I was working last Monday, closing up the family bar we have near Dundalk when at about 1 o’ clock a resident from the B&B turned up for a late drink. I was pretty much finished so I wasn’t averse to the idea of staying up for a late drink either. The conversation started off with the usual banter of what took him to the area, he was supervising the building of a house nearby. At some point the conversation changed and the fact that he used to be a psychiatric nurse came up. The conversation then took an unexpected turn as he proceded to tell me that he was a whistle blower against abuse that took place in various mental hospitals. He told me how after he and a colleague of his brought this abuse to the attention of authoristies that the two men began to get verbal abuse from fellow colleagues and worst of all an official garda statement he made was leaked to a local drug dealer with the express purpose of putting his daughters in danger(their addresses in Dundalk were included with the statement). He went on in much more detail about his struggle against the very institutions of this country who should have been protecting and how they persecuted him over the past number of years including being jailed for 10 days in relation to a suspected drink driving incident.
While I didn’t doubt for a second what he had told me I did try to find out what press coverage his story had received by Google-ing his name. I found this recent article in SBP.
I forget many of the other details he told me and wouldn’t like to approximate such serious incidents, but wish him the best in his continuing fight for these patients who could not defend themselves
