Irish Constabulary Research Articles

Emmanuel Destenay. Shadows From the Trenches: Veterans of the Great War and the Irish Revolution (1918–1923).

Early in Shadows from the Trenches: Veterans of the Great War and the Irish Revolution (1918–1923), Emmanuel Destenay refers to recent shifts in Irish historiography, prompted by Great War centenaries, that have “permitted the Irish to come to terms with the historical oblivion” into which the Great War had sunk (xv). In truth, these shifts had begun much earlier than that, most relevantly here with Jane Leonard’s examination of Great War veterans published in the 1990s. But even if it is no longer the case, the Irish contribution to the British war effort was certainly underserved by historians for some time. Shadows from the Trenches thus builds on work by Leonard and, more recently, Paul Taylor, Michael Robinson, and others in examining the fate of Irish ex-servicemen on their return home. These men found an Ireland dramatically different to the one they had left, and in the midst of its own conflicts—most obviously, a war of independence (1919–1921) against British rule followed by a bitter civil war (1922–1923). Destenay follows their trajectories as they navigated their way through these new wars and into a new political order. Importantly, the book reminds us that this was not a homogenous cohort of men, and they held a range of loyalties and allegiances that drew them in an array of directions. They fought among the guerrillas of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) but also joined the forces of the British Crown tasked with suppressing IRA insurgency—as so-called “Black and Tans” in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), in the often brutal Auxiliary Division of the RIC, and in the Ulster Special Constabulary in what became Northern Ireland. Others avoided taking up arms again but were dragged into the conflict as victims of intimidation and violence. Inevitably, Irish ex-servicemen found themselves shooting at and killing their former comrades.

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Countersurveillance, Photography and Revolution in the Irish War of Independence

This article examines a photographic album compiled by an Irish Republican Army unit during the Irish War of Independence, a guerrilla struggle fought in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 between the Irish Republican Army and the British Army, along with the quasi-military Royal Irish Constabulary. The employment of techniques and surveillance methods similar to those of the British state and police forces in Ireland enabled the group’s intelligence squad to track the movements of their enemies. Those depicted were monitored and sometimes targeted for elimination, thus turning this photographic evidence against the state and its representatives. The article is based on witness statements, memoirs and parliamentary proceedings, thus revealing the importance of photography in the intelligence war against the British Empire. Studio portraits originally taken for familial or occupational uses, newspaper cuttings reflecting society events and covertly taken snapshots were triangulated with handwritten notes detailing the daily routines of those pictured. The album’s multiplicity of formats constitutes a type of conflict photography that differs from the usual depictions of ruins and raids that dominated imagery of the Irish revolutionary period.

Conscription, rural populations and the dynamics of war and revolution in Ireland (1914–18)

AbstractDrawing on secret witness reports from Intelligence Officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and diplomatic correspondence from France’s representatives to Dublin and London, this article seeks to complement recent historiography and qualify our understanding of the period 1914–18 by engaging fully with the issue of compulsory military service from the outbreak of the conflict. It contemplates how fears of conscription contributed to the radicalisation of rural communities and demonstrates that opposition to conscription formed a solid political foundation for Sinn Féin. Britain’s determination to implement conscription to Ireland frightened civilian populations, gave rise to nationwide discontent, and attracted towards Sinn Féin populations likely to be drafted into the British Army. That study seeks to be a re-examination of the dynamics between the Irish revolution and the conscription scares and maintains that fears of compulsory service in Ireland significantly contributed to the victory of Sinn Féin candidates during the four electoral contests in 1917.

The disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary and forced migration, 1922–31

ABSTRACT This article concerns the men of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) who were disbanded from the force in 1922 and felt obliged to leave Ireland for Britain. Afforded unique – if not always entirely sufficient – financial and practical arrangements by the British government, this was in many respects a distinctive but particularly well documented cohort of Irish migrants. While the RIC was an exclusively male force, disbandment and migration also impacted on the wives and children of married members. The article will first examine the nature of migration under threat of republican violence for Irish-born, disbanded RIC members. It will then explore forced separation and the experiences of police families, before offering some reflections on what this case-study can tell us about contemporary understanding of gender and violence.

