In the early years of this State, Éamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil had to go through a metamorphosis in their attitudes of support for the Garda Síochána, writes Conor Brady
As Sinn Féin and the IRA square up to the issue of support for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, there are some interesting - and perhaps instructive - historical comparisons with what happened here in the early years of this State.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Éamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil had to go through a metamorphosis in their attitudes to the Garda Síochána.
Fianna Fáil's journey of conversion - as much as that latterly being experienced by Sinn Féin - underlined an ineluctable political reality. Full participation in democratically based government and full acceptance of whatever arrangements a state may make for civil policing are ultimately indivisible.
The Garda was established in 1922 and 1923 and had been brought up to a strength of about 4,000 by the end of 1924. In 1925 the Garda Síochána and the Dublin Metropolitan Police were amalgamated - an initiative which, among other things, facilitated the deployment of armed Special Branch units around the State.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the entire police establishment of the new State was pro-Treaty. But it was certainly the case that very few of Mr De Valera's supporters had been placed in the new police - and none at all in the senior ranks.
Significantly, members of the Garda were not generally viewed as legitimate targets by the anti-Treaty forces during the Civil War. Many were injured or wounded by maverick elements but remarkably, just one Garda life was lost during the civil war as a result of IRA action.
Garda casualties were actually heavier in the period 1922-1927 than during the Civil War proper. As the National Army was drawn back to barracks and with large-scale demobilisation, the police became increasingly cast in the role of the State's security force - as distinct from a civil police force, concerned with routine administration of law and order. "The embodiment of the Treaty in blue uniforms" was one memorable description.
Under the direction of Eoin O'Duffy and his deputies, Eamonn Coogan and WRE Murphy, the gardaí were vigorous in their dealings with unreconstructed anti-Treaty supporters who did not recognise the new State or its laws. "Political" crime leached over into organised criminality in many cases. Uniformed gardaí were murdered, in at least one instance by criminals involved in the poteen trade, in another by demobilised National Army officers-turned-bank-robbers.
In 1925, with the deployment of armed Special Branch units across every division, the gardaí acquired new muscle and used it vigorously. The "S-Branch" took on and in many cases succeeded in putting out of business those who had turned to armed crime or who refused to abide by De Valera's "dump arms" order of November 1923.
The Garda in general and the Special Branch in particular became the eminences grises of those who opposed the treaty and who refused to accept the legitimacy of the new State and the Cumann na nGaedheal administration of WT Cosgrave.
In 1926 De Valera accepted the realpolitik of the Irish Free State and broke away from Sinn Féin to found Fianna Fáil. Shortly afterwards he led his deputies into the Dáil, declaring that he had taken no oath of allegiance to the British monarch and that he had merely expressed an "empty formula."
But if Fianna Fáil accepted the reality of the new political institutions, it took most of its members much longer to accept the legitimacy of the police force.
Neither did the police recognise much distinction between Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and the IRA, even after Mr De Valera had entered the Dáil. Not untypical was a case of attempted murder in Dublin in 1928.
A police informant, Seán Harling, shot dead a would-be IRA assassin who had waited for him in ambush near his - Harling's - home in Dartry. The dead man was also an active member of Sinn Féin and latterly of Fianna Fáil.
Local Fianna Fáil councillors passed innumerable resolutions condemning the new police and demanding that it be dissolved. The Special Branch men were assailed with particular vehemence in repeated speeches by senior Fianna Fáil figures including De Valera, Seán Lemass, Frank Aiken and Oscar Trainor.
Some of the Special Branch officers had been recruited from the former ranks of the Oriel House "Criminal Investigation Department," itself a lineal descendant of Michael Collins's War of Independence "squad."
Special Branch was led by Colonel David Neligan who had been one of Collins's agents in the DMP detective division. Oriel House men were generally - and almost certainly correctly - regarded as having been responsible for the murder of Noel Lemass whose body was found in the Dublin Mountains in 1923.
Fianna Fáil members refused to co-operate with the police either by way of giving information or by appearing as witnesses. It was perhaps hard to blame them. One or two that did so were murdered. Some disappeared. Many were intimidated or beaten or were threatened that their homes and properties would be burned out.
The columns of the Irish Press carried frequent denunciations of the gardaí while letter-writers to the editor expressed the repeated hope that a Fianna Fáil government would disband or politically cleanse the force.
But as the prospect of taking political power drew nearer, leading Fianna Fáil figures moderated their language and their demands. The 1930 Dáil debate on the estimates for the Garda saw Fianna Fáil spokesmen call for a reduction in the size of the uniformed force rather than its disbandment. The Special Branch however remained the object of deep hostility and it was clear that its members' future in a De Valera-led state would be unpromising.
When Fianna Fáil finally took control of government in 1932, the designation of the IRA as an illegal organisation was lifted. Military drilling, outlawed under the Cosgrave government, was no longer illegal. Two organised, disciplined forces were now recognised by the law.
It was an utterly confusing, demoralising and dangerous time for the gardaí.
De Valera made a post-election tour of the country and inspected parading IRA men, ignoring honour-guards drawn up by the gardaí. Many gardaí went into passive mode, drew their pay, kept their heads down and waited for the honeymoon between Fianna Fáil and the IRA to come to an end.
In power, Fianna Fáil quickly set about fashioning the police to their own ends. De Valera removed O'Duffy, Neligan and William O'Connell, the deputy head of the Special Branch. Many of the rank-and-file membership of the Branch were dispersed to other duties.
With the emerging threat of the Blueshirts, led by O'Duffy, the government took swift action to strengthen the police organisation it had so long castigated.
Some hundreds of Fianna Fáil supporters were mobilised by Oscar Trainor, issued with revolvers, hastily sworn in as members of the Garda Síochána and assigned to the S-Branch. They were dubbed the "Broy Harriers", a play on the name of the new Commissioner (Eamonn Broy) and the Wicklow hunting pack, the Bray Harriers. Many went on to long and successful careers in the Garda.
Within a matter of months, the Fianna Fáil government and the reshaped Garda Síochána were in a state of workable cohabitation. The new minister for justice was feted at Garda Headquarters in the Depot and featured on the cover of the Garda Review. In due course, the honeymoon between Fianna Fáil and the IRA did come to an end. Fianna Fáil had to come to an acknowledgment that there could only be one source of political authority in the land and that it could support only one security structure.
When Mr De Valera reimposed the prohibitions on military drilling and outlawed the IRA, it was the Garda Síochána that had to enforce the law in support of government policy.
There are many differences in the two scenarios then and now, but there are similarities in the progressions. Fianna Fáil entered Dáil Éireann in 1926 but it took almost six years before the party normalised its relations with the Garda Síochána. It has taken almost eight years since the signing of the Belfast Agreement for Sinn Féin to normalise its relationship with civil policing in Northern Ireland.
If there is a message for today from the example of the 1920s and 1930s, it would seem to be a positive one.
Conor Brady is a Commissioner of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission. He is author of Guardians of the Peace, a history of the Garda Síochána, published in 1974 by Gill and Macmillan. He was editor of The Irish Times from 1986 to 2002.