TAYLOR’S WIFE: I FEARED HE WAS GOING TO DIE... SO I CONTACTED A PRIEST

THE wife of Superintendent David Taylor has said she contacted a priest on behalf of her husband ‘because I actually believed Dave was going to die’.

Michelle Taylor said that after his suspension from work, her husband was ‘in a bad way’. She said the family was struggling to manage on his reduced salary, and that it was ‘traumatic’.

‘I had nowhere to turn. I couldn’t use welfare because they were gardaí... so I thought of Fr Joe,’ she said.

‘I had never met him, never had any dealings with him. I called him one night because I actually thought Dave was going to die.’

She said this explained the comment in Sergeant Maurice McCabe’s statement that Supt Taylor had spoken to a spiritual adviser before his confession to him. She said the priest had spent some time with her husband and had ‘given him some support – because there wasn’t any’. She felt it would be rude not to ring Sgt McCabe back after he had called her husband in May 2016. She met him for a coffee in the Skylon Hotel, she said, as her husband was ‘not in a good place’.

She reported back to her husband that Sgt McCabe was a very pleasant man, and that she thought they should meet. She said she and Sgt McCabe had agreed it was ‘an awful time for everyone’.

When her husband and Sgt McCabe met in September 2016, it was ‘very emotional’. She said: ‘Dave said, “I have to be honest, there was a campaign against you and I was part of it.”’

Mrs Taylor said her husband never used text messages to brief journalists against Sgt McCabe, but that he said he would speak to them at crime scenes. She said he was ‘not a big texter’, and that she was sure he had not told Sgt McCabe, or Deputy John McGuinness, that he had used texts in the campaign.