FROM THE ARCHIVES: JUNE 11th, 1896
THE IRISH Timesof the late 19th century regularly took issue with the nationalist view of the state of Ireland and British government institutions in the country. In this editorial, it challenged nationalist criticism of the police and corrected an apocryphal story about the experience of one of its own reporters at the hands of the police.
NOTHING COULD be more foolish or factious than the periodical attacks of a section of the Nationalist party upon the Constabulary Force. The endeavour to discredit the body . . . before the English people, is part of the system, now happily nearly played out, of suggesting that the public institutions and departments of Ireland are only so many organisations and devices for tyrannously keeping the country in subjection.
When Mr. Swift MacNeill speaks of the Constabulary as a “pretended police” who “really form a permanent army of occupation”, and babbles about “a gross fraud on the Bill of Rights and an abuse of the Mutiny Acts,” he only causes Irishmen to smile. We do not so much care to notice what Mr. T. P. O’Connor added to this random rhetoric . . . but the Irish members do know better than to support Mr. Swift MacNeill, and even Mr. John Dillon was obliged to rebuke the member for South Donegal in admitting that “the Force was sometimes extremely useful.” He gave an instance gratefully, and it is a remarkable one, both as having occurred in Mr. Swift MacNeill’s neighbourhood, and as showing that the police can and do serve others than landlords and the loyal minority.
“He (Mr. Dillon) was once protected by the Force from a band of Orangemen, two hundred in number, who came out with revolvers in their pockets to murder him at a political meeting in the North of Ireland.”
Not only so, but he admitted further that the police had “protected the Parnellites from the anti-Parnellites” – no easy job.
As an example of the correctness of the stories on which debates turn, we may, for almost amusement, take an extract from the speech of Dr. Tanner which followed that of Mr. Dillon, again extracting the words from the Times. “Mr. Hill, of the Irish Times,” said the member for Mid-Cork, “once attended a meeting at Ennis wearing a tall silk hat. A constable smashed it with a blow from his baton. ‘Why did you do that?’ said Mr. Hill, ‘I am a member of the Press.’ ‘Oh,’ replied the constable, ‘I thought you were an Irish member.’”
The House was entertained, possibly much considering why the Irish members and the police do not get on together. But it is necessary to make history in the matter a little better. The only element of truth in the story is that the hat was a tall one and suffered damage in the process of clearing the street. It was not struck by a baton, but by a sword. The wielder of the weapon was not a constable, he was a hussar. The tale thus melts. And we suppose it may be assumed, since we have said so much, that the cavalry of the occasion didn’t care a button whether the hats they knocked off were Irish members’ hats or journalists’ hats, or silk hats or straw. At any rate, the Ennis constables of the day were not in it, and Dr. Tanner as a historian has been made the mouthpiece of a romance.
The time that he and others expanded in such excursions in realm of fancy might have been easily devoted to some criticism upon the Force to its benefit, since nothing is perfect, not even an Irish parliamentary party.
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