Policing Twentieth Century Ireland

The twentieth century was a time of rapid social change in Ireland: from colonial rule to independence, civil war and later the Troubles; from poverty to globalisation and the Celtic Tiger; and from the rise to the fall of the Catholic Church. Policing in Ireland has been shaped by all of these changes. This book critically evaluates the creation of the new police force, an Garda Síochána, in the 1920s and analyses how this institution was influenced by and responded to these substantial changes. Beginning with an overview of policing in pre-independence Ireland, this book chronologically charts the history of policing in Ireland. It presents data from oral history interviews with retired gardaí who served between the 1950s and 1990s, giving unique insight into the experience of policing Ireland, the first study of its kind in Ireland. Particular attention is paid to the difficulties of transition, the early encounters with the IRA, the policing of the Blueshirts, the world wars, gangs in Dublin and the growth of drugs and crime. Particularly noteworthy is the analysis of policing the Troubles and the immense difficulties that generated. This book is essential reading for those interested in policing or Irish history, but is equally important for those concerned with the legacy of colonialism and transition.

The twentieth century was a time of rapid social change in Ireland: from colonial rule to independence, civil war and later the Troubles; from poverty to globalisation and the Celtic Tiger; and from the rise to the fall of the Catholic Church. Policing in Ireland has been shaped by all of these changes. This book critically evaluates the creation of the new police force, an Garda Síochána, in the 1920s and analyses how this institution was influenced by and responded to these substantial changes. Beginning with an overview of policing in pre-independence Ireland, this book chronologically charts the history of policing in Ireland. It presents data from oral history interviews with retired gardaí who served between the 1950s and 1990s, giving unique insight into the experience of policing Ireland, the first study of its kind in Ireland. Particular attention is paid to the difficulties of transition, the early encounters with the IRA, the policing of the Blueshirts, the world wars, gangs in Dublin and the growth of drugs and crime. Particularly noteworthy is the analysis of policing the Troubles and the immense difficulties that generated. This book is essential reading for those interested in policing or Irish history, but is equally important for those concerned with the legacy of colonialism and transition.

This book was written as part of a much wider criminological enterprise, designed at creating a real and critical basis for criminological enquiry in Ireland. Properly understood the Criminal Justice System (CJS) is every bit as important to society as the circular flow of money. No government would dream of conducting its business without the advice of an economist or, indeed, providing an econometric model of the economy. Yet when it comes to the CJS, governments take the opposite view and legislate in the dark, hardly reconnoitering for a moment to see what effect proposed legislation will have on the several institutions it invariably affects. Maybe this was okay when those effects could not be calculated. But such is no longer the case. In 1967 a President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice featured a model of criminal justice entitled "The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society." Incredibly misunderstood and widely neglected, this model marked a breakthrough -- the first step, as it were -- in coming to terms with the multiple agencies that go to make up what has come to be called the Criminal Justice System (CJS). In Volumes 2 and 3 of the present series Seamus Breathnach traces the initial steps necessary to complete the revolution begun by the President's Commission. In doing this he reveals the systematized neglect of the CJS in the Republic of Ireland for years 1950-80. In eight lectures he delineates the Republic's inability to get its act together or to engage the terms or significance of the '67 landmark - an inability that is anchored both in a deep religious resistance to the secular social sciences as well as an exaggerated estimation of the criminal lawyer as social commentator. From this study it appears that the first step for criminologists is to see the CJS as a totality - to see it as a social process clamoring to be rescued from the spokesmen of the discrete agencies that comprise it.

The role of the police has, from its beginnings, been ambiguous, even janus-faced. This volume focuses on one of its controversial aspects by showing how the police have been utilized in the past by regimes in Europe, the USA and the British Empire to check political dissent and social unrest. Ideologies such as anti-Communism emerge as significant influences in both democracies and dictatorships. And by shedding new light on policing continuities in twentieth-century Germany and Italy, as well as Interpol, this volume questions the compatibility of democratic government and political policing.

This book explores Irish participation in the British imperial project after ‘Southern’ Ireland’s independence in 1922. Building on a detailed study of the Irish contribution to the policing of the Palestine Mandate, it examines Irish imperial servants’ twentieth-century transnational careers, and assesses the influence of their Irish identities on their experience at the colonial interface. The factors which informed Irish enlistment in Palestine’s police forces are examined, and the impact of Irishness on the personal perspectives and professional lives of Irish Palestine policemen is assessed. Irish policing in Palestine is placed within the broader tradition of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC)-conducted imperial police service inaugurated in the mid-nineteenth century, and the RIC’s transnational influence on twentieth-century British colonial policing is evaluated. The wider tradition of Irish imperial service, of which policing formed part, is then explored, with particular focus on British Colonial Service recruitment in post-revolutionary Ireland and twentieth-century Irish-imperial identities.

This history of a century of policing in Ireland is a major contribution to Irish historical studies and deals with a period when policing in Ireland stood at the perilous intersection of politics, religion and the relationship between Britain and Ireland.

"This book examines the relationship between Irish republicanism, policing and crime from 1916 to the present day. While there is little academic attention paid to this aspect of republican history, crime and policing arose as issues in every era of the IRA's existence. This book describes republican attempts to deal with crime during the War of Independence, the problems caused by the Civil War split and how the organization grappled with accusations of criminality throughout much of the twentieth century"--