John Sweetman

And it didn't help that, like, my first station...

It was brilliant for me from the point of view of travel was Malahide and at the time that was only 15 minutes up the road from me and it wasn't nearly as big or as expanded as it is now and it was great and I liked it but it was really really quiet.

So for the nine months I was there I didn't get a huge amount of experience you know like you could have a week of nights say where you're working nights and maybe nothing fecking happening all week until a Saturday or a Sunday night.

So it was very quiet, whereas a lot of the other people that were in my class and that maybe got stations like Store Street or the Bridewell or busy stations down in Cork and Limerick and stuff like that, and they were getting the experience.

And then on top of that, when I finally passed out at Temple Moor with, you know, sworn in as a guard and all this crack, I got sent into the command and control place where you'd be dispatching cars

and answering 999 calls.

So I was there for a couple of years, and again, it was good, there was plenty of overtime, you had no paperwork, you had no files, you rarely had to go to court, but you still weren't getting any experience.

Whereas all the other people that I would have passed out with Temple Marwick, they were out there doing the job, getting the experience, getting confident.

So when I finally got out of there, I had about four years service at that stage and I still hadn't feck all experience, you know, I'd damn all arrests and all that sort of stuff because of just the circumstances I'd found myself in.

So I didn't like it and I wasn't going to stay in it and I was trying to build up the courage to quit when I discovered the fingerprint section through, you know, some poor devil out in Hought there where I was stationed, he got glassed in the pub one night, you know.

So the guard that was with me brought the point glass into the fingerprint section to get examined.

And I went with him.

And I saw this place, like air-conditioned, computers, everybody in plain clothes, all this sort of stuff, looking at detailed bits and bobs.

And I said, Jesus, this is for me.

And at the time...

It wasn't really well known that these positions existed.

They certainly didn't occur to me and then vacancies come up within a year.

I kept my foot in the door and I got in there and never looked back, you know.

It was the best thing that ever happened to me, like in the Guards.

In the Technical Bureau, yeah.