Sir, – I read Stephen Collins’s Opinion piece (August 24th) with increasing bafflement. Mr Collins wants the Irish people to honour the RIC and DMP who “guarded” the same people for a century. He suggests the RIC was on a par with current police forces as we know them today. Nothing could be further from the truth. The RIC had nothing in common with any other police force within the UK (as it was then constituted). It was the only armed police force and was more akin to a paramilitary force.
The list of atrocities carried out by the RIC/DMP include mass evictions; the murder of civilians in the Dublin Lockout; the shooting dead of the mayors of Cork and Limerick; the selection of the 1916 leaders for execution; and the shooting of prisoners. In my native Galway they are particularly remembered for the killing of Fr Michael Griffin, who they summoned on a fake mission of mercy before killing him and burying him in a bog. Also the murder of two brothers, Patrick and Harry Loughnane, who were dragged for miles behind lorries until they were unrecognisable.
And if we do commemorate this body we also include in this the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries who both served within the RIC as additional man power to suppress the insurgents. The figure of 500-plus RIC dead includes the numerous Black and Tans and Auxiliaries who were killed during the War of Independence. – Yours, etc,
ANDREW McGOWAN,
Aungier Street,
Dublin 2.
Sir, – It is not every week I get to read Stephen Collins’s column. I did however get to see his latest paean to “national reconciliation” and the desirability, as he would have it, to kiss and make up with the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the Dublin Metropolitan Police (Opinion, August 24th).
He tells us these gallant bodies of men “guarded us for nearly a century”. Could this, per chance, be the same DMP that exactly 100 years ago engaged in murderous attacks on Dublin workers during the Great Lockout? Oh, yes it could! In this month in 1913, at the beginning of that titanic struggle by the worker class to wrest a civilised living from the employers, our guardians launched an unprovoked attack on people heading to O’Connell Street from a meeting at Liberty Hall. This attack left 200 injured and James Nolan and John Byrne, both members of ITGWU, SIPTU’s predecessor, dead.
Ireland’s first Bloody Sunday followed, demonstrating another example of the DMP as our guardians. Mr Collins really should cop on and see that his Hobbesian view of society, and the role of the police in it, is codology of the purest water.
Police forces exist to guard the property and wealth of the ruling elite from encroachment by the rest of us, anything else they do is incidental to this. On the other hand, maybe I should stop reading Mr Collins’s drivel. – Yours, etc,
NICHOLAS COULES,
Suncroft Drive,
Tallaght,
Dublin 24.