WWN Reassembles Former Garda Commissioner’s Shredded Papers

ONE of the main questions remaining from the fallout of the Fennelly Report, which investigated the events which lead to Martin Callinan resigning his post as Garda Commissioner last year, was the suspicious shredding of up to ten bags of Callinan’s personal papers in the days following his resignation.

Luckily WWN were able to intercept one of the bin bags and assign a team of interns to the painstaking task of lining up and sellotaping together hundreds of pages of shredded paper, giving us an exclusive look at just what former Commissioner Callinan shredded while cleaning out his office.

A load of old phone bills

Judging by the sheer amount of phone bills our team meticulously reconstructed, we can only assume that Callinan had a drawer full of them in his office. Some of the mobile bills are old Eircell invoices dating back to 2001, and with the exception of one instance where the Commissioner went over his text limit, are all paid up and offer no damning evidence of Garda corruption or wrong-doing. Bill hoarding, certainly, but that’s about it.

Greeting cards

Our team spent approximately 500 man hours gluing together shredded card in the hopes of getting some insight into what led to Callinan’s resignation, but all we found was a man who doesn’t know how to throw out a birthday card. He’s kept every single Christmas, birthday, and Valentines card he received over the past ten years. We’re all for sentiment, but clutter is clutter.

A scribbly drawing of a guard shooting at some robbers

Callinan appears to have lovingly recreated a scene of a guard (himself maybe?) bringing down a legion of heavily armed bad guys. Doodled in HB pencil, the drawing is on the back page of an A4 pad, and is not dated.

Like fifty menus for the same Chinese takeaway

This one took our team almost six months, as the menu pages all looked the same when shredded. Callinan seems to favour the Joy Yin House Chinese takeaway, and rather than just have one menu which he keeps handy, he opted to get another menu every time he visited the restaurant, throwing them all in his desk until he had a huge pile of the same Chinese menu.

A special offers leaflet from Lidl dated Winter 2011

It was at this point that our team realised that although Callinan may have shredded some material that would have provided a damning insight into the activities of the Garda Síochána, we grabbed the one bag that really was just rubbish.