Kevin Barry: An Irish Rebel in Life and Death by Eunan O'Halpin (review)

Eunan O’Halpin, Kevin Barry:An Irish Rebel in Life and Death (Newbridge: Merrion Press, 2020), xii+250 pages. Kevin Barry is one of the most famous of the dead in Ireland’s War of Independence. It is not because of any fame during his life. It was the circumstances of his death that bequeathed him fame. Just eighteen years old when he was sentenced to death by court martial for his involvement in an IRA operation that led to the death of three British soldiers, Barry was executed by hanging at Mountjoy Jail on All Saints’ Day 1920, at a time when social disorder in Ireland was reaching a climax. In a new book, part biography, part analytical history and part family memoir, the Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin, Eunan O’Halpin, asks why Kevin Barry’s solitary image remains the dominant icon of youthful patriotic sacrifice for the War of Independence. Barry was one of approximately 550 IRA volunteers, 750 civilians and over 700 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and British Army personnel to lose their lives during that war. Nine other IRA men were sentenced to death and executed for similar actions in 1921, one of them – Frank Flood – a good friend (and fellow medical student) of Kevin Barry’s. In some ways Barry was unremarkable. Why then has his name continued to resonate in Irish republican, as well as popular, culture? With an ease facilitated by the author’s in-depth knowledge of the events and personalities of this period in Irish history and knowledge of archival material on Kevin Barry himself, Eunan O’Halpin, a grandnephew of Barry, addresses this question, as well as setting his life in the context of the politics and society of Ireland in the 1910s and 1920s. His subject’s story is intertwined with that of the divisions within society on Ireland’s political future and the gradual shift in public opinion towards a more separatist vision of Ireland, this shift largely caused by the social disorder brought about by political and military conflict. O’Halpin draws on family and school records to present a likeable, balanced boy with academic and sporting abilities (in rugby and hurling) and many friends, who was politically minded and increasingly more radical than mainstream opinion in 1917. More than anything O’Halpin presents a very human and real picture of an ordinary boy who progressed to become a ‘Jesuit-educated medical student’, leading a full life in addition to his role Studies • volume 110 • number 437 124 Spring 2021: Book Reviews in the IRA (which he had joined at the age of fifteen in 1917), both in Dublin and Carlow. He and his large family, to whom he was very close and by whom he was much influenced, especially in the case of his eldest sister Kitby [sic], had grown sympathetic to advanced nationalism even before the Rising, as a result of influences in both home places. He was inspired at thirteen years of age by a speech by Bulmer Hobson (a senior figure of the IRB), at an event which he attended with his eldest sister. The tickets for this had been given to him by schoolmates at St Mary’s College, Rathmines, which he attended before transferring to Belvedere College in 1916. Later, he was a medical student at UCD, in the last stage of his short but relatively well-connected life. The Barry family appear to have been part of a slightly privileged and interesting political class developing in Ireland in the 1920s. His sister Kitby herself later played a key role in ensuring communication between Éamon de Valera and Liam Lynch during the civil war and married Jim Maloney, son of P J Maloney, a TD in the first Dáil. Kitby’s daughter married the poet Patrick Kavanagh; Eglin, Kevin’s sister, married the eldest son of prominent Volunteer The O’Rahilly; and Mary, Kevin’s other sister, married Jim O’Donovan – the IRA’s leading expert on explosives. There is a fascinating insight into Kevin Barry, the schoolboy, which draws on homework – mostly essays – and on scrawls and doodles which appear on the margins...

James Stephens and the Irish Constabulary

James Stephens and the Irish Constabulary

Mark Radford, The Policing of Belfast 1870-1914

The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) is widely credited with serving as a “model” for policing across the British empire and playing a prominent role in the historical development of policing internationally. While efforts to assess this claim have generated a considerable and ongoing debate, and led to important qualifications regarding the actual extent of the RIC’s influence and legacy, it remains the case that the policing “model” that prevailed within Ireland during the era of the RIC was ...

