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Tribute may reopen old Irish wounds
Backlash may cost Dublin government in general election
DUBLIN — It seemed, to some at least, a perfectly reasonable event to include in a series of centenaries planned for the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921: a commemoration of Royal Irish Constabulary police officers who fought and died on the British side.
But the public outcry that greeted the event’s announcement last month not only forced its cancellation but may have damaged the government’s chance of retaining power in a general election Saturday.
Beyond its immediate effect, the dispute served notice that in celebrating the centenary, the government is venturing into a minefield that could open old wounds rather than heal them.
Opposition politicians accused Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael party of suggesting a moral equivalence between members of the Irish Republican Army, who fought for Irish independence, and police officers who died defending British rule.
That anger was amplified by the discovery that the 563 officers being officially commemorated would include — whether or not the government had realized it — not only Irish-born members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police but also members of the “Black and Tans” and the Auxiliary Division. These mainly British ex-soldiers were recruited as special wartime reinforcements and became notorious for mass reprisals and indiscriminate killings of Irish people.
“It is shocking to many to commemorate a force that aided the colonial power and the Black and Tans,” read one typical Tweet on the subject. “The French don’t commemorate Vichy!” it added, comparing the officers to the French government that collaborated with the Nazis.
Whoever wins the election will be in place to oversee the sensitive task of commemorating the centenaries of many of the most bloody and divisive episodes in Ireland’s modern history.
As part of a “Decade of Centenaries” of key dates surrounding Irish independence, the Dublin government has navigated several potentially sensitive commemorations, including the Easter Rising of 1916, which set off armed rebellion, the election of Ireland’s first pro-independence Parliament in 1918 and the first fatal shots in the War of Independence the next year.
There are more lying ahead, including the Bloody
Sunday massacre of November 1920 and the partition of Ireland in 1921.
Ireland’s new government will have to navigate all of this at a time when relations with Britain have been strained by the Brexit process — including the delicate question of how to handle the border with Northern Ireland, a territory that remains under British control and now out of the European Union after Brexit.
“A lot of what has happened in the last three years has brought out militancy in people who thought they were quite moderate nationalists,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, a history professor at University College Dublin. “Three years of listening to the debate about the border, and to British ignorance about Ireland, have allowed a reflex anti-British sentiment to come to the fore.”
Henry Patterson, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, said the dispute over the RIC threatened to feed into destructive sectarian passions.
“If you can’t recognize the humanity of these people and what was done to them as well as what they did to other people,” Patterson said, “we are really into the worst kind of tribal narrative about Irish history.”
The current backlash erupted at a time when many people south of the border had been gaining a more nuanced understanding of the old RIC.
Founded as a heavily armed colonial police force, it was expected to protect Anglo Irish landlords from their impoverished Irish tenants, oversee evictions and quell political unrest. But in quieter times its constables earned acceptance and even respect through ordinary police work.
Most of its rank-and-file members were recruited from the same class of Catholic farmers and merchants who provided the bedrock for Ireland’s struggle for independence.
In the War of Independence, thousands of these Irish-born RIC officers — isolated and ostracized, threatened with death and often divided in their loyalties — either resigned, left the country or threw in their lot with the rebels.
As it led the military fight for independence, the Irish Republican Army — which committed plenty of atrocities of its own — was ruthless toward those officers and their families. Eunan O’Halpin, a history professor at Trinity College Dublin, said that by his count 452 RIC members of all types, including Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, lost their lives.
“Some were off-duty, some were unarmed, and many were killed after capture,” he said.
Kevin McCarthy, an American writer who lives in Ireland, said he saw similarities to Iraqi police officers who continued to serve after the United States invaded their country in 2003. That dynamic was partly what inspired his 2010 novel, “Peeler,” about a conscientious RIC sergeant investigating a string of nonpolitical murders that occurred during the War of Independence.
“I saw a documentary about the Iraqi police after the U.S. invasion, how they had to attend at the scene while Marines were kicking in doors, and afterwards they’d be targeted because they were locals and had to live there,” McCarthy said. “The parallels really struck me.”
He said he was surprised when, after a public reading of the book at a festival in West Cork, the setting of his novel, four older people came up to talk with him about its subject matter. “They were saying to me, ‘My father was in the RIC, and I could never talk to anybody about it until now.’ ”
“It is shocking to many to commemorate a force that aided the colonial power and the Black and Tans. The French don’t commemorate Vichy!”
— Tweet on the subject