The Garda Review, on its first appearance in December 1925, addressed disgruntled former constables of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. They had recently changed their insignia for the badge of the Garda Siochana.
For some, who had already made the difficult decision to serve on under the new government, the surrender of the "Poilini Ath Cliath" badge was a personal act almost of betrayal. But they were encouraged, their traditions were intact; the DMP had been "throughout its history . . . in actual fact a Civic Guard".
The amalgamation of the two police forces had been accomplished quickly. In 1924 the country was settling down after the Civil War. The minister for justice, Kevin O'Higgins, with the intention of relieving the Army of responsibility for the supervision of subversive organisations, proposed the transfer to Garda Headquarters of the DMP detective division, under Chief Supt David Neligan.
The creation of a "unitary detective system for the whole State" was the "pivotal idea" in the decision to amalgamate, the secretary of the Department of Justice, Henry O'Friel, informed the DMP Commissioner, W.R.E. Murphy. It is not clear what other grounds were considered to justify consigning to history a police force recruited for completely different conditions of service in the metropolis.
Commissioner Murphy objected "strongly", protesting "deep discontent and resentment" in the force. From his appointment in 1923 he had laboured to restore police morale following a decade of social unrest and revolutionary upheaval. "I dislike intensely the thought of being back in the melting pot . . . without the means of arousing esprit de corps."
The DMP once again was proving its athletic prowess; the tug-of-war team had recovered its pre-eminent place in international competitions. O'Friel was not impressed. "We cannot refrain from doing something which we think to be in the best interests of the public because of the athletic traditions of the DMP."
The old police suspected the ambitions of the Civic Guard officers with an eye for new promotion opportunities. Despite assurances that their conditions of service would not be changed, possible transfer to a country station created anxiety; a fear that would seem to have been realised when in some cases banishment to the west of Ireland was ordered for indiscipline.
Difficulties were anticipated in the merging of the two representative bodies. The rank-and-file on the Garda side were uneasy at the prospect of sitting with the stoic Dublin bobbies. In the city stations, there was even less welcome for the change.
O'Friel made light of the perceived problems. Making due allowance for sentiment in the DMP, he found it "impossible to imagine anything approaching discord or jealousy" between the representatives on either side.
The problem was not simply one of friendship and common understanding. In the disbanding of the RIC and formation of a new police force, important reforms had been put in place in the Civic Guard.
In the city, for all intents and purposes, time stood still. The metropolitan boundaries remained in place; the new Garda metropolitan division retained its own internal administration, with separate transfer and promotion regulations, and its hallowed work practices.
Without a single substantive alteration in its modus operandi, the unreformed DMP brought into the national force the psychological wounds of the recent warfare. The problems lay buried for decades until, in the 1960s, pent-up resentment fuelled by agitation for better pay and shorter hours erupted and spread like wildfire throughout the entire Garda force.
By then, the last of the old constables had retired, and a new young force patrolled the city. In the run-up to the Macushla Ballroom affair in November 1961, Commissioner Daniel Costigan detected inadequacies in the representative body regulations which he considered were against the interests of gardai in the metropolitan division.
Having sought in vain for assistance from an unco-operative Joint Representative Body to have the regulations amended, he turned for advice to his personal assistant, Chief Supt Thomas McCarthy, who reported justified "widespread discontent" in the ranks.
Underlining a fundamental defect in the amalgamation of two disparate police forces, he felt a realistic study by guards from country divisions of the disadvantages of service in Dublin was "too much to be hoped for", confirming W.R.E. Murphy's misgivings in 1925 on the score of mutual understanding.
He was aware, McCarthy concluded, that the commissioner had put out feelers in the hope of establishing a joint consultative council. He urged Costigan to convene the Joint Representative Body, and to put to the meeting in person his proposal for a council; and, should his initiative fail, to inform the force, bypassing the elected delegates.
Costigan was hardly tempted to appeal to the rank-and-file over the heads of their officers. To have done so would have sparked a demonstration by disaffected guards in Dublin, and have identified the Garda commissioner as instigator in the looming crisis.
The Dublin police district was confined within boundaries drawn in 1836, with small outward adjustments in later years. In an apparent move to neutralise the close-knit community of city policemen as a seedbed of rebellion, the boundaries were extended in 1964 to include the greater Dublin area. With a new unitary promotion system for the entire force, and liability for transfer to any part of the country, the last ties with the DMP were severed.
The creation of the vast Dublin Metropolitan Area did not remove the underlying causes of discontent. For the Dublin garda, there was no respite from the treadmill of long hours working an ancient beat system. It took the most of another decade fraught with agitation for new duty rosters to be won.
In the provinces, an effective method of policing was compromised by Judge Conroy's extension to rural areas of the wholly unnecessary three-relief system. Change was inevitable, but not to the extent brought about by the clamour to meet needs in the city.
Within a long overdue general restructuring of the Garda Siochana, the case for restoration of administrative autonomy in a redrawn Dublin metropolitan area seems unanswerable.