Twenty years ago, on 16 September 2005, Terence Wheelock died after weeks in a coma. He’d been arrested on 2 June 2005 and taken to Store Street Garda station in Dublin’s north inner city. The Guards claimed he hung himself. But their story didn’t add up. The Wheelock family have been campaigning for justice for two decades.
In Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Tell-Tale Heart, a man commits a murder and later feels so guilty that he imagines the still-beating heart of the victim knocking on his floorboards, driving him to confess. But after two decades, it’s unlikely conscience is going to get the better of the Guards who were on duty the day Terence Wheelock was arrested and beaten into a coma.
These Guards were never challenged on their inconsistencies: the changed roster; the fact they said they found him seated, yet the coroner said injuries on his knees were consistent with being forced to his knees; the cuts and bruises on his knuckles that the coroner said could have occurred in a “struggle situation”; the fact that the Garda picture of the cord he supposedly hung himself from was deemed a “reconstruction”.
The contradictions go on and on. But the lack of conscience and new information from the Guards is no surprise. They have no conscience. It is not an individual but a systemic failing. Their lack of conscience is a necessity of their job—to defend capitalism no matter what. Some young person could join the Guards with the best intentions, but when they realise their actual job is removing the Debenhams workers from their picket line, they get demoralised. They leave, or they adapt.
Decades of Thatcherite policies, what we now call neoliberalism, have devastated Dublin’s inner city. Greedy developers use intentional dereliction to drive up property prices, while the government and council assist by running down social housing—all the better to drive people into the arms of the private market. You have families that are generations deep in trauma, and the Guards know they are useless in changing that reality. They just criminalise the victims of the system the Guards are paid to defend.
Establishment politicians have no conscience either. They have fobbed the Wheelock family off with claims that the investigation was done. Never mind that the initial investigation was run by a former Store Street station Guard and the GSOC investigation was a whitewash that framed the whole thing as searching for clearer methods of suicide prevention. Terence didn’t kill himself.
Again, this failing isn’t just about their individual lack of moral fibre; it’s about the fact that these politicians serve the bosses, the capitalist class. They need the Guards to defend their masters against the working class, and so they don’t want the truth to come out—especially when that truth would damage their beloved attack dogs.
The only heart that keeps beating for Terence is the immense heart and courage shown by the Wheelock family and the people of inner-city Dublin, who cry out for justice for Terence Wheelock and won’t stop protesting until the truth comes out.
