Swallow did not spend much time thinking about the mysteries of religion. But as a Roman Catholic policeman in a force where his co-religionists rarely made it to senior rank, he thought a lot about its influence. Had he been born into the Protestant faith, he reckoned, he would have enrolled in the Trinity College medical school rather than that of the Catholic University on Cecilia Street. Cecilia Street was his undoing. It all seemed a long time ago now, before he had joined the police.

Trinity medicals were no saints. Their exploits in taverns across the city and in particular in the red-light district around Montgomery Street—‘Monto’, to knowledgeable Dubliners—were notorious. But perhaps, he reasoned, had he enrolled to study among those of a different religious background he might have been more concerned to put up a show of better behaviour. He might have been careful, more cautious.

He might not so readily have succumbed to the delights of the alehouses, as he did, within days of enrolment in Cecilia Street. His fellow students there were not angels either, but most of them seemed to know when to stop carousing and start putting in the bookwork that was necessary to pass their examinations.

Swallow’s inability to identify that point had cost him his hoped-for medical career. And his three years of roistering dissipated the hard-earned money his parents had put aside for it. If blasting away their savings was bad, then shattering their hopes and ambitions was infinitely worse. When his father succumbed to a brain haemorrhage while working in the family bar at Suncroft in rural Kildare on an August evening, Swallow knew that his child’s betrayal, as he saw it, had played some part in it.

It had taken years for his mother to forgive him. She had been if anything more ambitious than her husband for her only son. An uneasy peace had eventually been brokered by his younger sister, Harriet, but the bond between mother and son was never the same again. Had he offered to return to Suncroft to help her run the business it might have laid the foundations for a fuller reconciliation, but it was not something that either of them wanted.

He saw himself with three choices after repeatedly failing his examinations: America, Australia or the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Somewhat to his surprise, he managed to control his drinking in order to complete the police educational examination. And he succeeded in masking his drinking habits from the examining surgeon at the Kevin Street depot. His drinking was long in check. He could take alcohol, often quite a lot of it, but it did not control him as before. He took drink—and he liked having it, mellow Tullamore whiskey, porter from Guinness’s, good red wine from France—but drink did not take him.