Access to Gardai report after death of parent?

Long post, some heavy topics. Read at your own discretion.

Last year my dad committed suicide after the Gardaí & “Child Protective Services” (as my mother described them, probably Tusla but I don’t know) came to our door in the morning and confiscated my dad’s electronics.

I was asleep for all of this as I had work later on in the day and so slept in. When I woke up and started getting ready, nobody was in the house. Both my brother & my mam were at work and I noted that I couldn’t find my father anywhere. I didn’t know that anything was up until I texted the family groupchat that I was off to work & had fed our dog when my mother replied that my dad didn’t have his phone & she’d explain later.

Apparently when questioned by my mother, my dad had said to her that he was in a real bit of trouble, something along those lines. He was then left at home when she & my brother went to work. I was still asleep at this time. When I came home early from work after some frantic texts from my mam, I found gardaí, ambulances, etc. outside my house & she told me that he had hung himself.

I’m so baffled. We got his electronics back within a month or so, the officer said they couldn’t find anything and so they were released. I don’t know why his things were seized in the first place. It’s been eating me up ever since he died. I don’t know if I want closure on this. All he left for us was just a piece of paper that said “I’m sorry” My dad was very physically ill & had a heart transplant not 2 years ago and had been unemployed since he had a heart attack at work 3ish years ago. He was on a lot of medication and his mental health had been declining since my grandfather passed in 2017. He’d been struggling with depression and anxiety but I did notice him pick up maybe a month before he passed. Classic warning signs of suicide, looking back, but I’ll never know if he ended his own life because he had been planning it, or if it had been suddenly triggered by the Gardaí showing up. It’s horrific, but it feels like an admittance of guilt to me, in a way.

It makes me sick to my stomach to even be considering my dad having done abhorrent things, I don’t want to accept it and I don’t really even want to know, I’m only 20. Despite all of this, some part of me feels like I should; the concept of my dad that I have is completely rattled in all this mystery. My dad was a good man, if not dealing with a lot of his own demons, but I have very fond memories of him throughout my life and it’s devastating that he’s gone. I know even seemingly normal people are capable of horrible things, it’s always the ones you least expect, it just badly shakes me to think about.

I mainly want to ask; what can someone who is next of kin do to learn more about something like this? As in, the investigations or accusations made against a parent. I haven’t found much strength to ask my mother more about it. I just want to know incase I need to bite the bullet and find out for myself to move on with my life. I regret not asking for more details from the Gardaí on the day or when they came to do a social visit a month after, but at the time I just couldn’t think about it.

Please be kind, this was and still is a very sensitive and complicated situation and all I ask for is for some advice and understanding.