The Royal Irish Constabulary and Colonial Policing: Lessons and Legacies
By Dr Seán William Gannon
TAGS
On 27 August 1920, the RIC’s in-house propaganda freesheet, the
Weekly Summary, warned that the newly-recruited Black and Tans (who had been arriving in Ireland since January) would make the country ‘an appropriate hell for those whose trade is agitation and whose method is murder’, and the orgy of reprisals against republicans and their communities that followed demonstrated that this was no idle threat. While reprisals had been hitherto an occasional feature of the police counterinsurgency (the burning of Tuam in late July the most significant example), they now assumed the status of a tactical constant as ‘old RIC’, Black and Tans, and Auxiliaries, acting variously or in concert, took increasing recourse to communal retaliation for IRA attacks. Extensive written and photographic reportage of reprisals such as Galway (8 September), Balbriggan (20 September), Trim (27 September), Mallow (29 September), Granard (4 November), and Cork (11/12 December) so appalled British public opinion that, by spring 1921, journalist Henry Woodd Nevinson could write that ‘at last the feeling of our country is, I think, [fully] awake to the hideousness of this hellish policy’. Thus, Britain lost the propaganda war critical to its counterinsurgency’s success.