RIC men were not heroes

When I was a teenager, the recruiting advertisements for Oglaigh na hEireann (Parkgate Street) invoked heroes from the days of Fionn MacCumhal, Brian Boru, through to the IRA of 1916-1921.

The message was that the State’s Army was the Continuity IRA. Ministers of Defence Oscar Traynor and Sean MacEoin and Ministers of Education Dick Mulcahy and Sean Moylan were all IRA heroes.

Indeed in 1922 Mulcahy assured comrades wary of the army section answering to the Provisional Government and paid by it, that it would continue to be the Irish Republican Army. When I joined the part-time FCA Reserve I believed I was joining the Continuity IRA. Our cap badge and buttons were identical to those worn by the Irish Volunteer insurgents of 1916. The Garda Síochána were not generally seen as a continuation of the RIC, nor of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Tom Kettle, the Home Rule MP who was to die serving in the British Army in Flanders, was clear about the function of the DMP. In his maiden speech in the House of Commons he said that the DMP should not be paid for by the ratepayers of Dublin, but by the British War Office.