Shallow graves; documenting & assessing IRA disappearances during the Irish revolution 1919–1923

ABSTRACT This article assesses the extent, geography and nature of ‘forced disappearances’ carried out by the Irish Republican Army during the Irish Revolution of 1919–1923. The victims were either Irish civilians suspected of being spies and informers working for British intelligence, or members of the British army and Royal Irish Constabulary. It reveals the scale of these secret killings as a phenomenon that developed in the context of the IRA’s military strategy during the Irish War of Independence. Disappearances continued at a far lower level during the Truce (largely in Co. Cork), and almost ceased during the Irish Civil War of 1922–1923. The study found that rather than being a nationwide military strategy forced disappearances were the initiative of local IRA units, with those in Co. Cork (notably Cork 1 Brigade), displaying a more ruthless attitude to this tactic than elsewhere. Civilian targets (the majority of whom were ex-soldiers) were usually assumed by the IRA to be dangerous British intelligence assets. This was also the case with many crown force targets, but others were simply opportunistic killings.

Physical culture, the Royal Irish Constabulary and police masculinities in Ireland, 1900–14

AbstractThis article examines the importance of physical culture systems for Irishmen seeking to enter the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C), and those already operating within it, in the period 1900 to 1914. R.I.C. entrance requirements encouraged some men to alter their bodies physically to meet standardised body measurements for police officers. Simultaneously, a growing body of literature urged men to reflect upon their stature and, if found deficient, to undertake courses of physical culture. This situation, it is argued, led to a valorisation of muscularity and strength as foundational to an officer's physical presence and strength of character. To further demonstrate the relationship between physical culture and the R.I.C., the article also examines efforts by members within the force to associate strong bodies with broader masculine identities related to courage, integrity and bravery. The article begins with a brief discussion of the R.I.C., before examining the historiography of Irish masculinity and police masculinities more generally. Next, the article examines the importance of physical culture for those seeking entry into the constabulary, with reference to theIrish Times’sphysical culture column, before finally examining the efforts by existing members to strengthen the R.I.C.’s relationship with physical culture. In both instances, involving aspirant and actual members of the R.I.C., the article argues that conceptions of masculinity in the constabulary echoed broader social messages and came to equate strong physiques with wider assumptions about police integrity and character.

‘An Unnatural Crime’: Infanticide in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Infanticide reached record levels in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the rising population and increasing poverty provided the essential precondition for this, the sharp rise in the practice identified by contemporaries in the 1820s and 1830s might not have taken place had the Dublin and Cork Foundling Hospitals continued to assume responsibility for the care of foundling children. But once they were no longer available to receive them, the women who give birth to the children that society identified as illegitimate chose to terminate their lives in record numbers in an attempt to avoid the severe stigma that this brought and the practical difficulties of taking care of a child alone. Using the cases that came before the coroners court and the crime figures assembled by the Royal Irish Constabulary from the 1830s, this article combines the quantitative analysis of the practice that this permits with a reliance on the qualitative approach that informed a previous investigation of the phenomenon in the eighteenth century to track its evolving trajectory, to identify its main features and to explain how it had arrived at a point by the 1840s when it exceeded homicide as the primary cause of violent death.

Ireland: rebellion and counter-insurgency, 1848–1867

ABSTRACT The period 1848 to 1867 witnessed what could be regarded as a very small-scale insurgency campaign in Ireland, waged by agrarian groups; the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen. 1848 and 1867 witnessed rebellions by the Young Irelanders and Fenians, which proved to be small-scale and of short duration but the British government had prepared for a nationwide counter-insurgency campaign. The government relied heavily on the militarised Irish Constabulary but in 1848 and 1867 troops were used in large numbers and there were concerns about how they could be best concentrated to meet the envisaged threat.

