The RIC Official Murder Policy A Bloody Reign Of Terror

By January 1920, the old order of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) was beginning to crumble. General Macready GOC-in-Charge, British Army in Ireland said “as regards the RIC, we are sitting on a volcano” and continued “if they were turned into an ordinary unarmed police force, they would fulfil their functions in time of peace a good deal better than at present” That didn’t happen and instead an officially sanctioned RIC murder campaign was carried out by the crumbling and undisciplined force which they pursued with relish.

A Paramilitary Police Force

The RIC were an armed paramilitary force rather than a regular civilian police force that policed Ireland under British rule since 1836. From their beginning, the mass of the Irish people were hostile to this new natively recruited police force and they disparagingly referred to them as Peelers. Darby Ryan the Bansha poet poked fun at them with his song:

 “The Peeler and the Goat”

“The Bansha peelers went one night
On duty and patrolling O
They met a goat upon the road
And took him for being a stroller O
With bayonets fixed they sallied forth
And caught him by the wizzen O
And then they swore a mighty oath
We’ll send you off to prison O”

The Empires Jackboots

They were historically deeply resented but were largely unopposed by most of the population. They were seen as the eyes and ears as well as the jackboots and enforcers of the British Empire. To add insult to injury they were an Irish force keeping down their own people on behalf of a foreign oppressor. The 10,000 RIC force were a sectarianally segregated force comprising of 75% Catholic rank and file member. They weren’t trusted to hold the position of Sergeant’s or above. The majority of the officers were Protestants.

A Murder Machine

The RIC played a central role in the wholesale evictions carried out during the 1845/52 genocide. They were also instrumental in protecting the mass export of food on the behest of the British from a country whose poor people were starving to death in their millions. They had remorselessly attended as heavy handed armed enforcers at countless evictions throughout their existence and had helped to quell the Fenian uprising of 1867 for which they were given their ‘Royal’ title.

Eyes and Ears of the British Empire

Described as the eyes and ears of the British Empire the R.I.C. played a vital and a very conspicuous role in the accumulation and analysis of political intelligence. They were the British Empires primary weapon in the suppression of Irish agrarian unrest and nationalist agitation throughout the nineteenth century.

They were the British administrations first and primary defence against rebellion in Ireland. They kept a keen watch over the political sympathies and activities of people in their districts, and reported anything suspicious to their British superiors.

Intelligence-gathering was one of the RIC’s most important functions and was therefore one of the main reasons for the Irish Republican Army’s ruthless determination in their war against the R.I.C. Between 1919 and 1922 they were to become the primary focus of an intensive, effective and extremely violent campaign by the IRA.

Britain’s Irish Traitors

The RIC at that time numbered some 10,000 men and there were over 1,300 RIC barracks across the country. Being native Irish men the RIC were vulnerable and they were subjected to ostracisation as were their families. Attacks and assassinations were eminent and their first casualties were at Solohead Beg, Co Tipperary on January 21^st 1919. As the campaign against them grew in intensity many members began to leave the force. Some of those who stayed were remarkably brave patriotic Irish men who risked their lives by becoming spies for the IRA. Since no new recruits were forthcoming from Ireland the British Government decided to replenish and reinforce them from Britain.

Police on the Rampage

On August 27^th 1920, the Weekly Summary, the Royal Irish Constabulary’s, (RIC) internal free sheet warned with satisfaction that the newly arriving Black and Tans would make Ireland ‘an appropriate hell for those whose trade is agitation and whose method is murder’. At this stage of the War of Independence, the RIC were already a heavily militarised force. They were reinforced by new recruits descriptively known as ‘Black & Tans’ because of their uniform and by a distinct new paramilitary elite corps, the Auxiliary Division, composed of ex British Army officers.

This reinforcement of the RIC would lead to an escalated orgy of reprisals and unprovoked attacks against republicans and the general community quickly demonstrated that this was no idle threat. But was this just an escalation and a continuation of an officially sanctioned murder campaign already well underway by the RIC?

The Sack of Tuam

Reprisals and selective murders had become a tactic of the RIC long before the arrival of the Black & Tans and the Auxiliaries in what they liked to term as counter insurgency actions. After Constable Luke Finnegan’s shooting in Thurles on January 20^th 1920, his RIC comrades rioted, firing in the streets and smashing the windows of prominent local republicans. RIC men damage property belonging to local Sinn Féiner’s and some public property. The offices of the Tipperary Star were also attacked. This was the first instance of police reprisals in the War of Independence. This was purely an RIC enterprise and no Black and Tans were involved.

