Here comes the baby!
QUESTION Why are the girls of the Tiwi tribe in the South Pacific married at birth?
WHAT may seem like a bizarre concept to westerners made perfect sense to the people who live on the Tiwi Islands of Bathurst and Melville, Australia. But it was brought to an end by a Catholic priest known as the ‘bishop with 150 wives’, whose memoirs was even titled The Polygamist Priest.
The Tiwi tribe (which means We People) believed women were made pregnant by spirits, and babies were conceived during ‘The Dreaming’, so they disregarded the role of the man in conception.
At the same time, they wanted all babies to have a father, so they made sure a female was married at all times and that girls were promised in marriage before they were born.
Widows also remarried at the burials of their husbands.
However, as polygamy – having more than one husband or wife at a time – was the norm, these were loose arrangements, a view that ensured western mores such as the concept of ‘illegitimacy’ was foreign to them.
However, in 1911, a Catholic mission was established on the Bathurst Island, which eventually put an end to the traditional culture. Fr Francis Xavier Gsell, decided to win over the Tiwi by buying the rights to marry the girls himself. He paid their fiancés and fathers in cloth, flour and tobacco and married off the girls to baptised Tiwi men of their choice. He became known as ‘the bishop with 150 wives’. The mission educated a generation of women in the Catholic faith and the tribe’s view of marriage moved in line with western norms.
Today, the islands – that are part of Australia’s Northern Territory, 75km north of Darwin, where the Arafura Sea joins the Timor Sea – are a vibrant place known for a love of Aussie Rules football rather than unusual marriage practices.
Tom Davies, Sydney.
QUESTION After independence in 1922, how did the Garda Síochána take over from the Royal Irish Constabulary? Was it an orderly transition?
THE gardaí were formed in turbulent times, just at the end of the War of Independence and as the Civil War was about to start. And just to complicate things even more, they were taking over from a force that had imposed British rule in Ireland. And initially, conditions were so bad members actually mutinied, forcing the first ever Garda chief to quit.
Despite this, the transfer of policing from the RIC, that had been set up in 1822, was relatively smooth. Key to this may have been the fact that only 13 RIC men – out of a force that rose to 11,000 constables on the whole island, at its peak, with 1,600 barracks – joined the gardaí.
Instead, many decided to sign up to other English-speaking police forces around the world.
Tension between the old police force and the population grew after the 1919 Solohead ambush, in Co. Tipperary, in which two RIC men were killed, Constables Patrick MacDonnell and James O’Connell, marking the start of the War of Independence.
Between 1919 and 1921, 400 RIC men were killed and many barracks abandoned.
So once the Anglo-Irish Treaty had been signed, it became obvious that the RIC would have to be disbanded. This was agreed between the British and new Irish administration in January 1922. And on February 9, 1922, a meeting to establish a new police force for the south was held at Dublin’s Gresham Hotel. Later that month, the Civic Guard was born and it became An Garda Síochána on August 8, 1923.
It started as an armed force, although it soon became largely unarmed, and 18 months after formation, 600 barracks had been set up. Within two years, it had 6,000 men, although the first women didn’t begin training until 1959.
At the same time that the Civic Guard had been set up, the RUC came into existence in the North; it lasted until it was disbanded in 2001 and replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Initially, men joining the new Civic Guard were armed. The first recruits trained at the RDS grounds in Ballsbridge in Dublin, before being transferred to Kildare military barracks at the end of April, 1922. There, some of the new recruits mutinied for seven weeks as they were dissatisfied with conditions. That led to the resignation of the first Commissioner Michael Staines after just eight months in office.
Apart from that mutiny in Kildare, the rollout of the new police force went relatively smoothly in most parts of the country, in very troubled times, as the Civil War broke out on June 28, 1922, and lasted until the following May. This meant that, in some parts of the Free State, new units of the gardaí were slow to be set up.
In Cork city, for instance, members didn’t arrive until November, 1922. During the Civil War, the force suffered many attacks, including attacks on more than 200 Garda stations.
Meanwhile, members of the old RIC who retired got a pension from the new State.
Even though there was little crossover between the RIC and the gardaí, the new force adopted many of the practices and procedures of the old RIC, and these persisted for years.
The RIC depot in Dublin’s Phoenix Park became the new Garda headquarters, which the force still occupies today.
In some respects, the new police force moved quickly to set up new functions for its members. By 1929, it had 150 gardaí working on traffic duties.
The final aspect of the old police system lasted until 1925. The Dublin Metropolitan Police had been set up in 1836 as an unarmed force for Dublin city.
It had about 1,100 members, but its reputation was tainted by the policing of such events as the 1913 lockout.
When it was absorbed into the gardaí, this concluded the process of setting up a new police force for the new State, and considering the general lawlessness when it began, including an absence of a properly functioning courts system, the new Garda Síochána came into being relatively easily.
But the minister who had been largely responsible for its formation, Kevin O’Higgins, was assassinated by anti-Treaty killers in Booterstown, south Co. Dublin, in 1927. Geoff Morgan, Cork.