Post-revisionism: Conflict (Ir)resolution and the Limits of Ambivalence in Kevin McCarthy’s Peeler

This essay considers a historical novel of recent times in revisionist terms, Kevin McCarthy’s debut novel of 2010, Peeler. In doing so, I also address the limitations that the novel exposes within Irish revisionism. I propose that McCarthy’s novel should be regarded more properly as a post-revisionist work of literature. A piece of detective fiction that is set during the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921, Peeler challenges the romantic nationalist understanding of the War as one of heroic struggle by focusing its attention on a Catholic member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. In considering the circumstances in which Sergeant Seán O’Keefe finds himself as a policeman serving a community within which support for the IRA campaign against British rule is strong, the novel sheds sympathetic light on the experience of Catholic men who were members of the Royal Irish Constabulary until the force was eventually disbanded in 1922. At the same time, it demonstrates that the ambivalence in Sergeant O’Keefe’s attitudes ultimately proves unsustainable, thereby challenging the value that Irish revisionism has laid upon the ambivalent nature of political and cultural circumstances in Ireland with regard to Irish-British relations. In the process, I draw attention to important connections that McCarthy’s Peeler carries to Elizabeth Bowen’s celebrated novel of life in Anglo-Irish society in County Cork during the period of the Irish War of Independence: The Last September of 1929.

Defying the IRA? Intimidation, Coercion and Communities during the Irish Revolution, by Brian Hughes

Brian Hughes here seeks to examine the means by which non-state militants, primarily the IRA, attempted to establish and maintain control over their communities during the Irish war of independence. He is also much interested in the forms of response which local people offered to address, and (at times) counter, these ambitions. His general idea is to map a rarely explored part of the landscape of revolutionary Ireland—that encompassing the large majority of the population who found themselves caught between the relatively small numbers of separatist guerrillas (perhaps no more than 3,000 at any one time) and the retreating forces of the United Kingdom state. In essence, he posits that this community, otherwise diverse, was united by a desire to avoid absolute commitment, by a willingness to elide loyalties where necessary and by a general desire to look out for itself. The book is meticulously researched, but is particularly effective when combining papers from the Bureau of Military History and the records of the Irish Grants Committee. Collating these Irish and British materials has enabled Hughes to expose the complex ways in which ordinary citizens, caught in the cross-fire of revolution, interpreted the course of events around them, as well as their own loyalties. A strikingly emblematic case is supplied by an egg-dealer from Arva, County Cavan, James McCabe, who simultaneously applied to both the Irish Free State and the British authorities for compensation arising out of the struggle of 1919–21. McCabe, a (long-) retired officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary, looked to the British Treasury-funded Irish Grants Committee for financial relief on the grounds of his service to the Crown; but he was also an Irish nationalist, who had a son active in the IRA, and he turned, too, to the Irish Free State authorities for financial redress, citing the family’s record in the revolution. Few were as bold as McCabe in seeking to milk the two competing jurisdictions for personal benefit; but his story does illustrate crisply the kind of ambiguous, alternate or sequential loyalties which characterised many at this time.