RIC Murder and Mayhem

In March 20^th 1920 Tomás MacCurtain, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, was murdered at his home in front of his family days after the murder of three RIC officers in the city. Mac Curtain, a subsequent inquest found, had been murdered by the police (RIC). The RIC continued to relentlessly carry out their own murder campaign separate from the Tans and the Auxiliaries. The murders of Limerick Mayor Saoirse Clancy and former Limerick Mayor Michael O’Callaghan both carried out on the same night a year after MacCurtain’s murder has been identified as an RIC operation. These Limerick murders took place at one o’clock in the morning of 7^th March 1921. The RIC didn’t like Mayor’s.

On the night of July 21^st 1920 the RIC in Tuam, in Co. Galway went on a rampage of terror and destruction causing damage to property estimated to be upwards of £100,000. What became known as the sack of Tuam was a reprisal for the killing of two policemen on the previous afternoon.

With the arrival of reinforcements, reprisal activity would now become a tactical constant as RIC, Black and Tans, and Auxiliaries, acting separately and in combined forces increasing embarked on attacks on individuals, communities and property in retaliation for IRA attacks.

Reports of Reprisals

Galway September the 8^th,
Balbriggan September 20^th,
Trim September 27^th,
Mallow September 29^th,
Granard November 4^th, and
Cork December 11^th and 12^th

Smoking Gun

Writing to Walter Long (or John Anderson) on April 23^rd 2020 General Macready GOC-in-C, British Army in Ireland says “as regards the RIC, we are sitting on a volcano” and continued “if they were turned into an ordinary unarmed police force, they would fulfil their functions in time of peace a good deal better than at present”

In their article ‘Smoking gun? RIC reprisals, summer 1920’, John Borgonovo and Gabriel Doherty claim to have provided ‘indisputable evidence’ that ‘Dublin Castle had authorised an assassination campaign against its republican opponents’. This ‘indisputable evidence’ consists of passages from what they describe as a ‘newly discovered’ document, a secret letter from a senior police officer to a senior civil servant.

Brigadier-General Cyril Prescott-Decie was the RIC’s Divisional Commissioner for Clare, Limerick, and northern Tipperary. In his letter, dated June 1^st 1920, reporting to Dublin Castle about conditions within his division, towards the end of the letter, Prescott-Decie says the following:

‘I have been told the new policy and plan and I am satisfied, though I doubt its ultimate success in the main particular – the stamping out of terrorism by secret murder. I am still of opinion that instant retaliation is the only course for this, and until it is stamped for good and all, the same situation is likely to recur.’

Borgonovo and Doherty say there is only one way to interpret this passage: ‘the stamping out of terrorism by secret murder’ must refer to a ‘new policy and plan’ of extrajudicial killings.

They say, ‘The letter reveals a disturbing policy of assassination sanctioned by the highest level of the British government in Ireland.’ This policy was in place by the spring of 1920 – ‘months earlier than commonly believed’ – implying that ‘regular, Irish-born members of the RIC’ were involved. ‘Indeed, the proactive rather than reactive nature of the policy and its explicit “top-down” sanction by top officials in the “Irish Government” – bring into question whether the word – nay, the very concept of – “reprisal” needs to be fundamentally revised.’

David Fitzpatrick in a letter to History Ireland correctly pointed out that this document was not a new discovery. Fitzpatrick himself had discussed Prescott-Decie’s letter in his book Politics and Irish life 1913–1921, published in 1977. In fact Michael Collins had intercepted and read this letter and it has been widely discussed elsewhere from time to time ever since.

Fitzpatrick argued that Borgonovo and Doherty were misreading the letter’s crucial passage: the ‘secret murder’ in question was being committed by the ‘terrorists’ of the I.R.A.; and it was this ‘terrorism by secret murder’ that the ‘new policy and plan’ was intended to stamp out. Methinks that Fitzpatrick ‘doth protest too much’.

Borgonovo and Doherty defended their interpretation, ‘which is based on the plain meaning of the crucial sentences’. It’s amazing the amount of time and attention this letter receives from academics with such an amazingly narrow perspective in the light of so much more concrete evidence.

The RIC Murder Campaign

While Prescott-Decie’s letter was dated June 1^st the level of reprisals and murders according to our revisionist historians did not reach their bloody peak until the autumn. Since historic events are not looked at through the lenses of a microscope they should have broadened their field of vision if they wanted to be factually correct. I provide a table of RIC atrocities throughout this period at the end of this article.

Reprisals and murders were operating at a steady and deadly pace from the beginning of 1920, long before the arrival of Prescott-Decie’s letter. This would suggest that Prescott-Decie was merely referring to the accepted state of affairs whether they received official sanction or not. The large number of reprisals carried out by the RIC with towns and villages being looted and burned as well as numerous murders without any sanctioning of the perpetrators shows official approval in practice.

