If the people became armed and drilled, effective police control would vanish. Events are moving. Each county will soon have a trained army far outnumbering the police and those who control the volunteers will be in a position to dictate to what extent the law of the land may be carried into effect.
Inspector General, RIC, 1914
Between 1919 and 1922, 490 RIC men were killed by the IRA. The RIC were predominantly catholic, though there tended to be fewer catholics in the higher ranks; some were native Irish speakers. Many survivors stayed on in Ireland, usually adopting diplomatically low profiles in a society which saw them as remnants of a failed regime. Some of their fellow countrymen, like Dan Breen, saw them as, ‘a pack of deserters, spies and hirelings’.
Ernie Hogan remembered: ‘I had this pal when I was young in the 1950s – he was in Fianna Fáil with me – and his father had been RIC. I knew the dad well – he was a decent enough old character. He’d clearly done very well for himself and farmed a large holding in the Cahir area. I remember when he died in the mid 1960s that his death notice in the Irish Independent mentioned the fact that he was “ex-RIC”. Some people were amazed at his family’s effrontery, their lack of embarrassment about his previous existence. RIC men were supposed to be “invisible”. I have no doubt that there was a stigma attached to being ex-RIC in Tipperary.’
The armed RIC was always perceived as being the physical manifestation of British rule in Ireland. The British army came out of their barracks when serious suppression was demanded but it was the RIC who did the day-to-day political policing which got up the noses of both moderate and extreme separatists.
‘The Peeler and the Goat’, a song written in Bansha, a village on the road between Tipperary town and Cahir, was hugely popular in south-west Tipperary when Breen and Treacy were growing up. In the pre-radio era of sing-songs and crossroad entertainments, it was a favourite with the youths of the IRA. The ballad lampooned the RIC by celebrating the attempted arrest of a goat in Bansha; it was apparently based on a real incident, during which the RIC took some troublesome goats into custody:
As Bansha peelers were, one night,
On duty a-patrolling, O,
They met a goat upon the road
Who seemed to be a-strolling, O,
With bayonets fixed they sallied forth,
And caught her by the wizen, O,
And then swore out a mighty oath
They’d send her off to prison, O,
‘O, mercy, sirs,’ the goat replied,
‘Pray, let me tell my story, O,
I am no Rogue or Ribbonman,
No Croppy, Whig or Tory, O,
I’m guilty not of any crime
Of petty or high treason, O,
And I’m sadly wanted at this time,
For ’tis the milking season.’
The Irish Constabulary Act of 1822 had established the Irish Constabulary. Amongst its first duties – during the Tithe War – was the forcible seizure of tithes (payments made by the community for the support of the anglican clergy) from the catholic majority and the presbyterian minority populations.
In 1848, they demonstrated their adroit taste for suppression by putting down the Young Irelanders’ rebellion. The fenian rising of 1867, marked by attacks on isolated police stations, was suppressed with ease because the police had infiltrated the fenians with spies and informers.
‘The constabulary started off as the Irish Constabulary,’ said IRA member Martin Walton, ‘but, for their zeal during the fenian rising, Victoria graciously gave them the term “Royal”. And they were the eyes and ears.’
By 1901, Ireland contained approximately 1,600 barracks and some 11,000 constables. The majority of the lower ranks in rural areas were of the same social class, religion and general background as their neighbours. For this very reason they were usually transferred far away from their home areas so that social and familial connections with the local community were broken. Through their enforcement of tens of thousands of evictions in rural Ireland and their harassment of land league leaders, the RIC became deeply unpopular with the majority catholic and nationalist population during the nineteenth century. By 1916, they’d gained some general level of begrudged acceptance. It was this very normalisation of relations which goaded the republicans who saw them as enforcers of an unwanted union with Britain.
With the establishment of the Free State, many RIC men went north to join the RUC. As a result, the original RUC was forty per cent catholic. This fell to eight per cent, as those men reached retirement. Some RIC members joined the gardaí – such men had assisted the IRA in different ways. Many retired, the Free State having agreed to pay their pensions. Others, faced with threatened or actual violent reprisals, fled to Britain.
Seán Kavanagh, who gathered intelligence from RIC informers for Michael Collins, said that, outside of Dublin, the real army of occupation in the years leading up to Soloheadbeg was the RIC, which was armed and semi-military in structure: ‘The RIC provided accurate information on every Volunteer company in the country outside of Dublin, while the members of the political wing of the “C” division of the DMP [Dublin Metropolitan Police] reported in detail on every prominent Volunteer in Dublin. After the Rising it was those “political” detectives who identified and selected the leaders for court-martial and summary execution or long sentences of penal servitude.’
Martin Walton said that: ‘The country was studded at the time with small police barracks every few miles … You couldn’t travel from Dublin to Swords – that’s about a distance of seven miles – without going into three RIC outposts and everybody passing up and down the road was noted carefully. In fact when Augustine Birrell, who had been the chief secretary here during the Rising, when he was questioned about the activities of the revolutionaries, he said that the Royal Irish Constabulary had Ireland under a microscope.’
Michael J. Costello (Fianna Éireann) said: ‘When I was a little scut growing up in Cloughjordan I was never frightened by the RIC. They seemed to a young child to be a civilised enough body of men but we knew too that it was the RIC who’d played a major role in suppressing the fenians. It was the RIC who’d supervised evictions in the bad old days. When I was a child it was commonplace for our parents’ generation to chat with RIC men in the public house or to pass the time of day with them on the street. 1916 changed all that. On the one hand, a lot of the people grew swiftly alienated from all manifestations of British rule. On the other hand, the RIC themselves became more shifty or suspicious. After Soloheadbeg the more superior men amongst them knew that the game was up and either got out or like Jerry Maher or David Neligan – two fine brave men – made themselves known to, and put themselves at the disposal of, the IRA. Eventually – by the time of the Truce – the RIC had just filled up with bowsies and blackguards. Soloheadbeg was tough. The two RIC killed that day may have been the embodiment of the British empire with two feet on the ground in Tipperary but, as I understand it, they were two harmless enough fellows – armed harmless enough fellows of course. It was a tough call and I’m glad I had no part in it. Dan Breen and Seán Treacy had their own attitude to things, their own solutions. They were their own men and, therefore, they got the whole thing going.’
James Malone, a member of the east Limerick Flying Column (the first of the flying columns) said the RIC, ‘were the eyes and ears of Dublin Castle. As long as they remained, British power remained. East Limerick and Tipperary Three were the brigades that commenced the policy of winnowing them out.’