Garda Patrick McElroy

We have a lot of welfare supports in the Guards.

We've become more streamlined.

We kind of deal with counselling sessions, mandatory counselling sessions.

We're kind of peer supporters.

We kind of talk to each other.

It's kind of very open and friendly.

It's good to talk to lads about it.

I have a psychologist, Aidan Newman, that I deal with and I deal with him twice a year.

So he engages with me and I tell him exactly what I've been through for the last six months.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the application came out in 2013 and I looked at the role profile and with my own engineering degree and kind of the physics of Matty heading me, I looked at what was required and then I went and I kind of talked to the lads that were involved in it.

So this, forensically, isn't really introduced into the Guards since 2006.

So it was relatively new at the time when I joined.

So we were probably the second batch of recruits that underwent the training, which is two years intensive training where you go through a company called AITS in the UK, which is their kind of work with DeMalford University in Leicester.

And you spend two years going through various principles and fundamentals of road traffic collision investigation.

There is.

Yeah, like I got promoted back in 2022 when I went to Kilmainham and that was a bit of an eye opener for me.

And to see how the frontline policing has changed somewhat since I went out of frontline policing in 2013 and back in 2022, what's demands that are on the guards at that time.

They deal with all sorts of situations, but it's more victim engagement now and community relations that they deal with.

And they're pretty much engaged and they're kind of the pressures, not the pressures on them, but they're tasked to go out and engage with the community and talk to people.