The constabulary agitation of 1882

Abstract

For two weeks in late July and early August 1882 newspapers in Ireland and London carried accounts of discontent among members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.), which policed the whole of Ireland except Dublin. The Irish land war of 1879–82 was ending, and the R.I.C. had burnished their reputation for stolid loyalty among British officialdom and the Irish public at large. Problems among Ireland’s police may have been disquieting, particularly at Dublin Castle and in landowner circles, but in the news accounts and other papers that survive there were few expressions of surprise that, at the end of three years of often intense duty during the land war, the men of the R.I.C. were tired, restive and eager to draw attention to their concerns. By mid-1882 the morale and financial resources of individual members of the R.I.C. were drained. The problem of unreimbursed expenses incurred on land war duty, a special problem for married men with families, impinged on policemen’s living standards. Fatigue, frustration and, in individual cases, actual hardship compelled members of the R.I.C. at stations throughout the country to adopt the unusual expedient of public agitation. The excitement among the Irish police during the summer of 1882 resulted in remedial legislation and changes in working conditions that proved to be a defining point in the development of the R.I.C. as a career for young men in Ireland, rather than a stopover on the way to emigration.