Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Guardians of the Peace by Conor BradyReview by: Richard HawkinsIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 20, No. 77 (Mar., 1976), pp. 76-78Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30005559 .

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76 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

lessen it. Though questions of education, as this study points out aroused surprisingly little controversy, the attitude of state legislation towards birth control and divorce expressed an essentially differing position; and the view of the minority church towards neutrality in the Second World War is amply indicated by a remark of the then primate, who referred at the general synod of I94o to 'the hospitality of the neutral country within whose borders we are assembled'. It is a telling phrase, capable of wider application.

Dr McDowell charts the history of this separate consciousness with sensitivity, wit, and scholarship, drawing from a wide variety of church records, episcopal papers, and official publications-as well as a vivid selection of memoirs. And one's regret that the larger questions men- tioned at the beginning of this review were not embarked upon is caused only by knowledge of what a historian of Dr McDowell's calibre can do in brilliantly rationalising the inchoate material of 'public opinion' and intellectual attitudes, not by any shortcomings in this valuable short study.

R. F. FOSTER

GUARDIANS OF THE PEACE. By Conor Brady. Pp xvi, 254. Dublin and London: Gill and Macmillan.

1974. £3.50.

THE maintenance of public order in Ireland is a subject that is deservedly receiving increasing attention; and of a number of recent publications in the field this is by no means the least important. It is not, one must say, a work of scholarship: there is a note on sources and a short list of secondary works in the introduction, but no footnote references in the text. It is easy, of course, to think of works over- burdened with the trappings of scholarship, but no more scholarly for all that; and Guardians of the peace has the excuse that much of its material is drawn from the author's interviews with over two hundred persons. Footnoting such material would be a trial to the author and the general reader, without greatly assisting the scholar. More off-putting than the lack of footnotes are the occasional instances of a looseness of grip: for example, the vagueness about the number of R.I.C. stations (pp 21, 23, 83), and such needless duplications as the data on pay rates (PP 43-4, 87), armed robberies (pp I 14, 128), and the death of Guard O'Halloran (pp i14, 131).

Guardians of the peace is not intended as a comprehensive history of police in Ireland, and the twenty pages allotted to police history up to i92o form an outline account which, though a reasonable digest and by no means wholly derivative, is necessarily sketchy, and sometimes weak. Mr Brady's legitimate and laudable perception of the unique qualities of the GArda Siochana leads him to stress the contrast with the R.I.C., with some consequent injustice to the latter. This can happen even when he is trying hard to be fair, as on p. 1 I6 where the gArdais' informal dispensing of thumps on the skull is contrasted with the R.I.C.'s supposed obsession with due process of law 'on the English model'.

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 77

Setting aside whether this was true of the R.I.C., was it true of England? This reviewer's great-grandfather, as the first resident policeman in Wembley (Middlesex), may not have made a regular practice of con- cussing offenders up Horsenden Lane, but one can confidently assume that, with his superiors three miles away in Harrow, he used his dis- cretion as much as a garda in rural Ireland. And surely it is not the case that R.I.C. officers were trained in England (same page)? The insistence (more than once) upon the D.M.P.'s loss of popularity after the IgI3 labour troubles should surely be qualified in view of the extent of R.I.C. assistance; some of the men shown in the picture facing p. 8o appear to be R.I.C.

Nor is Guardians of the peace a comprehensive history of the Garda Siochina. Fully half the book is devoted to the first ten years of the force,, and seventy-five pages to the next ten years. Seamus Breathnach's The Irish police (Dublin, 1974), devoting very few pages to the entire history of the force, actually provides more detail on some matters. Mr Brady's purpose has been to show the way in which the Gdrda's role in Irish society and politics was conceived and established, and for this purpose his book is (with the above qualifications) admirably designed and executed. The practical importance of the question is undoubted. In the home-rule controversy, criticism of the Castle system centred upon the conduct of its police, centralised under a government without direct responsibility to, or the full acceptance of, the Irish people. Conversely, a powerful argument against home rule was the predicted inability of a native government to guarantee the rule of law; a home-rule police would, if centralised, be merely the tool of the dominant section in Irish society, and if decentralised would fall subject to corrupting local influences. When the organisation of a native government had to be tackled, O'Higgins's words put the importance of the police question succinctly: 'if the guards lose, we all lose' (p. 77).

The successful creation of a civilian police force was indeed a very remarkable achievement, and not merely with the circumstances of 1922-3 in mind. Throughout the political history of the Free State, the concept was under continual attack; if by 1938 the Garda was not quite what had been hoped for, the wonder is still that the essential character had survived at all. Mr Brady gives a very clear picture of successive phases of development from the embryonic stage under Collins when the influence of the R.I.C.'s example, and of some of its former members, was strong, and the new force was still basically a gendarmerie. The decisive change was made under O'Higgins and O'Duffy, when the guards were able, in effect, to stand apart from the armed struggle while continuing to do their civil duty-the position which the D.M.P. had tried to preserve during the war of independence, and which some at least of the R.I.C. would have liked to achieve.' The Garda's striking success in establishing itself in Irish society was inevitably compromised by the direct control exercised by the government of the day. For this reason, the first few years under Fianna FAil were crucial. Certainly

1 See The memoirs of Constable Jeremiah Mee, R.I.C., ed. Fr J. Anthony Gaughan (Tralee, 1975).

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78 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

nothing occurred to diminish the subjection of police to political control -if anything, the reverse happened-, but it was demonstrated that, whatever O'Duffy might do, the Girda was going to stand by the prin- ciples O'Duffy had earlier laid down, and was not going to choose which government should be obeyed and which disregarded. This demonstration must have contributed nearly as much as the establishment of the force to the preservation of order and parliamentary politics.

Guardians of the peace allots eleven pages to the last thirty years of the force, and devotes half of them to a consideration of present problems and future possibilities. It is a measure of the book's success that this does not seem out of proportion: the lesson conveyed is that one can validly measure the present and prospective performance of the GArda against the ideals and objectives of its founders; and, incidentally, that a condition of war between apparently irreconcilable political opponents, aggravated by every kind of violent lawlessness, is not irremediable so long as people are ready to do what is needed to end it. Despite its shortcomings, this is a particularly important addition to the historiography of police in Ireland, and by no means a negligible contribution to the political history of Ireland since 1921.

RICHARD HAWKINS

FROM BIG GOVERNMENT TO LOCAL GOVERNMENT: THE ROAD TO DECEN- TRALISATION. By T. J. Barrington. Pp viii, 238. Dublin : Institute of Public Administration. I975. £6.oo00.

MODERN government displays two apparently inexorable trends: it has constantly grown in size and it has tended to become more centralised. These tendencies pose problems for society. T. J. Barrington has for long been concerned-obsessed even-with them. This book is a product of that obsession, consisting as it does of lectures, articles and papers produced over the last twelve years on aspects of the reallocation and decentralisation of governmental functions.

Because it is a collection of disparate pieces, there is much repetition in the book, and Barrington's themes are not developed systematically or at a single level of detail or sophistication. It is, indeed, a pity that he did not choose to write up his material as an entirely new book. A systematic exposition would have been shorter and more satisfying to read, and it would have allowed Barrington's ideas to emerge more logically and their solid basis in fact to have been more compelling than they are. Nevertheless, even in the format necessitated by addresses to bodies such as the Christus Rex Congress and the Community Govern- ment Movement, the breadth of his perspective and the extent of his detailed knowledge of our political and administrative institutions are impressive.

As Barrington sees it, the problems of a public sector that is becoming ever bigger and more centralised are, first, the overloading of the central administration and, conversely, the underdevelopment of government at

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