Eamon Dillon

There's coordinates of the MV Royal has been sent to one of the landing crews, one of their phones.

So, I mean, what happened, I suppose this week we had one of those guys, his sentence hearing was on Monday this week, whereas the others, all the sentence hearing, all the mitigation was heard just before Christmas in December.

So he was the last one to go.

So we got to hear a bit about them as well.

So Gary Monks, he's 41-year-old.

He's a former British Army soldier.

He served eight years in the British Army, honorable discharge, and then went on to become a military contractor.

So he was working in Iraq and Afghanistan for quite some time, like from 2008 to 2020 or something like that.

So he had a long career there and obviously earning decent money.

He had been recruited with a promise of €30,000 for doing this, and it was going to be possibly...

you know, there might be more in it if this went well.

And it kind of pushed him on this kind of, I suppose, not a slow descent, but it pushed him on a descent where he was abusing drink and drugs as well.

From what, 2020 onwards?

Yeah, well, he wasn't able to go back to work because it was heard in court that he didn't really realise that he was suffering from this.

I mean, it was actually referred to that he's known in the prison as the man who screams in his sleep at night.

So I don't think he's faking it if he's kind of already known in the prison system as suffering from severe PTSD

Well, I think it was the fact, I suppose if you're used to that kind of money, if you're working as a military contractor in Baghdad or wherever, you know, with a former military background, I mean, it wouldn't be unusual to be getting paid three grand or four grand a week.

So you're not going to make that kind of money when you return home to Scotland or Ireland without any, you know, necessary skills.

I mean, to make three grand a week, you're,

You know, you want to be fairly decent at something like, you know, other than, you know, than I suppose acting as a soldier, whether in a private capacity or for your country.