As General Macready observed, “Decie was wild and violent in both expression and conduct: his favourite recreations included pig-sticking, and his aggression made him a prime target for assassination, ineptly attempted by a Limerick flying column on 27 November 1920… Clearly, he was no wimp; yet neither was he demonstrably an advocate of liquidating his opponents through secret murder squads.”

West Galway Singled Out

Our current crop of revisionist historians asks “where are the bodies”? They claim that extrajudicial killings by the police ‘did not become a prominent feature’ of the War of Independence until the autumn of 1920. They basically want to exonerate the RIC and place all the blame on The Black & Tans and the Auxiliaries.

In April 1920, General Sir Neville Macready described this RIC police forces as “rotten” and hoped that Major General Tudor, the new Police Adviser, would improve the situation. Tudor had other plans as we will see.

Our revisionist historians singled out West Galway to try and make this point stick. They conveniently ignoring the rest of the country where in some areas the RIC were running riot with extrajudicial murders and the destruction of property as the hallmark of their activities.

The West’s Asleep

Prescott-Decie’s letter is dated 1 June 1920. Our revisionist historians tell us that if Dublin Castle authorised an assassination programme in the spring, it seems odd to them that more than five months would elapse before the first of these assassinations was carried out in Galway. They tell us that there were no extrajudicial killings in west Galway in June 1920.

There were also none in July, though they concede that the police did riot in Tuam. There were still none in August, even after an ambush claimed the life of a constable again followed by police reprisals in Oranmore.

What is really odd is how our revisionists manage to ignore the RIC’s extrajudicial murders going on in the rest of the country unless of course they are promoting an agenda rather than presenting history as it happened.

Blame the Black & Tans

They tell us that no republican activists were killed in west Galway until the night of 8 September 1920. By now they can shift away the blame from the RIC to the Black & Tans. Sean Mulvoy was killed in a fight with a Black and Tan at Galway railway station. In the reprisals that followed, Seamus Quirke was summarily executed by a police firing squad.

But no republicans were actually assassinated in west Galway until October 1920. Apparently innocent civilians didn’t count.

Galway City councillor Michael Walsh was abducted and murdered on the night of 19 October. More than a month passed before the security forces claimed their next victim, Fr Michael Griffin, who was abducted and murdered on the night of 14 November.

Much Adoo About Nothing

This controversy was started by Borgonovo and Doherty who claimed that a policy of extrajudicial killings must have been sanctioned from the top down – by ‘top officials in the Irish government’. If that is true, then: who were these top officials? Whose hidden hand was at work they asked? They wouldn’t have asked unless they had a ready but unconvincing answer.

Prescott-Decie’s letter is their trump card. It was addressed to the assistant under-secretary for Ireland who according to them was Sir John Taylor but he had already left office. He took a month’s leave in mid-April 1920 and retired in mid-May. Taylor was replaced by Alfred ‘Andy’ Cope described by Charles Townshend as the moving spirit of the ‘peace party’ in Dublin Castle. Prescott-Decie letter is just an incidental distraction – as are its rebuttals – away from the reality of the RIC’s judicial murders and reprisals that were happening on the ground.

The Real Evidence

This very visible level of the RIC’s murderous activity could not have continued throughout 1920 and beyond without high level official sanction or a very blind eye from the authorities which is effectively a form of official sanction. The actions of those under General Tudors command provide a bloody string of proof but it goes even higher.

• Recorded in the diary of Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary, 23 May, 1920 Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff wanted to collect the names of Sinn Féiner’s by districts, proclaim them on church doors all over the country, and whenever a policeman was murdered, pick five by lot and shoot them!
• Sir Henry Wilson on July 1920, recorded that the Prime Minister thought just the sort of arrangement he had recommended was operating under Tudor’s authority. Lloyd George believed that “Tudor, or someone, was murdering two Sinn Féiner’s to every loyalist the Sinn Féin murdered”. Cameron Hazlehurst in his 1972 Observerarticle also found that Macready had told Mark Sturgis: “[Lloyd George] is against burning, but not gunning, and told me so himself.”
• The fact that Smith of Listowel fame (see below) was not reprimand by officialdom for his inflammatory speeches in Listowel and Killarney suggests that Prescott-Decie’s letter was simply stating the obvious.
• Did Lloyd George not at the very least give an official nod and a wink to the RIC to carry out judicial murders? He wrote in the Daily Chronicleabout the RIC’s Thurles reprisals of January 20^th saying: “Nobody can fail to deplore such occurrences but equally obviously no one can wonder at them.  Indeed it is obvious that if these murderous clubs pursue their course much longer, we may see counter clubs springing up and the lives of prominent Sinn Féiners becoming as unsafe as prominent officials.”
• Following an inquest on May 7^th into the killing of three men in Miltown Malbay, Co Clare on April 14^th the Coroner issued warrants for the arrest of the below named RIC men. The warrants were served on RIC DI Mooney.

