The Blue Wall of Silence Around Terence Wheelock

Twenty-one years ago, Terence Wheelock was dragged away into Store Street Garda Station and did not walk back out. This crime committed by those who are tasked with being the guardians of the peace, who murdered this young man, covered it up and built a blue wall of silence against the Wheelock family’s struggle for justice.

His brother, Sammy, gave a overview of what happened to his brother: Terence Wheelock, a regular working-class young man was doing up his room in 2005; he had everything he needed, he was just missing a paintbrush. His mother left him some money to go out and get his paintbrush, and he went out to the local hardware store to get it. This all sounds like a regular errand everybody would do that appears harmless.

However, earlier that day, a car had been robbed and it just so happened that the car had been robbed near the Wheelock family home. Terence took the backway out of the house and the Garda had set a sting operation to catch whoever was responsible. Unfortunately for Terence, he was working class, the accent, the clothes and the Garda, like bulls, thought they found their guy and chased him down and dragged him away.

What happened in that Garda station is vile. Terence was repeatedly refused contact with his solicitor, put in isolation, yet he didn’t give the Garda what they wanted, as a result of maintaining his innocence, his decency in Store Street, he was murdered. Don’t let the ruling of suicide fool you! He was beaten to a pulp, cuts, bruises, blunt force trauma, the Garda who did this are not only responsible for murder, but also for utter betrayal of their duties.

The official channels in addressing this brutality against innocence do not work; you put a complaint to GSOC, they fob it off to the DPP, they wash their hands of it in as many words as they can for them to cover their backs under a legal veneer. New laws are needed, laws that’ll take complaints seriously.

I interviewed an attendee at the demonstration to get their thoughts:

“…I want justice for Terence, and for his family and I wish more people would attend…the guards claiming he used his shoelaces to hang himself,  but his shoelaces still in them as though someone would go to the trouble of replacing them…I think people in Ireland have a pretty good awareness of police brutality and misconduct in the US, but as people living in Ireland, we have the most power and therefore the most responsibility to fight against it here, so long as we make ourselves aware of it…more urgency is added with every year that passes as the Wheelock family gets older.”

Time is wasted, grief gets worse, and closure seems even further away. Nobody can imagine the trauma that the Wheelock family wake up with every day, knowing they have been denied justice for over twenty years. The Irish state is playing a waiting game; they know how embarrassing it is, how compromising it is for Garda Siochana to be shown as an institution that has gotten away with murder for this long. On top of their intense over policing of working class estates, such as recently covered in Aontacht, the Garda have a lot to answer for: the fatal shooting of George Nkencho, a working class man effected by mental illness, the breaking of the Debenhams strike led overwhelmingly by working class men and women who were screwed over, the ‘giving-up’ of responding to domestic abuse calls during COVID and many, many others as covered by James O’Toole, in his book, Guards: The Biggest Crime Gang in Ireland, who spoke and gave a compelling answer as to why the Garda act like this, they are demoralised, the Garda are not heroes, they don’t stop crimes, they keep the working class in line and act as front-line soldiers for the status quo that will kill working class people when it wants to and get away with it.

Many speakers and friends spoke outside Store Street Garda Station, including People Before Profit speakers, TD, Richard Boyd Barett and councillor Connor Reddy as well as Sinn Féin councillor Janice Boylan. These speakers spoke of their support for the campaign, they exposed how this isn’t unique, this tactic of delay, deny and ignore used by states and policing that would be utterly embarrassed, the loss of credibility that no renaming of institutions would be able to fix. However, they pointed out that justice is coming, despite the delay in renaming of Diamond Park to Terence Wheelock Memorial Diamond Park; councillors, such as Conor Reddy, will be going to court to challenge the DCC blocking this action despite majority support.

This is why the Justice4TerenceWheelock campaign is, morally, colossal. For twenty-one years, they have been seeking justice, and they will get it. Two of the Wheelock family have passed in this family’s struggle before they could see justice. For justice to be imposed, the guilty must be exposed, though it’s been over twenty years now, longer than Terence Wheelock’s life on this Earth, their justice will be remembered as a turning point in Irish society.