Fr Gaughan: ‘Commemorate the RIC, just not in the context of Irish freedom’
AUTHOR and Listowel native Fr Tony Gaughan believes that there is room for commemorating the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), just not at the same time as commemorating the War of Independence.
Author of ‘ The Memoirs of Jeremiah Mee RIC’ – a book covering the mutiny of RIC officers in Listowel in 1920 when they refused to hand over their barracks to the British – told The Kerryman this week that the government’s idea to commemorate the RIC was ‘unfortunate’.
“If you’re celebrating the War of Independence, then it’s the people who fought for Irish freedom that should be the primary centre of attention - not an organisation they were fighting against as it were,” he said.
Fr Gaughan described the storm of controversy as a ‘political football’ and stated that many RIC men, who didn’t want to get involved in the War of Independence for patriotic reasons, were treated very badly afterwards.
“When they (RIC) mutinied in Listowel Barracks their point of view was that they had entered the RIC to be policemen. Now they were being asked to act as a paramilitary force. They decided this wasn’t the role they had entered for. Also, when martial law was introduced in Munster, they essentially became part of the Crown Forces.”
Constable Mee and his RIC colleagues had been ordered by a British commander to ‘shoot down’ IRA suspects but they refused and resigned from the RIC. In his memoirs, Constable Mee stated that after Easter 1916 the change in public opinion was a ‘gradual process’ and was ‘ hardly perceptible’ at the beginning of what would eventually become wide-scale resistance to British rule.
Does Fr Tony believe this aspect was lost in the recent condemnation of the RIC?
“I think that’s true to an extent, it was gradual in some cases. Also lost in the debate was a man named T. J McElligott, who started the policeman’s union. Around 2,500 RIC men joined that union on the basis that they wished to be treated as policeman on a par with police in England.”
Fr Tony feels that many RIC men were also put in impossible positions.
“Many of them were never keen on violence of any kind and it just came across them. It was, in effect, a revolution and they were the fall guys in the middle of it, without ever having intended to be in the middle of it.”
He believes there is room to commemorate the RIC, nationally, but in its proper context.
“In effect what happened is the RIC men who stayed right to the end were treated very well by the British. But the 2,500 or so members that left the force for their patriotic stance, or simply didn’t want to get involved in the war, were treated shamefully by successive Irish governments. They didn’t even get pensions, which was absolutely disgraceful. That they were forgotten about and more or less overlooked is certainly very unfair.”
Lastly, regarding the Black and Tans, Fr Tony feels there is no place for commemoration given their response to civil unrest in Ireland between 1919 and 1921.
“I don’t think so. They were a disgrace to their own people, let alone how Irish people felt about them. It was their conduct and misconduct that tilted the War of Independence in favour of Sinn Féin. Most of the Irish population weren’t at that time enthusiastic supporters of the IRA at all. They weren’t against them, but they weren’t for them either and gave them no co-operation. In that increasingly hostile environment created by the Black and Tans, the War of Independence was lost to the British.”