In a piece written before Charlie Flanagan's decision to defer a planned commemoration for the RIC, Jim Duffy felt the original idea for a commemorative event was a positive one.  

As someone with members of the IRB and RIC in my ancestry I applaud their decision. The real history, as opposed to the myth, is complex. My great-grandfather was a republican. Two of his brothers were in the RIC. (Another was in a police force in Britain.) His son fled to the US in 1915 to avoid a gaol sentence for attacking an RIC member. His daughter helped that son escape. That daughter herself had two brothers-in-law in the RIC. She was my granny.

There are IRA guns buried in the garden of her family home. In that home, pictures of RIC relatives were on the wall.

The local RIC station was opened in the 1880s - following a petition by local nationalists and Catholics to the Chief Secretary for Ireland Asking for it to be opened, as a minority of local republicans were making life a misery for the local people. Some of the local republicans harassing the locals were ancestors of mine. Other ancestors of mine were among the people signing the petition. When the War of Independence led the British government to withdraw from local police barracks the local barracks was closed, to the anger of local people who complained they were being left without police to protect them from ordinary criminality. The old barracks was let to the widow of the local RIC member - until it was burnt out by Sinn Féiners in 1920, again to local anger as it left a local woman homeless.

General Richard Mulcahy once told some friends years later that the RIC were a big problem for the IRA - simply because they genuinely were accepted by the population, and republicans really annoyed many people by attacking them. It was the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans who were despised. The RIC on the whole weren't, though some individuals were.

I spent New Year's Eve at a party in a relative house. On the wall of the room we were in was a picture of my cousin's grandfather and colleagues in the RIC, in full dress uniform. He was my grand-uncle by marriage. On my wall is one of my great-grandfathers who was a republican. On the same wall is a picture of another great-grandfather who supported the RIC. His best friend was a republican who was in hiding during the War of Independence.

That is the reality of Irish history - a complex intertwined set of identities and loyalties. The reality, one carefully hidden by the propagandistic history projected since independence, was that more Irish people joined the RIC, DMP and British army in a Single year than joined all republican movements in Irish history in two hundred years In Total.

So Of Course people like John O'Brien, Christopher O'Brien, James Gaughan, Michael Crowley and many others should be commemorated. They are part of our nation. The inconvenient fact is that the organisation they were part of had more support than all the Irish rebellions put together, was respected and treated as a normal police force.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer.

RIC More Popular Than Republican Rebellion

In a piece written before Charlie Flanagan's decision to defer a planned commemoration for the RIC, Jim Duffy felt the original idea for a commemorative event was a positive one.  

As someone with members of the IRB and RIC in my ancestry I applaud their decision. The real history, as opposed to the myth, is complex. My great-grandfather was a republican. Two of his brothers were in the RIC. (Another was in a police force in Britain.) His son fled to the US in 1915 to avoid a gaol sentence for attacking an RIC member. His daughter helped that son escape. That daughter herself had two brothers-in-law in the RIC. She was my granny.

There are IRA guns buried in the garden of her family home. In that home, pictures of RIC relatives were on the wall.

The local RIC station was opened in the 1880s - following a petition by local nationalists and Catholics to the Chief Secretary for Ireland Asking for it to be opened, as a minority of local republicans were making life a misery for the local people. Some of the local republicans harassing the locals were ancestors of mine. Other ancestors of mine were among the people signing the petition. When the War of Independence led the British government to withdraw from local police barracks the local barracks was closed, to the anger of local people who complained they were being left without police to protect them from ordinary criminality. The old barracks was let to the widow of the local RIC member - until it was burnt out by Sinn Féiners in 1920, again to local anger as it left a local woman homeless.

General Richard Mulcahy once told some friends years later that the RIC were a big problem for the IRA - simply because they genuinely were accepted by the population, and republicans really annoyed many people by attacking them. It was the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans who were despised. The RIC on the whole weren't, though some individuals were.

I spent New Year's Eve at a party in a relative house. On the wall of the room we were in was a picture of my cousin's grandfather and colleagues in the RIC, in full dress uniform. He was my grand-uncle by marriage. On my wall is one of my great-grandfathers who was a republican. On the same wall is a picture of another great-grandfather who supported the RIC. His best friend was a republican who was in hiding during the War of Independence.

That is the reality of Irish history - a complex intertwined set of identities and loyalties. The reality, one carefully hidden by the propagandistic history projected since independence, was that more Irish people joined the RIC, DMP and British army in a Single year than joined all republican movements in Irish history in two hundred years In Total.

So Of Course people like John O'Brien, Christopher O'Brien, James Gaughan, Michael Crowley and many others should be commemorated. They are part of our nation. The inconvenient fact is that the organisation they were part of had more support than all the Irish rebellions put together, was respected and treated as a normal police force.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer.

