People saw my husband as a nice, family guy but he was torturing us
Meav Doyle decided to leave her marriage to a garda after realising her life and those of her children were at risk – and she wants other women to know there is a way out
BEFORE we sit down, Meav Doyle is anxious to explain why her house is ‘in a total state’. It’s a perfectly fine home, spotless and warm, although there’s little sign of the family who lives here.
In the sitting room is an armchair, a small sofa and a big-screen telly but there’s not a single knick-knack or photograph, and on the walls about a dozen conspicuously empty picture hooks are dotted around the place.
‘I don’t want to be here, I hate it, so do the kids,’ Meav explains. ‘We moved out for about a year, it was on the market and it’s been sold, and we found somewhere else to buy ourselves.
‘But then Mark got in the way. We had to leave the house we were in and because he’s dragged everything out, we lost out on the place I put in a bid on. We’d no choice but to come back here.
‘Everything is in storage and it’s torture being here, every single room holds so many awful memories, for all of us. But hopefully now things will start to move again, and we can get on with the rest of our lives.’
Last week, Meav’s ex-husband, former garda Mark Doyle, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to six charges of assault causing harm to his wife and his two stepsons. During the sentence hearing, Doyle was revealed to be a violent bully who repeatedly beat Meav in front of her four children, and who physically attacked her two older sons from a previous relationship.
During her victim impact statement, she told how he was a ‘respected member of the community but a monster in our home’, and how when she met him, she was ‘ambitious, confident and outgoing’, but by the time she left, she was ‘a shell’ of a woman who ‘would jump at noises’.
Her family has been left fractured. Her two eldest children moved out several years ago to live with their father, terrified of Doyle’s violence and unable to understand why Meav put up with his abuse for as long as she did. The guilt she now lives with is ‘horrific’.
But these, she says, are the grim realities of coercive control. Her ex-husband’s behaviour for most of their 12-year relationship, ground her down into believing she was worthless and powerless. Perhaps most insidious of all, he convinced her that his job as a garda and standing in the community would make it impossible for her to convince anyone that he was an abuser.
Indeed, during the sentence hearing she told how he used his position when summoned into a meeting at her son’s secondary school after a ‘disclosure’ of Doyle’s behaviour was made to a teacher. He arrived in a patrol car, wearing his full garda uniform. It was a deliberate move, Meav says, to try and ‘quash’ any suggestion that he might be abusive at home.
While the incident was referred on to the appropriate services, there were few who knew of the abuse Doyle, who is also a former soldier, was capable of.
‘Because he was a guard he was totally respected,’ Meav says. ‘He was a scout leader and when he was in the army he trained to be a plasterer, so he was good at DIY and was in and out of neighbours’ houses doing odd jobs. Most people knew him as a nice family guy.
Being a guard really holds weight in a community.’
It’s just a few days since Doyle’s sentencing and although surprised and satisfied at the length of time he will spend in jail, Meav is by no means happy at the outcome.
‘There’s no happiness in any of this,’ she says. ‘There’s just sadness, it could have been such a normal and good life. When I think of all the mess left behind, for me and the children...
‘The only reason I went to court was to put a line in the sand, to let him know, “you can’t keep coming back and torturing me through the civil courts, you can’t keep torturing the children”.’
Her only regret is that Doyle wasn’t charged with as much of the coercive abuse as the physical attacks on both her and her two eldest children.
‘It only became a criminal offence a few years ago and you can’t go back retrospectively,’ she says. ‘But it was the coercive control stuff that really damaged everyone. I see people online asking why I didn’t leave sooner but unless you’ve experienced it, you really have no idea what it can do.’
That’s why she’s happy to do this interview today, to let other women in similar situations know that they too can get help and will be believed.
Looking back, she now thinks Doyle spotted a vulnerability in her that he knew he could exploit. The pair met in the spring of 2007 in a Carlow nightclub, Doyle’s hometown, where Meav was on her best friend’s hen night.
Living in Celbridge, Co Kildare, Maev was married at the time, to her first serious boyfriend, who she’d had a son with at the age of 17; their second son was born three years later. But the relationship was in trouble and com
ing to an end. ‘I was 25 and Mark was four years younger,’ she says. ‘He was really charming and we talked for ages that night. There was no kissing or anything like that, he was just a really nice guy. I was struggling and Mark was someone to talk to.’
The pair spoke a few times again on the phone.
‘It wasn’t a relationship,’ she explains. ‘It was confiding and talking to each other. Six months before I met him, his mother died of cancer and his own father was very violent, so he was talking to me a lot about that.’
By that summer, Meav’s marriage was over and a couple of months later, Doyle — who was in the army at the time — asked her to go to a wedding with him.
