Irish Constabulary Research Articles

‘The other boys of Kilmichael’: No. 2 Section, ‘C’ Company, Auxiliary Division Royal Irish Constabulary, 28 November 1920

The Kilmichael incident of November 1920, in which an Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) column of nearly forty men ambushed and killed all bar one of a motorized patrol of eighteen Auxiliary Division Royal Irish Constabulary cadets, proved to be one of the I.R.A.'s most noted victories of the Anglo-Irish War. Recent historiography has been dominated by controversy over the late Peter Hart's 1998 conclusion that contemporary British claims of I.R.A. mutilation of the cadet's dead bodies were true. However, this article aims to demonstrate that studying other aspects of Kilmichael, such as the British unit, can enable a broader understanding of both the ambush, and of contemporary British policy concerns.

THE FORMATION, COMPOSITION, AND CONDUCT OF THE BRITISH SECTION OF THE PALESTINE GENDARMERIE, 1922–1926

ABSTRACTThe British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie was raised in early 1922 by the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, as a striking force and riot squad for Palestine. Through the agency of the Irish police chief, General Hugh Tudor, this British Gendarmerie was recruited almost entirely from amongst the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its Auxiliary Division, then in the process of disbanding as part of the recent Anglo-Irish settlement. The international notoriety of the Black and Tans led to official efforts to obscure the fact that the force was to be drawn from RIC ranks but these were entirely unsuccessful. Indeed, the British Gendarmerie itself quickly acquired a reputation for Black and Tan-type behaviour but an examination of its four-year career indicates that this derived more from preconceptions about the force's composition than from its actual conduct. In fact, in terms of force discipline and levels of police brutality, the British Gendarmerie's record compared very favourably with those of its ‘parent’ forces in Ireland, lending support to recent claims that historians have tended to over-value character-based explanations at the expense of circumstance-based assessments when analysing police behaviour both during the Irish revolution and the Palestine Mandate.

The British State and the Irish Rebellion of 1916: An Intelligence Failure Or a Failure of Response?

The teleological narrative that has dominated the handling of intelligence by the British state in the events that led up to the 1916 Irish Rebellion in Dublin has been characterised as a cocktail of incompetence and mendacity. Using new and existing archive material this article argues that both the cabinet in London and key members of the Irish Executive in Dublin were supplied with accurate and timely intelligence by the Admiralty's signals intelligence unit, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police with respect to this event. Far from being a failure of intelligence here is evidence to show that there occurred a failure of response on behalf of key decision-makers. The warnings that were given by intelligence organisations were filtered through the existing policy preferences and assumptions. As a result of these factors accurate evaluations and sound judgement were not exercised by key officials, such as Sir Matthew Nathan, in Dublin Castle.

