For friends and family, Michael Dwyer was a ‘really nice guy’ who never uttered ‘a political opinion’ in his life. But his work in the security industry here ultimately led to his fateful trip to Bolivia
MICHAEL DWYER was a child of his time and place. Born into a generation that grew up in an era of plenty, his path through life seemed pleasantly ordinary and effortless.
He was the second of four children of Martin and Caroline Dwyer, an electrician and pharmaceutical engineer respectively, living near the village of Ballinderry, on the picturesque Lake Drive in north Tipperary. Former classmates struggle to remember any distinguishing features about him, beyond the fact that he was an ordinary, likeable, easy-going youth.
At St Joseph’s secondary school in Borrisoleigh, the principal, Padraig O’Shea, described a “model student”. At the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT), where he began a four-year degree course in construction management in 2004, he was also regarded as a good student by his lecturers, pleasant and popular among his peers, kind and caring to his friends.
He was also an enthusiastic hurler. “He was a bit of a hero as he was from Tipperary and he was well able to hurl – he could give it timber. A very nice fella always,” says Tom Lane, of the Menlo Emmets GAA club in Galway. His Facebook page reveals him as a member of the Willie O’Dea Fan Club – set up to have a laugh at the Minister for Defence – and of another group calling for the return of Féile, the Thurles music festival.
In the context of his violent death, bewilderment is the dominant tone of any comment. A nice guy, but he couldn’t plan his own birthday, never mind an assassination, say friends in Ballinderry. “He could hardly plot his way to the gents, never mind the convoluted politics of Bolivian separatism. No one I know of has ever heard him utter a political opinion,” says another in Galway. “He was no mastermind,” says a young man who knew him briefly. “I’d have thought he was a bit of a dreamer. Naive maybe.” He was also good at “talking himself up”, by all accounts.
A wiser youth – not to mention an alleged plotter – would have opted to keep his online social networking private. The fact that a 24-year-old college graduate chose to make his life an open book on Bebo and Facebook is testament to at least a degree of naivety. Pictures of him and friends dressed in black Swat (US police special weapons and tactical units) team uniforms and posing in camouflage gear with heavy weapons in a forest, along with a penchant for silly online quizzes in which participants answer questions that sort them into “jackal” or “sniper” types, have been swooped on as evidence of sinister militarist inclinations.
The pedestrian truth is that the Swat pictures were taken at a Halloween party in a Galway nightclub. The camouflage gear and “guns” are a big part of the attraction of Airsoft games (akin to paintballing), run by Martin Cummins (AKA MaxForce) and his wife Evelyn on a “skirmish” site near Portumna, Co Galway. He liked dressing up in macho gear. Contrary to early media reports, he had no military training and had no connection with the armed forces.
Like many college students trying to boost their income, he worked as a bouncer for Praetorian, a large, Oranmore-based security company (which folded last year due to revenue non-compliance). In January 2008, while working towards his finals at GMIT, he obtained a “door supervisor’s” licence from the Private Security Authority of Ireland (PSAI) and worked at the Central Park nightclub.
After a Fás advertising campaign, he was recruited by Integrated Risk Management Systems (I-RMS), which is run by ex-Army Rangers near Naas, Co Kildare, and licensed as Business Mobile Security Services. According to a company statement, he worked with it as a security guard on the controversial Corrib gas pipeline project from March until his contract ended on October 20th, 2008. “Prior to being recruited by I-RMS,” reads the statement, “Mr Dwyer had been working part-time as a door supervisor in Galway and held a Private Security Authority of Ireland (PSA) licence, which included a full Garda background check.”
Nonetheless, it was only towards the end of April last year that Dwyer formally applied for a security guard's licence, required by law to work on sites such as the Corrib project. The current system allows applicants to take up work while their applications are pending but in the event, he chose not to proceed with the application, the PSAI told The Irish Times. In effect, he worked without a licence during his eight months with I-RMS.
Some 21,000 individuals are licensed to work as bouncers and/or security guards in the State and at one point, a third of these were thought to be non-EU nationals, some with exotic backgrounds. Dwyer had requested time off from I-RMS to sit his finals and graduated from GMIT with a degree in construction management, a qualification of little relevance in a collapsing economy. By the time construction work had wrapped up for the winter and his I-RMS contract had run out, he had already met at least one of the people who would be somehow connected to his fate in Bolivia. This was a Hungarian who also worked with I-RMS, who was in the group of four (including two Poles) that left Ireland for a purported bodyguard course in Bolivia in November, and who happened to be acquainted with Eduardo Rózsa Flores, the alleged leader of the “gang of mercenaries” killed in the Bolivian hotel.
While the other three returned to Ireland when the course failed to materialise, Michael Dwyer stayed on with Flores. Comments from friends at home suggest wide confusion about his purpose in Bolivia. Some seemed convinced, for example, that he had gone there with a job already in hand. The Irish Timeshas established that the onward flights from Madrid to Bolivia were paid for by someone else; one explanation is that they were part of an all-in course package. His father told RTÉ that Dwyer had said "there was some wealthy guy out there that he'd got in with . . . he didn't elaborate any more after that as to who it was or anything".
In Bolivia, Dwyer continued to document his life, openly, with lots of exclamation marks, in his Bebo and Facebook pages. The tattoo (visible on his corpse) that has triggered much “neo-Nazi”-style chatter in online forums and dismissed by friends as drawn “freestyle” by the tattoo artist, was mentioned excitedly in his reports. “Got a new tattoo. It’s hugh (sic) and sore!!!!”
South American insects were “as big as freakin cats man”. There were cheerful pictures – entitled “hols” – of Dwyer holding a tropical orchid, standing cheek to cheek with pretty local girls, Dwyer in a bowling alley, having a beer outdoors with friends at the open boot of what may have been the new BMW he mentioned – he was happiest, he said, when “cruising in my new bmw in south America”.
A friend on the politics.ie site railed against suggestions that there was something suspicious about such a newly-arrived 24-year-old acquiring a BMW: “im sure he had savings like the rest of us i no its hard to believe a 24yr old can afford a bmw but im sure they are not that expensive over there . . . ”
The divide between conventional internet users and the kind who uninhibitedly use Bebo and Facebook to document their lives (and tag their mundane pictures with obviously outlandish captions) is stark in this story.
“Prodrift on tour” and “Soldiers of Fortune” – captions on pictures of Michael Dwyer’s arrival in Bolivia – are analysed and pored over by posters on Politics.ie but dismissed by defenders as just that: captions.
Prodrift is a type of car racing with league tables openly displayed on Irish websites. His last status update on his Facebook page on April 9th said he was “playing Motorcycle Madness and just achieved Level 6, Tricycle III”.
A friend on politics.ie describes him as “a really nice guy and would not of been involved with anything they are saying. I know him and have known him for a long time, he was kind and caring. He is loved by anyone he ever met and would be the first one there if you needed him as he has been for me in the past.”
He would have been 25 in June.
