Our politicians ignore those who served as policemen before 1922, while those who killed them are seen as heroes, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
THE REFUSAL of the authorities to give any official recognition to today’s ceremony at Glasnevin Cemetery to commemorate the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) gives a hollow ring to the Government’s claim that the decade of commemorations will be inclusive.
It is bizarre that the Government sees no difficulty about commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Ulster Volunteer Force, formed with the express purpose of opposing Irish democracy by force, yet it has no plans to honour the ordinary Irish policemen who served the community before 1922.
Today’s ceremony is being organised by two retired members of An Garda Síochána who wish to honour their predecessors and remember the 500 or so police officers killed by the IRA, often in brutal circumstances.
The organisers have emphasised that they have no intention of denigrating the role of the IRA or any other group who participated in the momentous events that took place in the 1912 to 1922 period; they simply want to commemorate the policeman, most of whom acted honourably.
“We have the beautifully restored Memorial Gardens to mark the men and women who died in the world wars. We feel it is also time that we should remember those who served in the RIC and DMP,” said Patrick McCarthy and Gerard Lovett, the retired gardaí organising the event.
The fact that in the welter of planned commemorative events the State has, so far, not made any move to honour those men indicates that a narrow-minded approach to the past still holds sway in official Ireland despite all the self-congratulation of recent years about our new sense of inclusiveness.
Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore did make a respectful acknowledgment of the policemen who were killed and the impact on their families when launching the decade of commemorations back in April, but so far that has been the only reference to them.
To honour the men who served in the RIC does not imply an endorsement of everything they did, any more than the commemoration of Michael Collins at Béal na Blá last weekend implied an endorsement of all his actions.
As Conor Brady pointed out in this paper yesterday, the RIC men generally conducted themselves with forbearance and dignity in the face of a ruthless terror campaign directed against them by Collins. Their unwillingness to respond in kind prompted the British government to import the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries to wage a counter-terror campaign. While few members of the RIC or DMP joined the Garda on the foundation of the new State, in time many of their sons and grandsons followed the family tradition. At least five Garda commissioners had ancestors who were in the RIC, and the policing methods and ethos of the Garda owes an awful lot to its predecessors.
Anybody, whatever their political views, who wants to fully understand what happened in Ireland during the War of Independence should read Richard Abbott’s book Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922. Published over a decade ago it dispassionately chronicled the circumstances surrounding the death of every policeman killed during the struggle. It is an eye-opening work.
Failing to remember an important group who played a vital role in Irish society for so long not only distorts our sense of the past; it contributes to a warped view of the present.
In his groundbreaking essay for the magazine Studies written in advance of the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising in 1966, but not published until 1972, Fr Francis Shaw SJ addressed some of the key problems created by a narrow nationalistic interpretation of the past. One of the difficulties he identified was that the dominant nationalist interpretation of history in the 1960s required the Irish people of that decade to disown their past and censure as unpatriotic the majority of their grandparents’ generation who were not attracted by new revolutionary ideas in 1916.
The then professor of early and medieval Irish at UCD summed it up by suggesting that the accepted canon of Irish history “asks us to praise in others what we do not esteem or accept in ourselves”.
In other words the majority of law-abiding people who live by democratic standards are required to despise those in earlier generations who adhered to the same values while honouring those who rejected them.
In political terms it means that political leaders from Daniel O’Connell to John Redmond are airbrushed out of popular history while revolutionaries such as Pádraig Pearse and Michael Collins are elevated to iconic status.
The reality is that most of our modern political leaders have far more in common with the values of the old Irish Parliamentary Party and its leader than they have with those who directed the activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Yet our current generation of politicians still finds it difficult to acknowledge their political predecessors while falling over themselves to pay obeisance to revolutionary leaders whose values they don’t actually share.
This approach to our past means that those who served as policemen before 1922 are either denigrated or ignored, while those who killed them are accepted as heroes.
Yet when similar events happened in modern times most people were firmly behind the police and opposed to modern armed revolutionaries who at times showed as little compunction about killing gardaí as Collins’s squad had about killing RIC men.
The past is a different country but it is surely about time to give some recognition to those who have been ignored in the dominant popular historical narrative. After being forgotten for so long, those who died in the first World War can now be commemorated openly. If the Irish State cannot find it in its heart to commemorate those who served and died at home as policemen trying to keep the peace, the decade of commemoration will lack completeness.