Ex-Wife Demands Garda Dismissal After Assault Conviction

A decade after Margaret Loftus disclosed to Garda colleagues she had suffered domestic violence at the hands of her ex-husband, garda Trevor Bolger, she still fears he may not lose his job. She has pledged to handcuff herself to the gates of Leinster House if he is not dismissed from the force. Last Friday, Bolger (48) was sentenced to three months, fully suspended, after being convicted of assaulting Ms Loftus back in 2012, when they were both gardaí. The assault was contrary to Section 2 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act, which is regarded as an attack on the lower end of the scale. Ms Loftus, who has since left the Garda, said she was devastated when told Bolger had agreed to plead guilty to that charge. It was an arrangement that meant other, more serious, charges would not go to trial, namely a threat to kill and coercive control. “I started crying, I got really upset,” she said when members of the investigation team told her about the plea to the lesser charge. “I told them I found it really insulting. But in the next breath they told me I didn’t have a choice, that the DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions] had already accepted it.” Ms Loftus said some of her contacts, who have knowledge of criminal cases in the legal system, have told her they know of Garda members who did not lose their jobs after being convicted of a Section 2 assault. “One of them asked me was I prepared for the possibility he may not lose his job,” she told The Irish Times. “If he doesn’t lose his job I will personally handcuff myself to the gates of Leinster House. It’s an absolute national scandal that he can do all that he’s done and think he’ll be allowed to go back, and put on the [Garda] uniform.” Garda Headquarters will conduct an internal process, following Bolger’s conviction, to determine his future, which could include being dismissed. The charge Bolger was convicted of arises from his assault of Ms Loftus in her childhood family home in Co Mayo in October 2012, which ended their marriage. When she began disclosing inside the Garda that she was the victim of domestic abuse, she said it seemed impossible to get a substantive investigation commenced because the person she was accusing was also a garda. [ ‘Justice was never going to be delivered’: Woman’s Garda ex-husband avoids jail for assaultOpens in new window ] However, after a long period of frustration, she effectively compiled a case file herself. She wrote her own witness statement and in 2018 sent it to the Garda Commissioner’s office. Then assistant commissioner Pat Leahy picked up on it and things finally started moving. “The next day they had a Garda investigation team down to my house,” she said. Bolger was eventually charged in late 2019 and has been suspended from his job, apparently on full pay, as the case has taken years to reach a conclusion in court. “He terrorised me, and he was left there and allowed to flourish within the organisation tasked with protecting me, and that I worked for myself,” she said of Bolger being promoted to the rank of detective and issued with a firearm. This happened in the period after she had made her allegations and before he was suspended. She also made a protected disclosure to the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission – the Garda oversight body which has since become Fiosrú. She outlined what she sees as the failure of the Garda to tackle domestic violence more effectively and concerns around how her allegations were investigated and, specifically, how long it took for an inquiry to start. “They had to do an investigation in secret and they had to hand-pick a few key people to do that investigation,” she said. There were concerns that information about the inquiry would be leaked to her ex-husband, she added. “They [the investigators] weren’t allowed to tell anyone they were doing it.” Furthermore, Bolger was able to use discovery orders in court to secure “information about every inch of my life” including the protected disclosure she had made. He did so while on legal aid. The case went to court 58 times between Bolger’s first appearance in 2019 and the sentencing last Friday. Ms Loftus said her ex-husband’s ability to secure so much information about her through the discovery process during that period was very oppressive. “I would not be able for this journey again,” she said. “He was allowed continue to exert power and control over my life right up until the end, to the point my victim-impact statement was censored by him beforehand. I had to take out parts of that victim-impact statement that he wasn’t happy with on the day.” She said that section related to her apologising to her own family “for bringing him into their lives” as “they had borne the brunt of his behaviour every bit as I had”. In the censored section she also thanked her family for standing by her “and that I was forever grateful for all they’d done for me”. “Then I had to sit in court on Friday and listen to copious amounts of references. They were about what an amazing person this man was. And how he was so great at training the under-12 girls’ teams and how they just couldn’t believe he was before the courts for these things, and wasn’t he great to tell them that. And this man is still a guard.”