Sport in a Time of Revolution: Sinn Féin and the Hunt in Ireland, 1919

Sport in a Time of Revolution: Sinn Féin and the Hunt in Ireland, 1919 William Murphy (bio) Introduction On 5 march 1919 twenty-five members of the Muskerry Foxhounds from east Cork rode out. The Muskerry’s master, Jerry Rohan, was not present. For several weeks he had sought a compromise that would see local Sinn Féin activists end their campaign to stop fox-hunting, but by early March he had conceded defeat, leading the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) inspector for the area to report that the Muskerry had abandoned their sport for the year. Master or no master, however, twenty-five defiant members set off that morning, and according to the correspondent of the Freeman’s Journal, at first “all went merrily” and there “was abundant promise of good day’s sport.” Early on, two men on foot attempted to persuade the hunters to stop, but after a brief conversation the spoilsports were ignored and the incident was momentarily forgotten when a fox appeared, offering the opportunity of a chase. When that fortunate animal eluded them, the hunters moved on to the townland of Ballyshoneen. There the unusual action began. As the hunters prepared to rouse a new quarry, they heard the sound of whistles that signaled the arrival of fifty to sixty Sinn Féin supporters. This group adopted a vigorously persuasive approach. Wielding hurleys and sticks, they immediately set upon the hounds and horses. When a Catholic clergyman, who was among the hunting party, demanded that the attackers desist, he was, in the words of the Freeman’s prolix euphemism, “answered by an opprobrious sally of unseemly names and epithets.” Hurleys, sticks, and stones were met with riding crops, but soon the hunt was in full retreat, withdrawing to the sound of a revolver shot and the [End Page 112] shouted question, “Now will you obey Sinn Féin and the orders of our executive?”1 This incident was among the final confrontations in an almost forgotten campaign that saw radical nationalists wreak widespread disruption upon the activities of Ireland’s hunt enthusiasts during the early months of 1919.2 The Irish revolution of 1912 to 1923 has been explored in ever more depth and using a variety of approaches in recent years, but as yet scholars have written comparatively little about the ways in which the profound instability of this period, punctuated with violence, affected the quotidian of Irish life. To what degree did the series of political crises that together constitute this “revolution” impact upon the day-to-day? To what extent, and in what ways, did commonplace practices become sites of contest? Irish sporting life is an obvious place to explore these questions because sport is one of the most significant markers of identity in modern societies. Fox-hunting is not a product of the Victorian sports revolution. It is not a mass participation sport today and it was not one in 1919, but it did have deep roots in rural Ireland, and local hunts impacted upon the lives of many who did not themselves ride to hounds. Indeed, it was in part this combination of exclusivity and pervasiveness that exposed the hunt to attack. This article will explore the origins of the campaign, the pattern of its progress, the motivations of those who participated, and the responses of those for whom it posed challenges or questions. In doing so, it will throw into relief aspects of Ireland’s multilayered revolutionary conflict and provide an alternative angle from which to view the contests around political identity, class identity, space, and legitimate authority that marked Irish provincial society at the beginning of 1919. [End Page 113] Origins of a Campaign The “stopping the hunt” campaign of 1919 originated in the exuberance that followed Sinn Féin’s triumph at the general election of December 1918. Increasingly confident, the party pressured the British government to release the large number of political prisoners incarcerated in England and Ireland. They focused in particular upon a group of ninety-six internees held at seven English prisons.3 Many of these had been arrested in May 1918 when the authorities, intent upon a more aggressive policy in...

Rheumatic fever in Ireland: the role of Dr Monica Lea Wilson (1889–1971)

In 1869 William Stokes pointed out that the severity of rheumatic fever in Dublin had declined over recent decades. Similar worldwide decline led to the closure of many internationally famous rheumatic fever centres. The discovery by Robert Collis that rheumatic fever was a sequel to haemolytic streptococcal infection and the subsequent discovery of penicillin accelerated the decline. St Gabriel's Hospital in Dublin opened in 1951 under the clinical direction of Dr Monica Lea Wilson. Contrary to contemporary medical opinion a regimen of very prolonged bed rest was enforced. From 1961 the family doctors became concerned at the adverse psychological effects of the unnecessarily prolonged hospital stay. Twenty-seven of the 56 inpatients were re-assessed. None of them showed any evidence of active rheumatic fever and their parents took them home. The hospital closed in 1968. Dr Lea Wilson distanced herself from mainstream medicine and she is best remembered for having presented an unrecognized Caravaggio painting to the Jesuit Order in recognition of their pastoral support at the time of the controversial assassination in 1920 of her husband Percival, an Inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary.

The British State and the Irish Rebellion of 1916: An Intelligence Failure or a Failure of Response?

The teleological narrative that has dominated the handling of intelligence by the British state in the events that led up to the 1916 Irish Rebellion in Dublin has been characterised as a cocktail of incompetence and mendacity. Using new and existing archive material this article argues that both the cabinet in London and key members of the Irish Executive in Dublin were supplied with accurate and timely intelligence by the Admiralty's signals intelligence unit, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police with respect to this event. Far from being a failure of intelligence here is evidence to show that there occurred a failure of response on behalf of key decision-makers. The warnings that were given by intelligence organisations were filtered through the existing policy preferences and assumptions. As a result of these factors accurate evaluations and sound judgement were not exercised by key officials, such as Sir Matthew Nathan, in Dublin Castle.

