‘Paddy Does Not Mind Who the Enemy Is’: The Royal Irish Constabulary and Colonial Policing

Abstract

The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) occupied a prominent place in the British imperial imagination as a model for policing the empire. Sir Charles Jeffries of the Colonial Office observed in 1952 that ‘the really effective influence on the development of colonial police forces … was not that of the police of Great Britain, but that of the Royal Irish Constabulary’.1 In this formulation, the police forces of the British Empire, typically armed and under centralized state control, with military or quasi-military features, sought to replicate the organization, functions and ethos of the RIC. Yet historians have more recently cautioned us to be wary of sweeping generalizations regarding colonial police forces essentially based on an ‘Irish’ model, and we should be skeptical about the idea of an RIC model being transported intact to the colonial Empire.2 As Elizabeth Malcolm has observed in her study of The Irish Policeman, ‘no colonial constabulary was ever an exact replica of the RIC’.3 Indeed, the relationship between policing in the United Kingdom and its counterpart in the British Empire was neither one-way traffic exporting of metropolitan models to the colonies or of importing colonial models to Britain, but rather a process of ‘cross-fertilization’ in which policing models, technologies and personnel were shared between metropole and Empire.4