THE COLLINS PRESS: Release
46 Men Dead
The Royal Irish Constabulary in County Tipperary, 1919–22
John Reynolds
On 21 January 1919, the opening shots of the War of Independence were fired at Soloheadbeg in County Tipperary. Two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) were killed by the IRA in the ambush. Constable O’Connell, from Coachford in County Cork, was thirty years old and engaged to be married. Constable McDonnell, from Belmullet in County Mayo, was a widower with seven children. Dan Breen regretted that only two men died, later commenting, ‘Six dead policemen would have impressed the country more than a mere two.’ In the four bloody years that followed, nearly 500 RIC men were killed and hundreds more wounded. In Tipperary alone, 46 policemen were killed, making it one of the most violent counties in Ireland. These men have generally remained as footnotes to a bitter and divisive conflict.
This unique, potentially controversial, history addresses the dearth of material about the RIC. The popular image of the force was set in 1926 when Piaras Béaslaí contended that its members’ primary purpose was to ‘hold the country in subjection to England’. The truth is closer to home: they were Irishmen who joined because it was a secure job with prospects and a pension at the end of service. When confronted with a volunteer army of young and dedicated guerrilla fighters, they were unable to cope. When the conflict ended, the RIC was disbanded, not at the insistence of the Provisional Government, but of its own members. This thought-provoking book shows how the grim reality of the conflict in Tipperary was a microcosm for the wider battles of the War of Independence. It is time to give a more balanced view of this force and its men.
John Reynolds is a serving Garda Sergeant based at the Garda College in Templemore, County Tipperary. He founded the Garda College Museum in 2002 and holds degrees in history.
Price €17.99/£14.99 • Paperback • April 2016 •
217 pp • 216 x 138 mm • 978-1848892729 • B&w photos • History/Irish Interest
Notes for the editor:
· Previously unpublished photographs of the RIC available for publication
· The religious composition of the force was more than 70 per cent Roman Catholic. Promotion to the officer corps, however, was almost impossible for any Catholic until the 20th century
· Tipperary has a long tradition of rebellion and lawlessness, as Robert Peel, a former MP for the county, remarked to the Lord Lieutenant in 1813: ‘You can have no idea of the moral depravation of the lower orders in that county … in fidelity towards each other they are unexampled, as they are in their sanguinary disposition and fearlessness of the consequences.’
· The abortive Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 had its epicentre at Ballingarry in south Tipperary.
· Of the 1,086 Fenians arrested in Ireland in 1867, the majority came from County Tipperary, with Clonmel described as a ‘hotbed of Feniansim’ by the local police inspector.
· The legacy of secret societies, agrarian violence and the 1848 and 1867 uprisings did much to ensure that by 1871, Tipperary had the highest ratio of police to population in Ireland and England. There were 1,600 police barracks in Ireland, ranging from a low of 16 in ‘Londonderry’ to a high of 153 in Tipperary.
· Members of the RIC used the stability of their employment to pay the rent on their parents’ farms, thus protecting them from the threat of eviction. However, the force was stigmatised by its association with agrarian-related policing duties. Even the pro-nationalist The Freeman’s Journal described the position of the RIC in 1882 as ‘intolerable’.
· The IRA declared war on the British Empire, and their fellow Irishmen in the RIC were identified as the main target of their campaign, in an announcement in An t-Óglach on 31 January 1919: ‘Every Volunteer is entitled to use all legitimate methods of warfare against the soldiers and policemen of the English usurper and to slay them if necessary.’
· In 1920, the Treasury sanctioned the bulk-buying of coffins for the RIC.
· During the War of Independence, Tipperary was a violent county within a particularly violent province. While Munster contained only a quarter of the population of Ireland, it consistently accounted for more than half of the police casualties for each year between 1919 and 1921.
· Tipperary women had their heads ‘bobbed’ or forcibly shaved as a public humiliation for what was termed ‘keeping company with policemen’.
· The RIC is associated with the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, but the force had a hundred-year history before the arrival of these anomalies
· A Templemore policeman said the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries had the ‘old soldier’s talent for dodging and scrounging, spoke in strange accents, called the Irish “natives”, associated with low company, stole from one another, sneered at the customs of the country, drank to excess and put sugar on their porridge’.
· A priest in Portumna, Co. Galway who was sympathetic to the Volunteer cause heard confessions and gave absolution to men involved in the Lorrha ambush when their parish priest denounced them from the altar.
· The author has made contact with the Australian family of James Walsh, the sixteen-year-old farm labourer who claimed during the infamous ‘Templemore Miracles’ of 1920 that religious statues touched by him were shedding tears of blood. Tens of thousands of pilgrims visited the town every day for weeks. Michael Collins examined one of the statues and discovered inside it the works of an alarm clock connected to fountain pen inserts containing a mixture of sheep’s blood and water. In 1923 Walsh emigrated to Australia and was employed as a lay teacher in a Roman Catholic school. In the 1950s he was recognised by a visiting Irish Christian Brother. He was reported to the cardinal, and dismissed by the Catholic Church.
· Gilbert Potter, an RIC district inspector, was taken prisoner in April 1921. The IRA offered to exchange his life for that of Thomas Traynor, an IRA Volunteer awaiting execution. Potter established a rapport with his captors. The hostage takers grew to like him too, and later recalled that he developed a respect and understanding for their aspiration to independence. His captors proposed to him they would allow him to escape if he gave his word of honour that he would take no further action against them. Potter stated that he could not give his word, as he ‘must do his duty as he saw it’. A grave had been dug, and Potter was forced to stand in it as the Volunteers took aim and fired at him, causing non-fatal injuries. Potter cried out, ‘I am not dead,’ so Commandant Lacey administered a fatal shot to the head.
· The chaos of the period just prior to the Civil War was encapsulated by Kevin O’Higgins; he wrote that the government was ‘simply eight young men in the city hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration … with the foundations of another not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the keyhole. No police force was functioning … no system of justice operating; the wheels of administration hung idle, barred out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions.’
· Several countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, were contacted by the British government enquiring as to whether they required experienced constables or soldiers in their colonial police forces or military, but the response was overwhelmingly negative. A significant reason was that many of them already had substantial populations of Irish immigrants. Consequently, the negative reputation acquired by the RIC weighed against any consideration of employing its former members. In March 1922, for example, the police commissioner of south Australia warned the governor general of the state that ‘grave trouble’ would be caused if former RIC men were recruited to his force.
· Many former Black and Tans and Auxiliaries joined the Palestine Police, which was undergoing rapid expansion to allow for the withdrawal of British troops from the country.
· In pure military terms, the substantial majority of attacks planned by the IRA failed, but nationalist historiography has in many cases romanticised the brutal and complex truth of a violent confrontation that, in some respects, was analogous to a civil war.
For further information, photographs, images or interviews with the author please contact:
Fíodhna Ní Ghríofa: Tel: 021-4347717 / e-mail:
Gillian Hennessy: e-mail: