Pat O’Donnell helped set up the traffic corps
LOCAL DS USED HIS EXPERIENCE AS A DRAUGHTSMAN TO PLAN POPE’S VISIT TO THE AREA IN 1979
December 1977
ON Wednesday evening last friends and colleagues of Detective Sergeant Pat O’Donnell gathered for an informal party in Drogheda Garda Station to wish him well on his retirement from the Force.
Pat officially bowed out from the Force last Sunday, November 30, almost 36 years to the week that he started as a recruit in the Garda Depot in Dublin
He still has the letter from the Recruiting Section, telling him to report for duty at the Garda Depot at 9 a.m. on Thursday, December 7.
Pat, a native of Naas, Co. Kildare, was 21 years of age when he joined the Garda Siochana. However, despite having spent three years as a draughtsman with a business firm it was always his intention, from leaving the Christian Brothers’ School and the college where he’d trained as a draftsman, to join the force.
His father, Patrick, a Clare man, joined the Gardai on March 14,1922 and was one of the founder members of the Force.
Today Pat is proud to be one of three generations in the Garda Siochana. His own son, Niall, is also a member of the Force. He served in Skerries for a period and is now on police duties with the U.N. Forces in Cyprus. He will be flying home for Christmas, in time to be present at the annual Garda Presentation Dinner/Dance in The Glenside Hotel on December 12 when Pat’s departure from the Gardai will be formally recognised.
That, incidentally, will be an unique night in the history of the Gardai locally. Some seven Sergeants from the area will be marking their retirement, all having served approx 35 years, Noel O’Connor, Laytown, Phil Galligan, Castlebellingham, Pat McGovern, Clogherhead and Pat Roche, Dunleer.
After his six months of training, Pat went, on May 7 1962, to Dundalk and served there until September 1963 when he went to Hackballscross.
On September 3 1964, he came to Drogheda and for about a year did relief work with Tom Coffee in the Court Clerk’s office in Fair Street. ‘I enjoyed that work although the hours were long. I’d work five days in that office and, at the weekends go back into uniform.’
Although the workload has reduced in later years Pat recalls that in those days they worked 49 hours a week. They had two days off a month - if they were lucky! Occasionally the dreaded memo would come from their superiors stating that their free days were ‘subject to the exigencies of the Force’ and if their Sergeant in Charge considered it unwise to let them off then “that was that’.
Pat recalls that when he came to Drogheda he stayed in a flat with the Carragher family in Patrickswcll Lane, now the site of the new Garda Station.
In 1972 Pat, with Dan McCann, Pat Curtin, Brian McCabe, Charlie Armstrong, Kieran Traynor and others, helped to set up the Traffic Corp. That came in with a blaze of glory - the first Divisional Force to operate out of Drogheda, the first time that white patrol cars were introduced the Force. They were the main enforcers of all traffic regulations, the precursers of today’s Operation Lifesavcr team.
Kieran Traynor incidentally, is the only member of that team still operating in the Traffic Corp.
When Pat left the Traffic Corp he joined the Crime Unit with Gda Con Nolan, now a Detective Sergeant in Dundalk. He was promoted Sergeant in October 1977 and left this area to work in Pearse Street Garda Station in Dublin. After that there was a stint at Border duties in Dromad before returning to Drogheda as a Detective Sergeant to serve in the Special Task Force.
It was around this time that Pat’s experience as a draughtsman was called upon. When Pope John Paul II came to Ireland in 1979 the advance preparations were enormous. There was mapping to be done, traffic lay-out to be organised and a host of other important matters to be arranged. Pat was put in charge of it all and the occasion was one of the most gratifying of his life.
Pat has handled many important duties in his time as a Detective Sergeant and is particularly happy with the role he played in ‘ the Grammar School saga”. After the old Grammar School in Laurence Street was unceremoniously demolished in a dawn raid, Pat had to carry out an enormous amount of investigation and research before the case was successfully finalised.
Pat was just two months in Dundalk when he met his future wife, May Cotter from Haggardstown. They got married in July 1965 and moved into their new home at Forest Hills, Drogheda where they still reside. They have two children, Niall, and Lorraine who works with a computer company in Dublin.
While most of his guests at last Wednesday’s function were past and present colleagues, also there were longtime friends like Naas-born Fr. Gregory Carroll, Prior of the Dominicans and Paul Hamlett and Brendan Walker from Water Safety Ireland of which Pat is County Secretary.
On his retirement, Pat will be visiting his 90-year-old mother, Johanna. Recently she became one of Ireland’s oldest emigrants when she sold up her house in Naas and went to live in a granny flat at the home of her daughter, Bidni, in Liverpool.