So, the Irish government announces a plan to commemorate the RIC and Dublin Metropolitan Police (which is historically inadvisable in itself), and the hyperbolic claim is made that it will commemorate "the Black and Tans". For one thing, many rank and file members of the RIC were not only Irish Catholics, but actively worked as double agents for the IRA during the War of the Independence, whereas the Black and Tans were ex-Army men specifically drafted in from England to dole out brutality. Of course, the RIC were historically distrusted by all nationalists, primarily for their role in land evictions, but historical accuracy merits pedantry.
-
-
Unsurprisingly, the event has now been deferred. -
Come out ye black and tans topping both the UK and Ireland iTunes charts https://www.independent.ie/entertain...-38847105.htmlComment
-
-
-
Was about to post that. Good indeedComment
-
I'd also recommend Brian Hanley's book on the OfficialsComment
-
After that show Garcia got a text from his mam (second captains fan no.1) to tell him that both her grandfathers were in the dmp and joined the gardai.Comment
-
I got the sense that he was wondering about his family's own history while he was recording.
The next few years are going to be an absolute mess historically. This is just the first bout of the undercard.Comment
-
I don't think he was wondering too hard. His dad joined the royal navy in 1968. He had crossed that particular hurdle a long time ago. See one area where I disagree a bit with your man is the degree to which being a policeman was just another public sector job in a job market where such things were few and far between. I have ancestors who were in the connaught rangers, and were over in india, putting the ire in empire, and when finished with that they got themselves arrested as land agitators. To a lot of them it was simply another job.Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
A big part of the reason that the tans were called in was that a huge number of the unmarried men simply left the force as soon as the war of independence kicked off. Leaving those needing to support a family to stay in, trapped by many of the circumstances that forced them to join in the first place.
This is a complicated story, but it seems that we were more Interested in having a bad history face off between the blue shirts who have something sexual about the police, and the provos who are lying filth
Comment
-
I'd suggest that it's not that colonial policing was seen as "just another job" but rather the conditional access to whiteness gained by Irish emigres, who might have been discriminated against at home, but "white enough" for colonial authorities. Whether policing is "just enough job" depends on your subject position - and that's different depending on whether you're a white colonist or an irish catholic under British rule.Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
Obviously some people drew on their experiences of colonial administration and took that to national liberation at home (Casement, for example), but there's plenty of examples from Y Wladfa to Jewish emigration to South Africa and Argentina - of internally marginalised people within Europe emigrating to colonies and ensconcing themselves in the oppressor class.Comment
-
Insert your political clichés about Fine Gaelers here:
https://twitter.com/ireland_thinks/status/1220006193332092928
Comment
-
But there's some doubt as to the degree it was seen as colonial policing in Ireland, and not just you know, policing. Very little changed between the RIC and the Gardai. Most of the people retained after the switchover, were instructors. I mean the important thing to remember is that the RIC, was quite literally the first police force. There weren't any other police forces to compare it to for a long time, and while it would act as a template for colonial police forces around the world, it wasn't really that different to what was happening in britain.. Yes they were armed, but there were guns in every london police barracks, and that is still true of a lot of police forces today. Also before the police were established in britain, it was locally appointed constables supported by the Yeomanry, and You did not want to be dealing with them. There was a whole lot of this in Ireland, and a whole lot of the army, so one of the major driving forces for the creation of the police was to not have to be calling in these two military forces any more than was strictly necessary. The Gardai didn't become an unarmed force because we believed deeply that the police shouldn't be armed, they became an unarmed force to make it essentially morally unjustifiable for an IRA man to shoot them. It worked really well.
See the thing to remember is that until very late in the day, most people wanted home rule, and that meant a parliament in Dublin, which would have a police force, which was the RIC. It was perfectly logically consistent to be a home rule voter and be a policeman. In much the same way that it was perfectly consistent for 110,000 out of the 121,000 Irish volunteers to join the british army in 1914. Now there comes a point where that stops but that's very late in the day. So you wind up in 1919 with the first person killed in the war of independence being James McDonnell, a Native irish speaker from belmullet in Mayo, a 50 year old father of five, from small farmer stock. The IRA men who carried out the sologhead beg ambush, were read off the altar in every church in tipperary for murdering a family man who was doing his duty. Now this is exactly the sort of thing that you would expect from the Strong farmers' sons in the vestments, but it also sounds suspiciously like a lot of Sermons I remember being broadcast during the troubles, and not a million miles removed from what you would have heard at the funeral of Jerry McCabe. The other thing is that the historically extremely rebellious people of tipperary, would have been all too keenly aware that Tipperary was one of the most heavily militarized parts of the British empire. There had been 4,000 british troops in Tipperary town before the first world war. coming up to the end of 1918, there were 10,000 soldiers in the barracks in tipperary town. This was January 1919. There was an army barracks in every town with more than 1,000 people, and some of them, like the ones in Cahir (Cavalry) and Templemore were massive. There wouldn't have been that much of a gap between the number of British Army soldiers in Tipperary at that point in time, and the number of british army soldiers in India at its peak.
It wasn't like people didn't know what was likely to happen next. the centre of dublin was still a smoking ruin. A hell of a lot of people voted for Sinn Fein in the 1918 election because they were absolutely furious at the attempt to bring in conscription. I don't know just how many of those people were giving their imprimatur to a war of independence.Comment
-
I fully agree that many Irish Catholics would have considered membership of the RIC to have been purely a salaried profession, akin to the modern Gardaí, and in the instance of Cornelius Crean, he appears to have been entirely innocuous. Where Minister Flanagan appears to have gone wrong, as stated by the Taoiseach on This Week last Sunday, is that he failed to consult the Cabinet before publicising his proposal. That done, the Government would then have initiated all-party consultations on the most appropriate form of commemoration. This worked perfectly during the 1916 centenary, even defusing potential controversy over the inclusion of British soldiers on the Memorial Wall, so it seems odd that the precedents of caution and diligence weren't adhered to in this instance.Comment
Comment