Despite the Coroner’s findings and his warrants being binding under the law of the land, the named RIC men were never arrested or charged.

The inquest states that they died from bullet wounds inflicted by “Sergeant Hampson, Constables Thomas O’Connor and Thomas Keenan, Lance-Corporal Kenneth McLeod, Privates William Kilgon (Kilgour), James McEwan, Peter McLoughlin, Robert Bunting and Richard Adams.

“We find from the evidence that each of the above-named members of the patrol was guilty of wilful murder, without any provocation …”   Regardless of the Coroner’s arrest warrants, the named men were never arrested or charged. That surely implies official collusion at a high enough level to prevent the rule of law from performing its duty. This was typical under Tudors command.

• On May 14^th, 15^th and 16^th every member of Dáil Éireann (not in prison) received a note on official Dáil notepaper through the post, saying “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  Therefore a life for a life.” On May 18^th Arthur Griffith held a press conference in Dublin where he displays those death notes. The Dáil note paper that they were printed on was, he said, removed during a raid on the 11^th of November 1919 by British forces from Dáil HQ in Harcourt St.  Griffith accused the British government in Ireland in being involved in the assassinations of elected representatives.
• James Saunders was shot dead in Limerick on May 28^th.  He was killed by the police according to the verdict at his inquest. This was the 8th verdict of murder by RIC police since the beginning of the year. Could these murders have taken place without sanction or official approval? Nobody asked any such inconvenient questions.
• The first meeting of the British Cabinet with its new Irish officials took place on May 31^st. This meeting Coogan claims, considered ways of making Irishmen “feel the effects of the campaigns of murder and arson along economic channels” and this transformed into the policy of burning creameries, bacon factories and mills in reprisals.
• On June 19^th as many days after Prescott-Decie’s June 1^st 1920 letter his newly appointed Munster counterpart, Divisional Commissioner Smyth made his controversial speech to the Listowel police. Present with Smyth at this meeting were Major General Henry Tudor Chief of Police, Poer O’Shee, Kerry County Inspector RIC; Captain Chadwick of the British army; RM Leatham and Assistant County Inspector Dobbyn.

Was Smyth in the presence of Tudor – his exalted superior – merely reiterating the existing rules of engagement, or was he sanctioning new rules of engagement? Surely his speech to the Listowel RIC ranks must have had the support of the high level officials that accompanied him? He reportedly said:

“Police and military will patrol the country roads at least five nights a week. They are not to confine themselves to the main roads but make across the country, lie in ambush, take cover behind fences near roads, and when civilians are seen approaching shout: ‘Hands up!’ Should the order be not obeyed, shoot, and shoot with effect.

If the persons approaching carry their hands in their pockets or are in any way suspicious looking, shoot them down. You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped and you are bound to get the right persons sometimes.

The more you shoot the better I will like you; and I assure you that no policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man and I will guarantee that your names will not be given at the inquest.”

Constable Jeremiah Mee put his pistol on the table and told Smyth that his speech was an incitement to murder.  When ordered to arrest Mee, the other constables refused. This became known as the ‘Listowel Mutiny’.  Fourteen RIC men tendered their resignation. According to Macardle, O’Shee also took part in the ‘mutiny’.

In stark contrast to the reaction of the RIC men present, the silent acquiescence of Major General Tudor, Captain Chadwick of the British army; RM Leatham and Assistant County Inspector Dobbyn speaks volumes regarding what the official policy was.

After a similar speech by Smyth in Killarney a little later, five more RIC men resigned. Throughout the entire affair Tudor remained conspicuously silent.

• General Macready issues a Special General Order on August 17^th warning that the severest disciplinary measures would be taken against any sign of looting or retaliation. General Tudor was supposed to issue a parallel order but did not do so. Instead on the November 9th he issued a memorandum asking for information and offering guidance. Is that not a clear case of Tudor condoning or even encouraging looting and burning?
• Sir Maurice Hankey’s minutes of a discussion on October 5^th 1920 between Lloyd George and the liberal Peer Lord Grey of Fallodon, says that the Prime Minister “strongly defended the murder reprisals”. According to the account of who was present at the interview, Lloyd George…showed that these had from time immemorial been resorted to in difficult times in Ireland. He gave numerous instances where they had been effective in checking crimes. He quoted two eminent nationalists who had told him in confidence that the Irish quite understood such reprisals, and that they ought not to be stopped.
• Many towns and villages were burned and looted by Tudor’s men. Two damning incidents involving Tudor occurred on February 9^th Auxiliaries went on the rampage in Trim, causing estimated damage of £325, while in Dublin near Drumcondra an Auxiliary Commander named King shot two young prisoners dead.

