The Irish Policeman, 1822–1922: A Life (review)

As she admits in her acknowledgements, Elizabeth Malcolm has been writing and publishing on the Irish police for a decade and a half. Given this, readers might think that they would be hard pressed to find something new in this volume that has not appeared before in Malcolm's earlier essays and articles. They would be quite wrong however. While The Irish Policeman concentrates on the Royal Irish Constabulary that policed Ireland between 1867 and 1922, it covers a wider chronological period, with an initial chapter offering a summary history of the Irish police prior to the formation of the Irish Constabulary in 1836, and a final chapter considering policing in Ireland after partition. The chapters that deal with the duties and training of the constabulary offer much greater detail than any earlier writing, either by Malcolm herself or by any other historian of Ireland's police, such as W. J. Lowe, Brian Griffin, Virginia Crossman, or Stanley H. Palmer. Thus, for example, we find that while recruits to the ranks were served "frugal" meals in spartan circumstances at the training depot, officer cadets enjoyed "schoolboy pranks" in an atmosphere much akin to a military mess. For both groups, however, drinking remained "probably the most popular recreation" (81, 88, 89). The focus on the domestic circumstances and lives of the force is both novel and enlightening. Policemen, we are informed, saw "their personal lives . . . open to official scrutiny and direction, almost as much as their working lives" (170). The result was a family environment, which, for the most part, aped civilian normality, but in which children and wives could find themselves as isolated from the wider population as their serving husbands. The analysis of the career structure and employment prospects within police service in the Irish constabularies deals, in one particular context, with an area of Irish labour history that has too often been ignored. With a few exceptions, such as John Lynch's work on shipyard workers and some varied studies of linen manufacture, the world of the Irish worker has remained largely closed to us. Here we are given details of pay and conditions alongside the attitudes of workers and employers. Service in the police force in Victorian Ireland emerges as a simple alternative to emigration for many, and very much an occupation rather than a vocation. Finally, Malcolm brings together material concerning the "simmering discontent in the force" (150) that existed from the 1860s, and highlights three incidents in which police officers failed to adhere to the military and disciplinary ideals supposedly instilled in them during their training. Under pressure during the Land War, at the time of the Belfast dock strike in 1907, and then during the Anglo-Irish War, members of the constabulary in Ireland failed in some measure to obey their superiors or to carry out their duties to a satisfactory level. The implication here is that though their struggles as workers were generally unsuccessful, the police forces of Ireland were not as impregnable to disaffection as the authorities would have liked.

There is, therefore, much here that is new and which will interest those concerned with both policing in the Victorian era and nineteenth-century Ireland. Underlying the book, however, are themes that have already emerged in Malcolm's earlier work. The transformation of the Irish police forces from paramilitary bodies into "domesticated" agencies that collected agricultural statistics and issued dog licences, survives. So too does the implication that members of the Royal Irish Constabulary in particular were largely accepted in the societies that they policed and conformed to the stereotype of the "village bobby." Yet in a postrevisionist turn, these earlier conclusions have been considerably qualified in this book.

There is an acceptance here that the police force as a body, as well as individual policemen, were far more political than has previously been acknowledged. Individual members of the majority-Catholic force seem to have seen themselves as the natural policing agency of...