No more extraordinary sight was ever seen in Tipperary: a recruitment poster for the Royal Ulster Constabulary. "The team worth joining" said the caption under beaming, uniformed faces.
The poster was part of an exhibition on the history of the RUC and the Garda - which came into turbulent existence 75 years ago - on display during the conference on 200 years of policing in Ireland in Cahir Castle.
While the opening session of the conference concentrated on relations between the policing forces north and south, much of what followed was given over to the relations of the forces with their communities.
Historian, Dr Brian Griffin, of Bath College of Higher Education, said in a lecture that members of the former Irish Constabulary were usually Protestant and much resented by Catholics - in 1840, he said, the only county where there were more Catholics than Protestants in the force was Kerry. The under-Secretary for Ireland from 1835 to 1840, Thomas Drummond, said he would prefer a Catholic force to police a largely Catholic population, and also directed Crown prosecutors to abandon their practice of disqualifying jurors on the grounds of their religious persuasion.
Rebuking a Tipperary magistrate and landowner, Lord Donoghmore, who wanted a crackdown on the rising level of crime in the county, Drummond wrote: "Property has its duties as well as its rights, to the neglect of those duties in times past is mainly to be ascribed to the diseased State of Society in which crimes take their rise and it is not in the enactment or enforcement of statutes of extraordinary severity but chiefly in the better and more enlightened and humane exercise of those rights that a permanent remedy for such disorders is to be sought."
In 1867, the police successfully suppressed a rebellion and Queen Victoria gave them the title "royal". But the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) were to be no more popular with nationalists than what had gone before.
Dr Griffin quoted from P. S. O'Hegarty's History of Ireland to 1922: "It is difficult to convey to modern minds what they (the RIC) were like. With their black uniforms (they were actually dark green, Dr Griffin said) their carbines, their batons, they terrified and bullied and bludgeoned. . . Day and night they patrolled the roads and lanes of Ireland, stopping and questioning those they chose and as they chose, so that not a dog could bark without their knowledge."
O'Hegarty - who took Michael Collins's side in the Civil War - does not appear to have been the most detached of historians. "Children fled at their approach. . . They were not alone England's eyes and ears in Ireland but her right arm. They held Ireland for England until Michael Collins broke them in 1920."
Dr Liam McNiffe, a teacher from Kells and author of a recent history of the Garda, took up the story of the newly independent Irish State under Griffith and Collins, which decided to disband the RIC in 1922. A committee was set up to decide on how they should be replaced, consisting of a number of senior RIC men.
Dr McNiffe said this was partly a practical matter: who better to organise a new police force then policemen? But, he added, it was more than likely that the RIC officers chosen were the men who covertly supplied Collins with information during and before the War of Independence.
Dr McNiffe said more than 96 per cent of the recruits were IRA men. He pictured a typical scene of a man who applies to a recruiting officer and says when asked what he had to recommend him: "I'm in the IRA." Training at first was in the RDS where the recruits slept on pallets filled with straw previously used by horses. Conditions were cramped with 1,000 men, and Dr McNiffe told a story, possibly apocryphal, about a superior criticising a recruit for being unshaved. The recruit replied: "There were eight of us using the same mirror this morning, sir. Obviously I shaved the wrong man."
Collins decided the new force would be unarmed. This, more than anything else, set them apart from the RIC and helped to gain them acceptance with the community at large.
The conference was organised by the Cahir Social and Historical Society and Sgt Peter Butler of Cahir. Last year's theme was memories shared, north and south, of the Somme. Mr Joe Walsh of the Society said they were developing a valuable link between Tipperary and Northern Ireland.