7 comments:

  1. Jim

    You make valid points and yes they should be remembered but not as equals or national heros.

    The 1916 Rebellion is revered universally, specifically because a small number of men and women took on the might of British Empire;and is considered to be inspiration for other oppressed peoples to rise up.

    It certainly inspired those who fought in the War of Independance. The RIC were the enemies of Irish Freedom and loyal to the Crown and remained so regardless of individual sympathies or friendships on the Republican side -the same was likely true the other way -family or neighbours might not have identified someone whom they knew to be in the RIC. Regardless they did not switch side and actively did their best to prevent Irish freedom. Regardless of your claims to which side had superior numbers the usual convention in warfare is 'to the victor the spoils'.

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  2. Jim,

    I agree with Christy Walsh here.

    British Loyalists are remembered in the States...

    But not as equals or national heroes.

    Even though most Americans claim an English-Protestant identity.

    Likewise the American Revolution has inspired others.

    Ho Chi Minh cited the US Declaration of Independence for Vietnam.

    And nowhere in Vietnam today do they honor the Army of South Vietnam.

    And nowhere in France today do they honor the Vichy Regime.

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  3. Eoghan

    The Vichy Regime deported tens of thousands of Jews to Auschtwitz and ikmposed a fascist system of governance of the territory it occupied. (The IRA of the time would have willingly collaborated with the Nazis and rid Ireland of its "Jewish problem".

    Whatever you may say and feel about the Republic of Ireland (or what you would call the Free State/26-county state); it is a modern and sovereign liberal democracy not the vassal state of anywhere. To compare it to a genocidal satrap of Nazism is bang out of order.

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  4. Barry,

    Rhetorically speaking, why do you obsess on the slaughter of Jewish people by Germans?

    During WWII the Germans killed more Russians and the Japanese killed more Chinese:

    China 20,000,000 Soviet Union 24,000,000

    https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war

    And for the same racist reasons.

    So Jewish people don’t have a monopoly on suffering.

    None of which justifies their racist slaughter and oppression of Palestinian people.

    Or your dishonest linkage of Irish liberation efforts with the Holocaust.

    Only a self-hating Irish person like you could manufacture such an oxymoron.

    All while conveniently ignoring British alliances with Mao and Stalin who killed more:

    https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/02/05/who-killed-more-hitler-stalin-or-mao/

    To say nothing of British Anti-Semitism from Churchill to Mosley just for starters:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Conservative_Party

    You really are a pound shop Eoghan Harris.

    Like him you’re just a manifestation of subjugation.

    All occupied and controlled countries suffer from this “Aunt Jemima” phenomenon:

    https://www.dictionary.com/browse/aunt-jemima

    Some - like the Vichy French State - worse than others - like the Irish Free State.

    A difference in degree maybe but not kind.

    Since Ireland just masquerades these days as “sovereign” republic.

    But with its money and economy run by Brussels.

    While waiting for the UK to allow it to reunite.

    LOL!

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  5. Eoghan

    To quote a famous Irish American politician, everyone is emtitled to their opinions but not to their facts.

    The memory of the Shoah/Holocaust is not just a Jewish one but a collective one for humanity. Any attempt to relativise or deny it is an assault on historical memory and truth. Because if the Holocaust can be relativised then so can African slavery, and the Balkan, Cambodian and Rwanda genocides. It is therefore incumbent on any of us as writers and scholars to challenge such falsehoods.

    I will not give you the satisfaction of rising to your infantile array of insults but, as a prosecutor, I thought you would have the ca;pacity to distinguish between truth and lies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Barry - the Nazis perpetrated a greater crime against the Russians then they did the Jews. Many of their Russian victims were Jews. Why the Shoah had come to transcend the Russian experience is in large part due to Holocaust Industry PR. Everything is relative to something and a refusal to relativise one experience may be to trivialise another. To reletaivse is not to trivialise. Relativising the Holocaust is fine so long as it is not minimised or done for the purpose of obscuring. And when we refuse to minimise we get a sense of the magnitude. And there can be no scholarly or truthful denial that the Nazis from the point of Barbarossa perpetrated the greatest crime of WW2.
      What happened to the Jews was an appalling act of barbarity which should never be allowed to go quietly into the night. And when Israel carries out Nazi like atrocities against Palestinians, scholars and truth advocates should remind Israel of its origins.

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  6. Barry,

    I will translate your gobbledygook here:

    Jewish lives matter for you...

    But Russian, Chinese and Palestinian lives don't.

    So much for your collective for one humanity.

    And by the way, I've never been a prosecutor.

    But system supportive fool that you are...

    You think state prosecutors can uniquely tell truth from lies.

    Wake up and die right:

    Millions spent compensating wrongful convictions

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-47973826

    Wrongful convictions in the United States

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_in_the_United_States


    ReplyDelete