BARR TRIBUNAL: Local people in Abbeylara, Co Longford, felt something had gone wrong when John Carthy was fatally shot, but made a distinction between local gardaí and the Emergency Response Unit (ERU) members, the Barr tribunal was told yesterday.
Garda David Martin, from Abbeylara, said that spokespeople for the community had told him they had no animosity towards local gardaí.
Mr Patrick Gageby SC, for the Carthy family, asked Garda Martin if he was conscious immediately after the shooting that the media had become very interested in it.
Mr Gageby said: "There appeared to be a lot of criticism of the gardaí and of the shooting. Putting that with the local shock at the death of John Carthy, there was certainly an amount of feeling, whether rightly based, that something had gone wrong.
"That feeling was in the local area, wasn't it?"
Garda Martin replied:"Absolutely, yes." He agreed that there were essentially good relations between local people and the gardaí and added that there still were today.
Mr Gageby asked: "And the finger was inclined to be pointed towards the professionals [The ERU\] who had been brought down from Dublin.
"Again, I'm not asking you to say whether that was right or not, but that feeling was certainly abroad."
Garda Martin said that two people who had appeared on television as spokespeople for the community, whether it was right or wrong, had called to his house one night. He lived one mile from the village.
"I let them in, and they said they had no animosity towards the local gardaí, but were making a big distinction between the local gardaí and the ERU, and that was the only context in which I heard that scenario mentioned," he said.
The tribunal resumes on Tuesday.
