to his neck in the culture of assaulting suspects, but he was far from alone.

The other consequence was that legally he could attack anybody who raised issues about his conduct in Tralee garda station. Once the tribunal exonerated him from intimidation and assault, his reputation was, in a legal sense, intact.

In 1987, Joanne Hayes told her story in a book published by Brandon Books. O’Carroll and three other gardaí sued and the case was settled on the steps of the high court.

Each garda received £17,500, a huge amount for a libel action at the time.

The case almost bankrupted the Dingle-based publisher.

Thirty-five years later the government accepted that the tribunal report contained gross errors, particularly in stating that Joanne Hayes and her family had lied about, among other things, their time in Tralee garda station.

The remainder of O’Carroll’s career was low-key.

The Kerry case rendered him something of an embarrassment among the upper echelons of the force.

When he retired in 2000, then commissioner Pat Byrne and a number of journalists hailed him on RTÉ as a great cop.

Despite that, he openly carried his bitterness, claiming he had been a victim of “blatant injustice”.

I was the victim of a witch-hunt as some of my colleagues were. We were a successful unit and certain people in high places, and I mean the Department of Justice, were getting slightly miffed about that and looked for an opportunity and they reverted to me and disbanded the squad.

The claims were baseless and laughable, but he was to repeat them ad nauseam during his subsequent media career.

He continued to claim he had treated Joanne Hayes “like a daughter” and aired his superfecundation theory at every opportunity.

In 2018 DNA sampling showed that Joanne Hayes could not have been the mother of the Cahirciveen baby, finally putting a stop to O’Carroll’s ravings.

Last year he accepted the findings.

“The DNA, I have to accept, is finite proof,” he said.

He would not, however, offer any apology to Ms Hayes. “I have only sympathy for two creatures on this,” he said. “The babies — and that’s my final word on that.”

By then he had long since become a figure of ridicule on the subject.

There is practically no dispute but that in Tralee garda station he intimidated a frightened, bereaved young woman to a point where she told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

He could have retreated thereafter in shame and regret and left well enough alone.

Instead, he continued to beat a hollow drum, claiming that far from acting the thug and misusing his power, he, and not Joanne Hayes, was the real victim.