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It was a Valentine’s Day like no other and the story that unfolded would rupture the relationship between The Irish Times and An Garda Síochána for many years after.
In late 1976, two gardaí separately approached the paper’s news features editor Conor Brady and told him that suspects were being mistreated in custody to secure incriminating statements, which in turn were used to secure convictions.
Having previously been editor of Garda Review, Brady felt he could not be directly involved in any investigation. When he passed the information to Irish Times Editor Fergus Pyle, a team of reporters was assigned to dig deeper. On February 14th, 1977, under the headline ‘Gardaí Using North-style Brutality in Interrogation Techniques’, the paper began a week-long series of articles by Don Buckley, Renagh Holohan and Joe Joyce that outlined the activities of a “heavy gang” of interrogators within the force.

The series had taken weeks to put together and was based on extensive interviews with victims of Garda misconduct; lawyers; doctors; ;social workers; and concerned members of the force. The investigation concluded that brutal interrogation methods were being used by a select group of gardaí in the questioning of suspects.
Noting that the “Heavy Gang” nickname had been ascribed to this group by other gardaí, the series outlined how unorthodox methods were being used to secure confessions. Among these were “threats, lies, and ... depriving suspects of sleep, food and water over long periods … and forcing people to stand spread-eagled against a wall for lengthy periods”.
It also outlined how suspects were “forced to sit by fires or heaters and refused water and an atmosphere of fear is induced by loud banging, shouting, threats and sometimes screams from outside the room. All these are intended to break the suspect’s resistance to reveal information or more commonly, to signing incriminating statements.”

The move towards these interrogation methods was, the series argued, in response to political pressure to secure convictions. While the paper had offered to interview the Garda commissioner, Edmund Garvey, and the minister for justice, Paddy Cooney, neither had accepted that offer.
In that day’s leading article, The Irish Times sought to pre-empt the criticism that would be levelled at it by the Fine Gael-Labour “law and order” coalition. It made clear that it had “not been taken in by subversive propaganda, which the minister for justice has several times blamed as the source of accusations against the gardaí” and declared that the series was “the product of many weeks’ diligent research and investigation by skilled journalists”.
It stressed that the paper was not accusing the Garda Síochána of “using illegal violence on a widespread scale”; instead the accusations centred “on a small minority of the force”. Lastly, it declared that the series did not “in any way align The Irish Times with the political views of any person who has been subjected to ill-treatment”.
With these disclaimers out of the way, the paper questioned the extent to which the ill-treatment of suspects was “condoned or ignored by people in authority over the force”. It expressed difficulty in accepting that the information gathered by its journalists would not have been available to the minister for justice had he looked for it. Similarly, it expressed difficulty in accepting that the Garda commissioner could have been “completely unaware of the very many accusations against the men under his command”.
While conceding that the institutions of the State and the rule of law were under attack by subversive groups, it declared that gardaí did no service to the State “by descending to the same methods as the gunman and the criminal”. Gardaí could not, it concluded, “take it upon themselves unilaterally to extend their powers beyond those set down by the elected representatives of the people”.

As the week progressed, the investigative series dominated the front page and detailed case histories of ill-treated suspects were printed in the News Focus page .The minister for justice, Paddy Cooney, denied the existence of a Garda squad specialising in interrogation and denied that the force was under political pressure to secure convictions.
However, the paper was not easily assuaged; it described Cooney’s response as “inconclusive and unsatisfactory ... and classically ambiguous”. The Irish Times had never alleged the existence of a specific squad tasked with interrogation duties; it had alleged that a squad within the force was exceeding its legal limitations. It also noted that Cooney was not “prepared to say that all complaints against the gardaí were unjustified”.
In a subsequent interview on RTÉ, when Cooney was asked why journalists had believed the allegations, he replied that “although he was not saying that they were untrue, there were journalistic tricks which could be employed to make things sound something a bit different from what they were”.
Such was the sensitivity of the story that other media outlets were initially reluctant to pick it up. On the day the story broke RTÉ did not mention it in its early morning news bulletins and only added the story to its news agenda after the Garda press office issued a denial to all media outlets. In contrast, as then news editor Donal Foley recounted, “you couldn’t walk across the newsroom of The Irish Times without tripping over television cables. Both BBC and ITN have done full programmes on the Gardaí and their antics.”
The coincidental fact that the story broke at the same time that the State was pursuing a case against Britain in the European Court of Human Rights over the use of unorthodox interrogation methods in Northern Ireland prompted some politicians to attack the heritage of The Irish Times and question its loyalty to the State.
At a meeting in Listowel, Fine Gael’s Gerard Lynch declared that “the publicity given to such allegations in the British press and their allies in the Republic is designed to distract attention from the Irish case at Strasburg, and it should be seen as such by all Irish people”. Another Fine Gael TD, Fintan Coogan, accused the paper of “doing the dirty work for John Bull”. It fell on politicians outside the State to congratulate the paper on its ground-breaking series. Paddy Devlin of the SDLP described the investigation as “a job the politicians should have been doing for some time past”.
Given the climate of the times, as Editor, Fergus Pyle was nervous about running the series. As remembered by assistant editor James Downey, Pyle was “desperately nervous about it, he was like a cat on a hot brick and while it’s not good for journalists to see this he was very brave to do the story”. Renagh Holohan, one of the reporters who worked on the story, said the “heavy gang story was one of the few things he actually went for”.
Brady, who was present at the final conference at which Pyle gave the series the all-clear for publication, remembered that Pyle queried whether the paper should secure affidavits from the interviewees but accepted Foley’s assertion that there was no way those who had given information, sometimes in confidence, to the paper would swear to it. As Brady recalled, “the reality was that Fergus would carry the can, not Foley or anybody else, if the story blew up in our faces. But Fergus gave the go-ahead, knowing that he, and the newspaper, were largely defenceless. It was a brave decision, for which he was subsequently not given sufficient credit.”
It was Pyle’s golden moment as Editor: within a year he had been replaced by Douglas Gageby. Like many ground-breaking investigative stories, the “Heavy Gang” exposé would take many decades to be accepted as fact, with appalling consequences that still echo today. Mark O’Brien is head of school at Dublin City University’s school of communications and the author of The Irish Times: A History