Comparaciones (no odiosas) entre la (Royal) Irish Constabulary y la Guardia Civil Española en los relatos de viajeros de habla inglesa por la España de los siglos XIX y XX

During the last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th century the Spanish Guardia Civil received multiple appraisals from English-speaking travellers in Spain at the time – all of them British– as regards this body’s efficiency, professionalism and incorruptibility. The comparison of this Spanish military corps with the (Royal) Irish Constabulary, a police corps of similar professional prestige, is constant in the English travel literature of the period, to the extent of becoming a recurrent literary cliché. The time span during which both corps collect such laudatory comparisons in the travel accounts of the age coincides almost exactly with the life of the Royal Irish Constabulary, that is, from 1867, the year when the Irish corps was awarded the adjective of “Royal” as a recognition of their loyalty and meritorious work in the repression of the popular and pro-independence riots and their support to the colonial interests of the metropolis, up to its final disappearance in 1922. From then on the Guardia Civil was more frequently compared to other famous and prestigious foreign police forces such as the French Gendarmerie, the Italian Carabinieri, the F.B.I., the New York Police and the Canadian Mounted Police.

“No ‘Wild Geese’ this time”?: IRA Emigration after the Irish Civil War

“No ‘Wild Geese’ this time”? IRA Emigration after the Irish Civil War* Gavin Foster (bio) In July 1923, two months after the Irish Republican Army abandoned its armed campaign against the Free State government, Éamon de Valera issued a defiant statement on behalf of the anti-Treaty cause. “There will be no ‘Wild Geese’ . . . this time,” he vowed. “The soldiers of the Republic have been ordered to live and die in Ireland, and they will obey. Living or dead, we mean to establish the right of Irish Republicans to live and work openly for the complete liberation of our country.”1 By referencing the Wild Geese—the folk term for Jacobite soldiers exiled from Ireland after their defeat in the Williamite War—de Valera was telegraphing a deeper historical truth that was on many people’s minds in the aftermath of Ireland’s Civil War.2 Well-versed in Irish history, the “revolutionary generation” knew that failed nationalist risings tended to produce “mini-diasporas” of exiles.3 Along with the Wild Geese, there had been the earlier Flight of the Earls, [End Page 94] thousands of United Irishmen who fled government repression in the 1790s, the scattered remnants of the Young Ireland Rising of 1848, and a stream of Fenian émigrés in the postfamine period. De Valera was optimistic that by maintaining discipline and redirecting energies into the political arena, the republican movement could arrest this historical cycle. Nevertheless, emigration took a heavy toll on the losers of the Civil War. The members of this “Lost Legion”4 primarily ended up in the United States5 where, among other things, they shaped labor history through their sizable presence in New York City’s powerful Transport Workers’ Union.6 Republican émigrés even entered American popular culture by way of Raymond Chandler’s classic detective novel, The Big Sleep, whose menagerie of underworld Los Angeleans includes Terence “Rusty” Regan, an ex-IRA officer turned bootlegger and bodyguard. It has even been suggested that Irish-American support for the IRA during the recent “Troubles” owes a great deal to Civil War exiles who passed their militant republicanism on to their children and grandchildren.7 An episode recalled with great bitterness by the generation of republicans who lived through it, and a significant revolutionary outcome [End Page 95] in its own right, the flight of the republican “Wild Geese” has been all but ignored by historians.8 Several factors have contributed to the scholarly neglect of this episode. For one, political historians tend to pass quickly over the messy aftermath of the Civil War, focusing instead on state formation and the emergence of a viable two-party system from the mid- and late 1920s. A similar lacuna exists within the subfield of Irish migration studies, which has treated transatlantic emigration in the 1920s as an afterthought.9 It might also be argued that as simultaneously a political and a demographic phenomenon, the republican exodus falls between the cracks of political and migration history as each is typically conceived. Although a small body of literature bridges this divide by examining the demographic consequences of revolutionary violence, most of these studies are concerned with the departure of southern Unionists, ex-service men, members of the disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary, and others tainted by their association with British rule.10 Of course, republican activists were merely one current in a much larger outflow of emigrants from Ireland in the 1920s. But given their experience of internment and defeat and their continued fraught relationship with the new state, republicans faced unique pressures and conditions that shaped their collective identity as exiles rather than as emigrants per se. These push factors included police harassment and government repression, poor employment prospects and poverty [End Page 96] due to blacklisting, and a broader sense of postrevolutionary disillusionment.11 Yet given the minimal research on the subject, the relative importance of political, economic, and other catalysts to republican emigration remains unclear. What follows is the first sustained analysis of the IRA’s emigration problem following the Civil War. Volunteers (as members of the IRA were known) were joined overseas by thousands of republican noncombatants, but strictly speaking the...

