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Royal Irish Constabulary

The Oxford Companion to Irish History | 2007 | Copyright

Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). The Irish Constabulary—from 1867 Royal Irish Constabulary—was created in 1836 by the consolidation of the Peace Preservation Force (1814) and the Irish Constabulary (1822) (see police). The RIC was a centrally controlled, paramilitary force: heavily armed, dressed in dark green, army‐style uniforms, and subject to military drill and discipline. Its first inspector‐general, a Waterloo veteran, compared it to a light infantry regiment. In this respect it differed markedly from other police forces in the United Kingdom, which were unarmed and locally controlled. The government clearly felt that policing in Ireland required military force rather than civilian regulation.

The RIC was deployed throughout the country, except for Dublin city (see dublin metropolitan police). Small parties of young, unmarried constables lived in barracks, under the command of a chief constable (later a sergeant) who was answerable to a sub‐ (later district) inspector, who in turn reported to a county inspector. The constabulary office, headed by the inspector‐general, was in Dublin Castle, while the force's depot was in Phoenix Park, Dublin. In this hierarchical structure, control from the top was rigorously enforced and much paperwork was thereby generated.

Before the Famine the constabulary was used to put down agrarian protest, election disorders, sectarian affrays, faction fights, drunkenness, and resistance to evictions. The imposition of public order, rather than investigative or preventive policing, was the constabulary's main task. But in the more ordered conditions that emerged after the Famine the RIC's military character began to seem increasingly inappropriate. Constabulary duties expanded and many were civil rather than military or even criminal. Constables were used as all‐purpose government officials, to collect information on and regulate everyday rural life. In these circumstances the military effectiveness of the force was gradually eroded.

By 1919, when the Anglo‐Irish War broke out, the RIC was full of long‐serving, Catholic constables with little military training, a significant number of whom were nationalists. Most were illequipped to fight a guerrilla war and many were reluctant to do so. Even reinforced in 1920 by tough English and Scottish war veterans, in the form of the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries, the RIC was not able to defeat the IRA. In 1922 the RIC was disbanded and replaced in the north by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and in the south by the Gárda Síochána.

Bibliography

Lowe, W. J., and and Malcolm, E. L. , ‘The Domestication of the Royal Irish Constabulary, 1836–1922’, Irish Economic and Social History, 19 (1992)

Elizabeth Malcolm

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