The Garda ana Siochana - Policing Independent Ireland 1922-1982. By Gregory Allen. Gill & Macmillan. 306pp. £19.99
The publication of Gregory Allen's The Garda ana Siochana represents a landmark in the chronicling of Irish policing history. As the former archivist and founder-curator of the Garda Museum, the author has had wide access to documentary sources which were not always available to earlier researchers. Equally important, as a former member of the force with 40 years service, he is uniquely equipped to elucidate the official thinking sublimated in the dusty, manila files of bygone decades.
Mr Allen has a particular vision of the policeman as an exemplar in the community. Much of the early rhetoric of the founding fathers of the Garda was grounded in this ideal. Early publications, public addresses by senior officers and even the force's Routine Orders propagandised the courageous, unarmed, patriotic and sober garda. The author draws on a wealth of documentary sources to relate how this ideal was pursued, with no small measure of success, in the force's founding years. In this vein, he goes to some lengths to prove as a hoax the lurid minute of Deputy Commissioner Coogan's supposed inspection of Corofin station in May 1923. He also includes, by way of an appendix, a fascinating selection of letters of appreciation sent to Garda Headquarters from around the State in the period 1922-1924.
Much of the focus of the first part of The Garda ana Siochana is on the character and leadership of Commissioner Eoin O'Duffy, who was appointed to lead the new police after the demoralising mutiny at its Kildare Barracks. A very much more admirable O'Duffy emerges than the inconsistent zealot of later years. Mr Allen persuasively details O'Duffy's sense of national duty, his care for the men under his command and his insistence on the highest standards of probity. The author does not shrink from criticism of his later instability, as instanced in his ill-considered recommendation in 1930 that the force should be armed. But were O'Duffy in a position to ask posterity to give him a fair chit for his work with the Garda ana, Siochana, he could hardly hope to do better than in Mr Allen's extensive treatment. A particular strength of this book is the author's understanding of the continuity between the Royal Irish Constabulary and the police force of the new State. He underlines the RIC's reliance, in both its rank-and-file as well as its officer corps, upon the recruitment of young men of good character and moral formation. Many of the families which gave their sons to the Garda ana Siochana in the early years of the State had members in police service under the ancien regime. The qualities which made a good RIC man were the same, in key respects, as those which later made a good garda.
There is a wealth of new detail in Mr Allen's narrative on the events surrounding the establishment of the Garda and on its early turbulent years. His account of the setting-up of the advisory committee on policing by the Provisional Government is certainly the most comprehensive yet to emerge. Similarly his chronicle of the mutiny at Kildare is rich in detail and is unlikely to be surpassed. He provides valuable additional information on the establishment of the "Broy Harriers", Fianna Fail's leavening of the Special Branch with its own supporters. He adumbrates the role of the Garda, and in particular that of General WRE Murphy, then deputy commissioner, in the establishment of the Local Security Force during the years of the Emergency. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no comparable narrative of the establishment of the "Taca" ana Siochana - effectively a full-time reserve - during the same period.
Something more than a third of Mr Allen's book is concerned with what might loosely be termed industrial relations issues within the Garda. This is a singularly valuable contribution, covering areas which have hardly been touched upon elsewhere. The author writes with particular insight, having been a prominent member of the representative body for the middle ranks in the period before the Conroy report of 1970, which pushed the force into something akin to late 20th-century reality. He has an unusual, bipolar view of the processes which began with a "go-slow" by younger gardai in 1961, resulting in traffic chaos in the capital. He at once recognises the legitimacy of the claims for fair pay and conditions while deprecating the "vacuum in the exercise of authority" within the force. His narrative traces the tensions which arose as an organisation, steeped in traditionalism, struggled to come to terms with the demands of a society which was rapidly urbanising, in which organised crime was emerging and which was being drawn into the political crisis of the adjoining jurisdiction.
Of the emergent trade unionism in the force, he writes: "An even greater problem within the Garda ana Siochana was the loss of identity with its own historical psyche . . . the radicalism inherent in the trade union movement can have no place in the uniquely disciplined institution of the police service, distinguished as it must be by an essential conservatism."
Much of the author's service was at the Phoenix Park headquarters. He had the opportunity over several decades to observe the force's various Commissioners and senior officers at first hand. He also gained considerable insight into the complex and often strained relationships which have existed between the Garda leadership and the Department of Justice. He has combined skilful use of documentary sources with his own empirical knowledge to offer valuable insights into many of the personalities involved and into the realpolitik of their working relationships. We learn of Commissioner Broy's passion for athletics and his efforts to use it to boost morale; of Commissioner Costigan's visionary recognition of the need for ordered change, frustrated by vested interests; of Commissioner Garvey's inordinately difficult task at a time when conflicting pressures of many kinds came to bear upon the force.
Garvey became Commissioner at a time when all the chickens of previous neglect and myopia came home to roost for the Garda ana.Siochana. Mr Allen is properly sympathetic of the difficulties he faced and applies the words of another senior officer to evaluate Garvey's stewardship. He was "a plain, blunt man who never had any time for cant or claptrap . . . jealousy of his ability, his uprightness and his integrity made lesser men come to the conclusion that he should be removed from office". There is, of course, another view of EP Garvey's commissionership: that he was the wrong man for the time and circumstances and that his judgment had become dangerously skewed. In a rare departure from his scholarly methodology, Mr Allen declaims that the allegations about a "Heavy Gang" which abused and ill-treated suspects at the time of Garvey's commissionership were a "media invention". Senior journalists who work on the staff of this newspaper could give him an argument there.
It is greatly to be regretted that this account does not go beyond 1982 and is thus almost two decades behind events. The author would not, of course, have had the same level of access to recent papers, and it must await another chronicler to cover the dramatic events and extraordinary changes which have overtaken the Garda ana Siochana over the past 20 years. The great value of The Garda ana Siochana is its meticulous use of written sources, and one has the sense that the author feels himself happiest and on the most solid ground where he is using those sources to throw light upon events which have been hitherto, at best, half understood. To take but one example, he disproves the assertion in this reviewer's Guardians of the Peace (1974) that O'Duffy had taken active steps towards a coup in 1932, including the preparation of a printed proclamation. The correction is happily accepted.
Taken in conjunction with Liam McNiff's The Garda ana Siochana - a Social History and Dermot Walsh's The Irish Police, this excellent volume must virtually complete the history of modern Irish policing in this State. Mr Allen writes in an elegant, flowing style and the book can be commended as much for that as for its historic content.
Conor Brady is editor of The Irish Times. He is author of Guardians of the Peace and a number of papers on the security policy of the Irish Free State 1922-32