The author of Tales of the R.I.C.

TALES OF THE R.I.C. are a series of anonymous short stories that appeared first in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1920 and 1921 and then in book form in the latter year.1 Strongly unionist and anti-republican, they are based on episodes in the Royal Irish Constabulary’s struggle against the Irish Republican Army during what Lloyd George described as the Irish ‘police war’ of 1919–21. Writers on the war, both popular2 and scholarly,3 have cited the Tales; but the value of the stories as an historical source cannot be assessed until its anonymous author is identified. The Tales themselves–some tragic, some funny in a sinister way, some just plain odd—provide no clue to the author’s identity.4 They begin around the spring of 1920, when the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), ‘after about as bad a hammering as any force ever received, were beginning to get their tails up again’; they end with the truce of July 1921 when the force, betrayed by its political masters in London, is forced to lay down its arms. ‘The day will come in Ireland when men will pray to God for a sight of the good old green uniform of the R.I.C. And it will be too late.’5

The social composition of the senior officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary, 1881–1911

In an influential article, William Lowe and Elizabeth Malcolm have argued that the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.) became ‘domesticated’ between its formation in 1836 and its disbandment in 1922:[I]t was naturalised by becoming in its composition more truly representative of the Irish population; it was attached to home as its duties became more routine, more akin to housekeeping than to peace-keeping; and it was tamed because its ability to use force was greatly diminished ... [T]he RIC was by the early years of the twentieth century very much a civil police force, reflecting very accurately in its composition the socio-economic structure of Irish society and in its operations the needs of small, relatively law-abiding, rural communities.

