50 years ago, gardaí protested against an unfair pay deal in an action that resonates to this day, writes Austin Kenny

LAST week was the 30th anniversary of Charlie Haughey’s election as Taoiseach for the first time, but the occasion seemed to pass without notice in the media. Maybe it is a measure of how low he has descended in the eyes of the public. Although he had always been acutely conscious of carving out a place in history for himself, it seems his reputation is now in tatters.

GARDA militancy has a long pedigree with the force’s industrial activists tracing their ancestry back to a meeting in the Macushla Ballroom in south Dublin on November 4, 1961.