General Crozier investigated the Trim incident and dismissed 21 Auxiliaries and held 5 over to be tried for their part in the raid. Two escaped and robbed a publican. Later 5 of the Trim Auxiliaries were convicted and 19 reinstated. Crozier investigated the Drumcondra killings but claimed the evidence was rigged.

• In November 1920 Tudor removed Croziers power to dismiss Auxiliaries. Crozier resigned in disgust on 25 February 1921. London’s press was full of accounts of Tudor’s treatment of him and “Black and Tans” atrocities. In April 1921, 3 of the Drumcondra Auxiliaries were tried but the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. Tudor and extra judicial killings went hand in hand. Tudor had been appointed by Lloyd George who supported his every move.
• On July 1^st Chief of the Imperial Staff, Field Marshall Henry Wilson, wrote in his diary that the Prime Minister Lloyd George was of the belief that “Tudor has organised a counter-murder society”.

On the 7th July, he wrote in his diary that Lloyd George “seemed to be satisfied counter-murder Association was the best answer to the S.F.’s murders”.

• The Irish Bulletin published reports of the RIC ‘mutinies’ in Listowel and Killarney. This led to questions in the British House of Commons but nobody asked the right ones.
• On August 2^nd the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (ROIA) placed before British Parliament – was guillotined through and received royal assent on the August 9th.  It legalised internment and empowered military courts to try capital cases and a number of other offences.

It replaced those troublesome coroners’ courts with Military Courts of Inquiry for deaths caused by Crown Forces.  According to Leeson “British counter-insurgency truly began in earnest on 9 August, when the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act was passed”.

• On 9 November 1920, Lloyd George declared, “We have murder by the throat!” Then on Sunday morning November 21^st, Collins sent out the Squad and shot twelve British intelligence officers dead, members of the “Cairo Gang” brought in from the Middle East to nail Collins. Four more were wounded.

That afternoon, Auxiliaries and RIC men indiscriminately fired on a crowd watching a Gaelic football match at Croke Park between Dublin and Tipperary, killing twelve civilians including a woman, a child and a Tipperary player. Sixty people were wounded. That “Bloody Sunday” ended with three men held by Auxiliaries being beaten to death in the guard room of Dublin Castle “attempting to escape”.

• On 10 December a detachment of Auxiliaries and Black and Tans committed one of the most notorious of all reprisals, the sacking and burning of Cork City. A large part of the shopping area, the City Hall, the Corn Exchange, the Carnegie Free Library, and most of Patrick Street were destroyed by pouring petrol into the buildings and igniting them. The police severed the hoses of the Cork fire brigade when they tried to extinguish the fires.

Lloyd George’s Cabinet agreed to a military inquiry the outcome of which was to be published, but a later Cabinet meeting had second thoughts announcing: The effect of publishing the report would be disastrous to the government’s whole policy in Ireland.

• Britain’s officially sanctioned commitment to terror in Ireland continued unabated. As the year closed, the carrying IRA suspects and civilians as hostages in military lorries became operational. Fighting continued with ferocity for another six months, but the burning of Cork and other atrocities had shocked British people. The Cabinet finally started working on proposals for a new political formula and through intermediaries both war weary sides agreed to a truce.

Tudors Official Murder Campaign

In what can only be described as Tudor’s officially sanctioned murder campaign, the RIC and later the Black & Tan’s and the Auxiliaries operated with impunity under his command. Without his overt support they could not have got away with their murderous reign of terror and wholesale destruction of property and common theft.

In the cases where General Crozier intervened his efforts were openly subverted by Tudor until he resigned in disgust.

If historians are interested in the truth of the ‘official sanction of murder’ they should forget about Prescott-Decie’s letter. Instead they should examine the long line of overwhelmingly factual evidence and officialdoms numerous condoning words of support from Lloyd George all the way down to Smyth and always with Tudor hovering in the background. That is just some of the unmistakable chain of evidence that is readily available in plain sight for all who care to see it.

Below is a Blow by Blow table of RIC atrocities at a time when it is claimed that nothing happened

Thurles again wrecked by British troops on March 7^{th .}

This table only covers the period when we are told that nothing happened.