The Irish Schoolboy Novel

The Irish Schoolboy Novel Ciaran O'Neill (bio) Some men never recover from education. Oliver St. John Gogarty1 In his 1965 autobiography, Vive Moi! Seán O'Faoláin recalled a Sunday morning ritual from his childhood in Cork City. His father, a member of the local Royal Irish Constabulary, would lead Seán and his brothers to Wellington Barracks, where they would join the loyal citizens of Edwardian Cork in saluting the church parade of the local British Army regiment. O'Faoláin remembered a connection he once had made, listening faithfully to "God Save the King" at his father's knee: When the drums rolled and the brass shook the air I could hear the sabre clash, the hoofbeats, the rifle fire of all the adventure books I had read—Mainly Henty's: The Dash for Khartoum, With Kitchener in the Soudan, One of the Twenty-eighth, Under Drake's Flag.2 [End Page 147] O'Faoláin was not alone among Irish writers in his exposure to G.A. Henty's many empire adventure stories.3 Generations of Irish boys and girls had by then sat enthralled, reading of the exploits of well-mannered wanderers fresh from public schools, as they colonize and civilize out among the farthest reaches of the British Empire. These adventure stories were the lineal descendants of the "schoolboy novel," a genre that owes its existence to the phenomenal popularity of an 1857 novel by Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, based on life at the famous English public school in Rugby. The passing of progressive legislation in the 1870s, the Forster Education Act of 1870 in Britain, and the Intermediate Education Act of 1878 in Ireland helped create over one million new places in schools across Britain and Ireland.4 An increasingly literate youth audience, in turn, was targeted by cheap periodicals, such as The Boy's Own Paper (1879–1967). By the close of the nineteenth century, this genre was firmly established and its formula had altered to reflect the expansionist rhetoric of British society, allowing offshoots based on young adulthood and imperial adventure, such as those contained in the Henty novels of Seán O'Faoláin's youth. For Irish nationalists of the revival period, such as Padraic Pearse and Douglas Hyde, the consumption of these distilled tales of imperial power by Irish youths was at best corrupting and at worst invidious and anti-Irish. Ireland has its own set of much neglected schoolboy novels. Aside from James Joyce's seminal work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), few have received any critical attention, due in many cases to small print runs. This article is an attempt to rescue the Irish schoolboy novel from its relative obscurity. Although the quality of some of the novels may well be debatable, they nevertheless provide us with a rare and valuable glimpse at the reality of school life for Irish boys in the nineteenth century. The Irish form of this popular genre experienced three main phases from its birth in 1895 to its decline (along with that of the English schoolboy novel) in the 1930s. The earliest of the schoolboy novels, written while Ireland [End Page 148] was united with Britain, all reveal a distinct British cultural influence, the infamous "West Briton" tendency.5 In contrast, those written in the first decade of the Irish Free State mark the emergence of Cúchulainn as an important icon of heroic boyhood that provided an apparently ultra-Irish alternative to Tom Brown and his public school politesse. Finally, toward the end of what is considered the heyday of the schoolboy novel, a more critical and radical form emerged in the 1930s, hugely influenced by Joyce's A Portrait and best understood in relation to the Bildungsroman tradition in Ireland. All schoolboy novels are essentially novels of youth, of childhood, and of personal growth—providing authors with something of an ideological clean slate on which to forge a new national identity. As the Irish novels were published in a period often referred to as the "birth" of modern Ireland, it is possible to see them as a forgotten record of...

‘Get into a Crack Force and earn £20 a Month and all found…’: The Influence of the Palestine Police upon Colonial Policing 1922–19481

The development of a ‘colonial’ police model has typically been linked to the Irish Constabularies. Little consideration has been given to the influences of the Palestine Police. The British section of the Palestine Gendarmerie was created in 1920 with the recruitment of former members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Black and Tans. Meanwhile training for colonial police officers continued in Northern Ireland until 1932. At this point it was the Palestine Police that provided the recruiting and training ground for senior colonial policemen until its disbandment in 1948. Thereafter, its ‘colonial’ policing practices and traditions were carried throughout the British Empire and Commonwealth by its former members.

Irish Constabulary Officers, 1837–1922: Profile of a Professional Elite

Irish Constabulary Officers, 1837–1922: Profile of a Professional Elite

The Royal Irish Constabulary (review)

The Royal Irish Constabulary (review)

Review: The Royal Irish Constabulary: A History and Personal Memoir

Review: The Royal Irish Constabulary: A History and Personal Memoir

New Ways of Looking at the State Apparatus and the State Archive in Nineteenth-Century Ireland 'Curiosities from That Phonetic Museum': Royal Irish Constabulary Reports and Their Political Uses, 1879-91

This essay seeks to contextualise the intelligence work of the Royal Irish Constabulary, particularly in the 1880s, in terms of the wider British and imperial practice and, as a corollary, to reflect upon aspects of the structure of the state apparatus and the state archive in Ireland since the Union. The author contrasts Irish and British police and bureaucratic work and suggests parallels between Ireland and other imperial locations, especially India. This paper also defines the narrowly political, indeed partisan, uses to which this intelligence was put, particularly during the Special Commission of 1888 on 'Parnellism and crime', when government-held police records were made available to counsel for The Times. By reflecting on the structure of the state apparatus and its use in this instance, the author aims to further the debate on the governance of nineteenth-century Ireland and to explore issues of colonial identity and practice. The line of argument proposed in this essay is prefigured in Margaret O'Callaghan, British high politics and a nationalist Ireland: criminality, land and the law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 1994).