‘When you’re older you realise that’s what those kinds of men do,’ she says. ‘They see there’s a vulnerability and they move quickly.’
That Christmas, Meav discovered she was pregnant. ‘By January he’d moved in with us here,’ she explains. ‘The boys were eight and five at the time and they did like him at first — he was into doing boys’ stuff and he made an effort. I was mad about him, I think he was mad about me too, at the start.’
However, a few months later, at her mother’s 70th birthday party, Doyle got aggressive with her after accusing her of being too friendly with her nephew’s friends.
‘I’ve known them since they were teenagers, they were coming over to hug me and say hello,’ she says. ‘Mark dragged me off, saying it wasn’t normal where he was from.’
Pregnant and in love, Meav tried to put these aggressions out of her head. But little by little he began to chip away at her selfconfidence, slagging her about her weight, complaining to anyone who’d listen about how ditzy and silly she was.
In the meantime, she helped and supported him to realise his life’s dream of being a guard.
‘He was thrilled to get accepted to Templemore in 2009, it was like he’d won the Lotto,’ she says. ‘But it was hard on us too. He was on about €100 a week, and I’d just been made redundant [from a sales job with a multinational company] but I said we’d make it work.’
There were a lot of sacrifices made, as Maev took care of three young children while looking for work. She went into the beauty salon business and after a few years, their second child, a daughter, was born. As time went on, Doyle’s behaviour became even more erratic.
‘You never knew when he was going to blow up,’ she says. ‘He’d go on like he was this perfectionist, and then tell everyone I was forgetful and lazy. He was always undermining me. I was under massive pressure, working fulltime with four kids — of course I forgot things.’
Doyle suggested they get married in 2010, and after Meav expressed concerns about his behaviour, he agreed to go to couples therapy. She says he also attended a specialist for men who are violent.
‘It seemed for a little while like he was turning a corner,’ she says.
But the violent incidents started up again about a year into the marriage. After one of the children’s Communions, he thumped her so hard he burst her eardrum. When she returned from the hospital later that night, he was asleep in bed, and later behaved as though nothing had happened.
He fractured her arm at one point and there were various kickings and beatings. He also grabbed her by the hair and dragged her around the house — most of it was done in front of the children. But it was the pressure cooker atmosphere that she found even more difficult to deal with.
‘He’d smash the doors, break the kids’ toys, throw plates off the wall,’ she explains. ‘We were always in fear. If I was cooking he’d stand right behind me, and if I said anything he’d gaslight me, saying he wasn’t.
‘For years I’d walk up the stairs against the wall because he used to put his hands through the banister and grab my legs.
‘It was constant, there was never any peace.’
If she or her two older boys ever tried to stand up to him, she says, Doyle would threaten them with his garda job, saying no one would ever believe them.
After a particularly vicious attack on her eldest son in 2017, the two older boys left to live with their father.
In the meantime, Meav was going to her GP with various injuries, all of which were recorded and later helped during her case against him.
‘Our doctor was always there for me and gave me gentle advice,’ she says. ‘I think she really understood domestic violence, how it’s like a fog, you can’t see what’s in front of you and then it starts lifting.’
It was someone else’s story that helped her finally come to the realisation her situation was far from normal.
‘I was listening to Clodagh Hawe’s mum being interviewed in 2016,’ she says of the mother and her three young sons who were murdered by her husband at their home in Cavan.
‘How she was describing their life, I started thinking that I was in real trouble.’
It took close to three years before she felt able to pursue a
‘It was constant, there was never any peace’ ‘He said I only took a case because I was jealous’
barring order against Doyle. ‘He didn’t take it seriously and sent me about 80 messages the day it went through,’ she says.
‘He kept turning up outside the house, at my work. He’d told me about dealing with barring orders through his work, how women would get them and then let the fellas back in, so they’re not taken seriously.’
Eventually she felt she had no choice but to go to the protective services bureau, who she says were brilliant from the start.
Shortly before his trial was due to start last October, Doyle pleaded guilty and last Friday he began his six-year jail sentence. With their divorce now finalised, Meav is relieved that he is totally out of their lives. Her two younger children stopped seeing him a couple of years ago and want nothing to do with him.
‘It was their choice not to see him,’ she says. ‘During one of the court appearances he tried to make it out that it was down to me and he told one of the judges that I was only taking a case against him because I was jealous he was in a new relationship.’
Doyle’s new partner, who he was living with up until being jailed, wrote a character reference for his trial.
‘She’s been manipulated,’ says Meav. ‘I feel so sorry for her, I’ve lain awake worrying about her and I don’t even know her. But I do know how Mark works.’