More Newly Identified Contributors to Household Words

More Newly Identified Contributors to Household Words Jeremy Parrott In my previous article on this topic for Dickens Quarterly (June 2018) I threw down the gauntlet to other scholars to find still further unknown or scantily identified contributors to Household Words, building on the groundwork of Ann Lohrli in the 1970s, but using the methods of twenty-first century digital genealogy. However, I was unable to resist my own challenge, and soon found myself once again sifting through the scattered online traces of obscure nineteenth century lives in pursuit of occasional writers for Dickens’s weekly magazine of the 1850s. I guessed that perhaps 10 to 20 more contributors could be pinned down from the available clues and having, at the time of writing, found substantial quantities of new information about 16 minimally defined entities in Lohrli’s 1973 guide to the journal, am at least temporarily drawing a line again under this research project. The first unidentified writer that I attempted to winkle out was the very first in Lohrli’s alphabetical listing of some 390 named contributors–Elizabeth Addey. The available information was her name, a Dublin address and the name George Addey as the registered proprietor of a business at that address. The Irish records are notoriously patchy and unreliable, but occasionally one happens upon an unexpected profusion of data. In the case of the Addeys, this took the form of the meticulous records of meetings of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Dublin, Wexford and Cork, and the service history of George Addy (spelt without the ‘e’) in the Irish Constabulary. A similar wealth of narrowly focused information was available about another, otherwise poorly documented Irish contributor, Peter Dowdall, thanks to the manuscript records of the Court of Petty Sessions for County Galway and minutes of board meetings regarding the administration of the Poor Law in Dublin. Several of the writers proved quite exciting to work on as I gradually peeled back layers of their lives. Taking just one of these as a model, A. L. V. Gretton was only known by her initials or as the wife of a George Gretton and as a writer on Italy. First I restored her full name–Amelia Louisa [End Page 189] Vaux née Le Mesurier–then found out that her English husband was an officer in the Hungarian hussars and died in Australia just nine days after the young couple had arrived in Adelaide to start a new life together! The realization that she was also a published novelist and personally acquainted with Dickens, having met him in Genoa in 1845 (Letters 6: 765, n.4), added considerably to the interest I had already taken in her. Then to discover that her correspondence with other family members over a 40-year period from Italy, Australia and Britain, had been collected and recently published online, was a totally unexpected boon. In several instances I found that Lohrli had made tentative attributions and then extrapolated from the content of the HW pieces to construct a fragmentary synchronic snapshot of the writers–whoever they were. Thus, for example, I knew from Lohrli that Francis Gwynne was a squatter in New South Wales. We are given the names of several brothers and are informed about some of their movements and transactions in the 1850s. However, Lohrli had no idea where Francis was born or died, who his parents were, how and when he got to Australia, nor what happened to him after the 1850s. In Gwynne’s case, patient trawling through the census data, births, marriages and deaths and migration records of Britain and Australia throughout the nineteenth century, enabled me to piece together the skeleton life of a younger son of a gentleman farmer in West Wales, migrating with three of his brothers (and, for a time, his father and step-mother) to the frontier lands of the Australian outback. One of his brothers died young, another went bankrupt, but Francis Gwynne made a success of his hard-bitten life as a cattle rancher, bought a town-house in Kensington and retired to London as an English (Welsh-Australian) gentleman. In 1900 he was buried in the churchyard of the...

Ewolucja taktyki wojennej Irlandczyków i Brytyjczyków podczas wojny o niepodległość Irlandii w latach 1919–1921

W artykule przeprowadzona została analiza przebiegu wojny o niepodległość Irlandii z punktu widzenia doktryny, strategii i taktyki wojskowej obu stron. Przyjęty został układ chronologiczny zagadnień, począwszy od zasadzki w Soloheadbag aż do podpisania angielsko-irlandzkiego traktatu pokojowego. Podczas analizy wyszczególnione zostały następujące etapy rozwoju konfliktu: okres walki kształtującej się dopiero Irlandzkiej Armii Republikańskiej z Królewską Policją Irlandzką, brytyjska odpowiedź, podczas której pojawiają się jednostki nazywane później Czarno-Brunatnymi i Posiłkowymi, oraz faza eskalacji przemocy zakończona wydarzeniami tzw. krwawej niedzieli. Po niej następuje etap stanu wojennego na terenie wyspy i zaangażowania w konflikt regularnego wojska brytyjskiego. Praca oparta jest na relacjach świadków wydarzeń zebranych przez Biuro Historii Militarnej Irlandii.

