Sir, – Stephen Collins’s article (Opinion, August 24th) appears to represent one of a growing number of recent attempts to de-legitimise Ireland’s War of Independence. His bold description of the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries as “counter-terror” organisations makes this position even clearer. Without offering any evidence, your correspondent also argues that the “vast majority” of RIC victims in that war were “ordinary Catholics and Protestants”.
Historically, the RIC as a body was involved in the carrying out of Britain’s policy of reprisals against the civilian population from about June 1920, following the arrival of divisional commissioner Lieut Col GBF Smyth from England. And it was the RIC who murdered the democratically-elected lord mayor of Cork, Tomás MacCurtain. Your Editorial (August 26th) on Bloody Sunday 1913, describes the DMP and RIC as a “brutal, partisan police force”.
Another troubling aspect of Stephen Collins’s argument lies in its logically implied dismissal of the sacrifices of the police mutineers of Listowel Barracks in 1920. These policemen resigned their commissions rather than, in their own words “commit murder”. They were followed by an estimated 1,100 of their colleagues who, likewise, sacrificed their livelihoods by resigning in solidarity, over the course of the following few weeks as the news of Smyth’s murderous speech spread through the country.
The emphatic endorsement of the 1918 election results and the now universally-recognised right to live free from colonisation, do not seem to feature in the neo-con thinking articulated by your correspondent. Once again, it seems we are being told that only empires, with their juggernaut killing machines, have an incontestable right to physical force. – Yours, etc,
BILLY FITZPATRICK,
Ashfield Park,
Terenure,
Dublin 6W.