THE following article was submitted to Donegal Daily by a serving Garda here in the county.
It was written by Garda Tom Daly and the officer wanted us to share it with our readers:
Here’s a thought for you…. At lunchtime today, I assisted with the formal closure of a country station, one of the 95 shut around the country today, located in a small County Waterford coastal village.
As we waited for the Office of Public Works man to arrive, the Sergeant got a notion and disappeared. I last saw him heading towards a house a few doors down from the station. A few minutes later he arrived in with a magnificent woman of 76 years of age.
She was the widow of the last Sergeant to have lived in the station. This, still beautiful, vital Tippeary woman passed an hour with us, describing her 26 years living in the station with her husband, the Gardai who’d passed through the place in her time, the 4 children she’d born in the station, the 2 she’d buried locally, in the same grave as her husband who stayed in the village on his retirement, and passed away all too soon.
Almost two decades after his demise, she still visits his grave daily, and her face lit up as she told us he’d been the love of her life. Never wearing the uniform, or drawing a penny from the State, she served our country as faithfully as any sworn Garda.
Her husband retired in 1990, and 23 years later, it was obvious she still saw we two, who she’d never met before, as family. A while later, the OPW man arrived, and, as he took possession of the keys, we, and the Super, signed out in the Station Diary, formally ending a century and a half of policing in this village.
The beautiful old lady returned to her picture postcard home, with her daughter and son-in-law, leaving us both enriched, and saddened. It strikes me repeatedly of late that oftentimes we hear our politicans referring to us as an “economy” and frequently make reference to their efforts to rebuild our “economy.”
An hour with this amazing woman would remind any politican, no matter how dense, that we are a society, not an economy, and we haven’t managed to wreck everthing yet – we still have something elft……. end of sermon!!!!!!!!!
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