Thurles Information

For the almost 2000 people who attended at last Saturday afternoon’s Garda Station Open Day, held at the open invitation of an Garda Síochána here in Thurles, the event for all visitors proved extremely educational and for our more junior visiting members, thoroughly exciting and totally enjoyable.

The purpose of last Saturday’s ‘Thurles Garda Station Open Day’ was to allow adults and their families visit this facility and to view at first hand the often difficult and painstaking work undertaken daily by our local police force. Its purpose also was to allow second level and third level students, who, sometime in the future, just may decide to make a future career, as a member of Ireland’s much valued police force.

As our video above shows, on hand were members of the Regional Response Unit, Drugs Unit and Traffic Unit, together with those involved in crime scene finger printing, each explaining their specialist crime detection work.

Officers were on hand to discuss information on dealing with up and running anti crime systems such as ‘Crime Prevention’, ‘Thurles Text Alert’ and ‘Know your Patch’, all which are proving strong deterrents against crime.

Also present were our Fire Brigade and Ambulance services, who re-enacted, in demonstration format, exactly what they encounter when a motor vehicle is involved in a serious collision. (It took only 8 minutes for four Fire Brigade members to dismantle a car, thus allowing medical personnel access to a severely injured driver / passenger.)  

For our younger members ‘Face Painting’ and ‘Colouring Competitions’ were the order of the day and of course the joy of meeting the highly intelligent ‘Cúchulainn’ and ‘Harley’; latter police dogs used to respectively sniff out explosive substances and assist in crowd control in certain situations, by the Garda Public Order Unit.

In attendance also were the Garda Armed Support Unit; demonstrating equipment for use in more serious situations, thankfully as yet not so common an occurrence in today’s Irish society.

A big ‘Thank You’ to all the off duty Police Officers and Fire Brigade and Ambulance Service Members who returned to the Thurles station, giving up their valued personal time, to participate in this eye-opening event.

Finally a ‘Thank You’ also to Chief Superintendent Catherine Kehoe and Garda Annette Connolly, latter who was responsible for co-ordinating the full planning associated with last Saturday afternoon’s very successful programme of events.