Force was strong with women pioneers

BACK in 1959 when Mary Browne, from Galway, became the first woman to join An Garda Síochána — serial number 00001W —it marked the end of a long journey to break the glass ceiling of a male-only force. The attitude of one justice minister around that time said it all: “The agitation for women police is an artificial business without any real roots in the country.”

In a Dáil debate on the subject in the 1950s, one TD offered this nugget of non-PC wisdom: “While recruits should not be actually ‘horse-faced’, they should not be too good-looking. They should be just plain women and not targets for marriage.”

One of the first intake in 1959, Bríd Wymbs, from Leitrim, recalled vividly her first day on the Dublin beat: “We were walking along O’Connell Street and the traffic slowed down and everything came to a standstill. At all the windows along by the Savoy cinema and the Gresham Hotel, there were people looking out, staring with their mouths open. As we passed a sergeant we recognised from Pearse Street station...we asked him what was happening. And he said, ‘Would you go away from me, ’tis yourselves they’re looking at.’ It was a shock.”

I well remember my own first encounter with a ‘Ban in Blue’. Six of us had piled into a mini and were heading from UCC to the Bruce Springsteen gig at Slane in 1985. Cider cans littered the floor and cigarette smoke fumed from the windows as we bombed through the midlands. Then, in the middle of Abbeyleix, she stepped out, all six feet of her, hand raised in supreme authority.

Walking slowly around our creaking jalopy, she bent her imposing frame to the driver’s window and rasped: “Get outta that yoke before I kick it out from under ye.” We did — and quick.