‘All we want is to give him justice’, say parents of ‘gentle giant’ Darragh Sheehan who died outside hotel

Darragh, who studied mechanical engineering at IT Tralee and later worked for EPS Mallow, died from asphyxiation.

Almost two years on, no one has been prosecuted for his death.

In December 2020, five men were arrested and questioned but all were released without charge. A file was prepared for the DPP but no decision has been made on whether there will be any charges.

“There is an empty hole, and it keeps getting bigger,” says Mr Sheehan.

He gets emotional — it’s the first time he has spoken out about that night.

“I have to apologise in advance — when I jump into it, it comes to me,” he says, wiping away tears.

He remembers being on that roadside screaming into the darkness 10 minutes from where his son lay dead. A garda had just phoned him with the news.

“He said to me: ‘Are you his dad?’ I said, ‘I am’. He said, ‘I am sorry he didn’t make it’.”

He knew he had to get back into his car and get to his son. “I drove like a lunatic,” he says. “I needed to get there. But then bureaucracy meets you. I can see him lying on the ground with a blanket over him, but I can’t do anything.”

A garda told Mr Sheehan they needed to “preserve the scene”.

“What? That’s my son and I stood 30 yards from him. I didn’t want him lying on the cold f***ing concrete on his own. That moment is etched on my mind; I can see his shoes out of the bottom of the blanket. I just wanted to hold his hand.”

It was hours before he was able to touch his son — at the mortuary when he had to identify his body.

“I can still see him now,” he says. “The colour gone from his face. You are standing there over him crying, trying to talk to someone who is not there any more.

“Then you have to take him off a mortuary bed and put him into a hearse to bring him home to his mother and family.

“I’m telling him I will see him again somewhere else. For the love of Christ, how does that make sense?”

Nothing about Darragh’s tragic death makes sense, and the enormity of the loss for his dad, mother Hannah, sister Fiona and brother Kevin “gets bigger with passing days”.

Mr Sheehan describes his wife as “an empty soul ... Any semblance of life is gone. She is a ghost walking around with nothing behind her eyes. The life is gone. He was her first-born, she can’t wrap her head around it.

“Three weeks ago, she said to me, ‘How are we going to get through this?’ My first thought was, ‘this might as well have happened yesterday’. It has got worse.”

When Darragh died, a friend gave his father a piece of advice that he still tries to stick to. “He sat in the porch during the funeral. He said to me, ‘Tom, I remember when my brother died. My parents fought hard never to allow the house not be a home’. That resonated with me.

“That is a daily struggle. Nerve ends are fraught and day on day that is the challenge to try and carve out an existence in this horribleness.”

He recalls the moment Darragh was born and how he “changed our lives”. “Two young adults became parents and he completed everything.

“I look back on the 26 years we had with Darragh with pride.

“I remember looking at him as a baby and thinking, ‘you have to be educated, we will give you a comfortable life until you paddle your own canoe. I have to take you to mass, I have to show you the older traditions in a world that has gone mad. I want you grounded in stuff that has stood the test of time’.

“He had these brown eyes and jet-black hair, he had sallow skin, he was handsome. He had a pair of shoulders he could use on the GAA field and to hit a golf ball.”

But how does the elation of holding his son’s hand for the first time compare to the devastation of holding it for the last time? “The first one is a utopia, where someone says, ‘your only function in life is to guide this person through his or her life’. Wow. This is direction, it is purpose, it is love. It was never lost on me. I said to him when he was born, ‘we have a right chance here’.

“But you go from that to he is 26 and his eyes are closed. He didn’t have a run at it. I am standing in that mortuary wondering, who turned out the light? Who pressed pause? Jesus Christ, we had so much planned for him.” When he visits his son’s grave he thanks him for bringing so much joy to their lives.

“He was always there to help grandparents and keeping an eye on his younger siblings, especially his sister. He played GAA, rode horses, loved to golf and was a perfectionist in how completed tasks — loose ends weren’t his thing.

“Darragh was tall and broad, the quintessential gentle giant who took it on himself to watch for those around him on the field of play and lead by his actions.”

Last November, the family was upset after watching a news broadcast covering the annual Garda convention which was held at the Gleneagle Hotel, where Darragh died, which they felt was “inappropriate”.

Mr Sheehan believes there are people who were there the night his son died who could help the authorities.

“That’s the final part of the jigsaw of Darragh’s life. None of it needed to stop, there are so many questions unanswered,” he says.

The nearest sign of life for the family is a Pomeranian dog Darragh bred before he died. Her every prance keeps the house smiling and remembering him.

On the morning of his funeral, Darragh’s dad made him a promise: “I said to him, ‘By God, we will get to the ­bottom of what happened to you’.

“To the DPP, my house is falling in on its own foundations waiting for you. Process the file. Give us our chance to give Darragh his justice, that is all I want.”

When contacted about the progress of the investigation, a Garda spokesperson said: “An Garda Síochána continues to liaise with the family, and the family is being kept up to date on the investigation. A file has been submitted to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. An Garda Síochána has no further comment to make at this time.”