Gardai not trained to deal with dangerous incidents..

Officer tells GRA conference how colleagues need real-life gun skills

- PAUL HEALY and JOHN HAND

A GARDA has told how he ran into a building to save children while a gunman opened fire – despite not being tactically trained. 

Det Padraig Harrington said he’s concerned armed officers who are not trained to deal with such incidents and called for that skills gap to be filled.

In 2014 he attended an incident in which a family, including young children, needed to be rescued as a gunman was indiscriminately firing out a top-floor window.

Det Garda Harrington, who has carried a firearm for 15 years, said a fight or flight decision was made to rescue the family – but he now questions whether he was properly trained to deal with such a dangerous incident.

He told the Garda Representative Association conference in Westport, Co Mayo: “That guy fired five shots at us. He had only fired three by the time we went in to get the family.

“I did have to turn around to a colleague in uniform that had never carried a firearm in his life and say, ‘Will you take off your ballistic vest there and wrap it around that child there and bring them out to the car’. We were the closest armed people.