Ireland’s Decade of Conflict, 1913-23 (III)

Ireland’s Decade of Conflict, 1913-23 (III) Sean Brophy The Anglo-Irish War (1919-21) In the British general election of 1918, Sinn Féin, vigorously opposing the extension of military conscription to Ireland, won a huge majority of the seats in the south. They withdrew from Westminster and established an Irish parliament – or Dáil – in Dublin, essentially ignoring Britain and proceeding to govern themselves. The British administration remained in place, as did the army and the national police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary. All the conditions for anAnglo-Irish war existed as, by means of political agitation and violence, Sinn Féin and the IRAproceeded to render the country ungovernable. The Irish government, through its armed wing, the IRA, fought a guerrilla war from 1919 to the middle of 1921. Through the IRA’s activities and the reactions and reprisals of the British military, and the auxiliary police they drafted in (the so-called ‘Black and Tans’and Auxiliaries), the loss of life and destruction to property was huge. Both sides fought to a standstill, neither one yielding on the principle of whether Ireland was to become a thirty-two county republic or a dominion of the British Empire, with home rule under the crown and no coercion of Ulster to become part of a united country. Westminster passed the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, giving home rule along the lines of the original 1914 measure to two parliaments, one in Dublin for twenty-six counties, the other in Belfast for the six counties of Ulster, thus partitioning the country. King George V opened the Belfast parliament at Stormont Castle in 1921. Sinn Féin declared the act illegal and refused to accept a Dublin parliament on such lines: they had their own freely-elected parliament of a thirty-two county Irish republic, their own army and its supporters. In July 1921, representatives of the Dáil were invited to London to agree a truce and the basis on which negotiations for home rule could proceed. Following in the footsteps of successive British governments, since Robert Peel faced Daniel O’Connell in the early nineteenth century, Lloyd George was unequivocal: no settlement would be acceptable that threatened the integrity of the British Empire and fidelity to the crown or that coerced Ulster. Studies • volume 106 • number 421 95 Ireland’s Decade of Conflict, 1913-23 (III) These principles would be defended by total war. De Valera tried to teach Lloyd George the same lessons of Irish-British history as Daniel O’Connell had done when he wrote to Queen Victoria in 1843, with no greater success. He argued that the British Empire was finished and that it was in British interests to have it transform itself into an association of former British colonies, including the United States of America. Ireland would join such an association and accept the king as the head of those associated states. But, for his interlocutor, this was too big an imaginative leap and too formidable a task. Even so, the truce held and subsequent negotiations culminated in a treaty agreement in December 1921. De Valera himself did not attend the negotiations. Was he reserving the right, as head of state, to decide on the treaty before it was signed? He knew from his truce negotiations with Lloyd George that conceding a thirty-two county republic was impossible for the British and that dominion status was all that could be achieved. Did he position himself to not be identified with the failure to vindicate the republic and thus secure his political base in Ireland? Did the negotiators discourage him from participating because they knew they could not get agreement with the British if he were present? Civil War (1922-23) The plenipotentiaries of the Dáil, led by Arthur Griffith, signed the treaty without De Valera’s presence or approval. In the Dáil, where the debates revealed the rancour between deputies on either side, it was passed by a vote of sixty-four to fifty-seven. In the general election that followed, the protreaty party won a majority of seats and claimed the support of the people and their acceptance of...

Ferocious Times: The IRA, the RIC, and Britain's Failure in 1919–1921

The 1916 Rising was, in military terms, a shambolic failure. Despite the fact that Britain was locked in a gruelling struggle with Germany, the Rising was still utterly crushed within a week. How then, in the aftermath of victory against Germany, did Britain fail to win the subsequent struggle with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) between 1919 and 1921? This article assesses some of the key factors that played out in the conflict, drawing particular attention to the IRA's focus on the Royal Irish Constabulary and the consequences of this, and then later, how distorted perceptions of the proximity of success ultimately undermined British commitment. One of the most remarkable features of the conflict was the widespread belief among many on the British side (and more than a few in the Republican camp) that the IRA was on the verge of total defeat when the truce was declared in 1921. The IRA had suffered heavy casualties and were running low on weapons and ammunition. Yet, somehow the movement prevailed. This article aims to shed light on how and why that happened.