The Royal Irish Constabulary and the Black and Tans in County Louth 1919-1922

The Royal Irish Constabulary and the Black and Tans in County Louth 1919-1922

New Ways of Looking at the State Apparatus and the State Archive in Nineteenth–Century Ireland: ‘Curiosities from that Phonetic Museum’—Royal Irish Constabulary Reports and Their Political Uses, 1879–91

New Ways of Looking at the State Apparatus and the State Archive in Nineteenth–Century Ireland: ‘Curiosities from that Phonetic Museum’—Royal Irish Constabulary Reports and Their Political Uses, 1879–91

The ‘scum of London’s underworld’? British Recruits for the Royal Irish Constabulary, 1920-21

Thousands of British ex-servicemen joined the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence. Nicknamed 'Black and Tans' for their haphazard uniforms, these British recruits are notorious for their viciousness. Historians agree that the 'Tans' were somehow predisposed to violence. Some charge that the RIC deliberately recruited criminals, but most argue that the Black and Tans were the brutal products of a demoralising war. New research indicates that British RIC recruits were neither ex-convicts nor a British Freikorps, but rather they were fairly ordinary British workingmen, whose behaviour was caused, not by a violent disposition, but by a violent situation.

Landlord Responses to the Irish Land War, 1879–87

In his magisterial study, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland, William Vaughan redresses imbalance of John Pomfret's pioneering work, Struggle for Land in Ireland, 1800-1923 (Princeton, 1930), that depicted Irish landlords as so many alien and absentee predators who positively relished rack-renting and evicting their tenants. Vaughan's demolition of Pomfret orthodoxy epitomizes best kind of archivally based revisionism. Although he exonerates landlords from charge of social vampirism, Vaughan stresses their manifold failures as estate managers, preservers of and role models for their tenants. While giving them credit for having survived fallout from Great Famine, he deplores their inertia or lack of enterprise as well as their inability to exploit full value of their lands. In decades following famine they extracted about 80 per cent of available rents annually and spent paltry sums on agricultural improvements. To make matters worse, they to curb their appetite for an aristocratic lifestyle, to bridge great social divide between themselves and their tenants, and to resist--let alone support--the forces of political democracy led by an assertive Catholic middle outside Northeast Ulster. No longer masters of their fate, they had lost their ability to influence British state. But then, as Vaughan puts it ever so pungently, European landed elite crowed without challenge on its own dunghill. Vaughan also contends that because they lacked the protection of tough state, versed in ways of bullying peasants, landlords looked to Dublin Castle and Royal Irish Constabulary for their salvation. In short, they had ceased to make themselves useful by providing law and order; they allowed their tenants to rebel in 1879; they no longer dominate[d] constituencies or parliament, and they were at best quixotic paternalists who could not protect their people from vicissitudes of outside world. Having failed to build up reservoirs of informal power, they were increasingly peripheral to land system. Not only did they fall far short of what Disraeli considered a real but they had also abdicated their position as most knowing class in Ireland to lawyers, policemen, and priests. Their failure to inspire an entrepreneurial spirit in their tenants, to take on responsibilities of proper rentier class, and to use their estates as sources of power and wealth, as did English aristocracy, meant that they had no chance of surviving as ruling class. (1) In sum, if Vaughan had to grade their performance, they would be lucky to attain gentleman's C. Such strictures may seem ironic coming from historian whom some critics have seen as letting landlords off lightly when it came to abuse of their social and economic power. After all, Vaughan's book provoked one reviewer to write landlords off as so many fossilized parasites. (2) Ironically, noted nationalist Alexander M. Sullivan, M.P., would have heartily agreed with Vaughan's verdict except for issues of under-rented farms and evictions. In two long letters to Times in 1880, this latter-day Young Irelander accused gentry of having achieved little over course of three centuries despite their monopoly of privilege, and wealth. He pointed out that one hundred landlords had just held crisis meeting in Dublin to discuss country's long-term smouldering civil war, and all they could recommend was repression. The sum of all their statesmanship, all their counsel, all their reforms, all their conciliation, he declared, bald demand on England for more coercion. After all, a landlord or gentry is meant to be something more than so many rent-spenders, fox hunters, and grouse shooters. And if they were not, then they had no right to complain about being heartily despised. …