Cockfighting in Ireland, 1900 to 1925

Cockfighting in Ireland, 1900 to 1925 Brian Ward Today, it is difficult to imagine the popularity and omnipresence of the blood sport of cockfighting in British society. The practice carries a long and rich history in England, reaching back to the time of Roman invasions and continuing right up until it was banned in 1835, and illegally, long after. In his 1912 Sport in the Olden Time, Walter Gilbey writes that it was common for members of the English clergy to keep cocks, and “it was not unusual when town beat town in a long main to ring the church bells in celebration of the victory.”1 People from all classes of society kept cocks for fighting and rubbed shoulders at the cockpits across the nation. In contrast, cockfighting in Ireland became popular only in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, when it was likely introduced by the gentry.2 James Kelly writes in Sport in Ireland (2014) that it was initially popular in Dublin as well as in the Ulster counties, where Edward Wakefield noted that it was practiced among the descendants of English and Scottish settlers.3 Before the growth of football and other organized sports in the nineteenth century, cockfights were commonly organized between birds representing opposing towns or counties. A whole industry grew up around the breeding, feeding, training, and arming of cocks for “mains,” as the events were commonly called. Cockfighting as an activity often took place alongside horse races or in the morning or evening of a race, and like racing, was enjoyed by men of all classes. It is not surprising then, that—despite the introduction of animal cruelty legislation in 1835—cockfighting continued to be popular for much of the nineteenth century. In 1849, further legislation titled “An Act for the More Effective Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” was introduced, and other restrictions followed in later decades.4 However, the sports historian Michael Huggins writes that despite [End Page 97] the ban, cockfighting “continued in attenuated and clandestine form for much of the century. This was partly because it was by no means merely a working-class activity.”5 The Irish experience was somewhat different, as the sport had begun to wane in popularity years before restrictive legislation was introduced. Paul Rouse writes that ‘“The Rules for Matching and Fighting Cocks in Ireland” was dropped from the Racing Calendar in 1819, which suggests a lack of interest among the sporting readership. The practice of holding fights in “lawns of big houses on the morning of race meetings was also abandoned.”6 Moreover, cockfighting in Ireland never took hold as a genuinely national pastime, but was, rather, restricted to regional pockets of popularity even before it was made illegal. After 1835, the activity continued to exist on the margins of Irish society where the cockfighting community took on anti-establishment characteristics. Mains were organized on county borders and in marginal landscapes, such as mountain valleys, river and canal banks, or islands on loughs. The continuation of cockfighting was also helped by the perceived lack of interest amongst the Royal Irish Constabulary to investigate cockfighting, and reluctance on the part of the magistracy to impose sentences.7 The sport’s unique underground qualities led James Kelly to conclude that “the historiographical landscape is featureless when it comes to cockfighting.”8 An exception to overall the paucity of research on the topic of Irish cockfighting is the reportage found in the provincial press. Taken as a whole, the scattered stories and references in these low-circulation newspapers afford an opportunity to at least begin to understand this secretive alternative culture, which existed in Ireland during a period of intense strife and violence. Evidence from the provincial press reveals the popularity of cockfighting among an audience made up of all classes and faiths. Indeed, newspaper reports repeatedly comment on the inclusive attitudes of this particular sporting fraternity. Despite an established ban stretching back six decades, there was a widespread interest in cockfighting within Ireland between 1900 and 1911. In July 1903, the Irish Times (obviously not one of the provincial papers) reported that three hundred people attended a cockfight outside of Monaghan, where twenty-four...

Policing the empire / Policing the metropole : Some thoughts on models and types

This article discusses the models and styles of policing deployed by European powers in their overseas empires. The main focus is on the police forces created in the British Empire and the assumption that the model for these institutions was the Royal Irish Constabulary. The article argues that, in reality, police systems in the empire were much more of a pragmatic pick and mix depending on the size and spread of the European population in a colony, the finance available and the size and form of the region to be policed. It builds on an earlier typology of European police and suggests that this extended typology provides a starting point for exploring the complexities of colonial police institutions and that it has relevance beyond the British Imperial context.