The young Tobias would have been aware of the complicated history of the police in the area. The Irish Constabulary were obliged to enforce the law of the land. They took part in evictions. They infiltrated and informed on secret anti-government societies. But Tobias was one among many thousands of Irishmen who signed up to the ranks of the police, joining in November 1899 at the age of twenty-two. Many hundreds of thousands of others joined the Irish regiments of the British Army. Without them, the writ of Britannia, from Ireland to the empire’s most far-flung borders, would have been hard to maintain. It was a choice made by members of my mother’s family too, as we will see. The O’Sullivan family had strong police links. Tobias’s older brother Bernard spent eight years in the RIC and became an inspector of police in Jamaica. Another brother rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army. Two of his cousins would become RIC sergeants in Limerick.
Tobias O’Sullivan and his wife, Mary, known to her family as May (Desiree Flynn)
Tobias O’Sullivan was an achiever. He was educated at the Galway Grammar School, a protestant institution with a strong academic reputation which admitted Catholic boys. Eleven years after joining the RIC, Tobias came second in Ireland in the exams for sergeant. He was ambitious with relatives on both sides who were doing well in business, the sons and daughters of the growing Catholic middle class. Growing up Tobias would have heard stories of the bravery of a local man, John Purcell, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Neighbours’ sons were far more likely to have joined the British Army than a militant nationalist organisation. Besides, the ranks of the Crown forces offered rare escape from rural poverty. The Connaught Rangers regiment recruited heavily from the young men of the region, and throughout the nineteenth century fought in wars across the British Empire.
Why did young men join the police? At home the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary offered upward mobility. There was strong competition for positions. Tobias O’Sullivan joined the police with his two brothers and a cousin. My maternal great-grandfather made the same choice with his three brothers. For many young men in rural Ireland the RIC constable was accepted as a pillar of authority and respectability. Even after the upheavals of the Land War the commanding position of the police sergeant in village and town seemed immutable. ‘They all went to him for everything,’ one officer remarked, ‘he was the chief advisor and all.’16 The police constable’s salary was equivalent to that of the bank clerk, the civil servant and the schoolteacher, but the prospects of advancement were better. And while the young schoolteacher and bank clerk would be confined within the narrow space of a classroom or behind a counter, the police constable could get out in the open air, meeting people from town and country. RIC constables had to read and write, and their literacy gave them an additional measure of respectability. There were also other advantages such as the fact that uniforms and boots were supplied free, and married men received a lodging allowance. They were also an armed police force, although in the years before the Revolution they rarely carried their weapons on patrol.
When O’Sullivan joined at the turn of the century the make-up of the force represented the sectarian reality in Ireland: eighty per cent of the constables were Catholic, but Catholics only made up ten per cent of the district and county inspectors. The leadership was dominated by Protestants; the strong Catholic middle class was still excluded from the upper echelons of the state security apparatus. A university education could not break this glass ceiling. No such restrictions existed in the colonies, however. A bright Catholic boy like Michael O’ Dwyer, for instance, one of fourteen children of a farmer in County Tipperary, could rise to become Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, in which role he imposed martial law and defended his subordinate’s role in the massacre of between 400 and 1,000 Sikh civilians at Amritsar. (O’Dwyer lost his job and ultimately his life. A Sikh tracked him down and killed him in London twenty-one years later.)
As the twentieth century opened, most Irishmen thought their position within the empire was settled. There was certainly enough consent from the governed for Her Majesty’s police to enforce the law largely unhindered. During Queen Victoria’s three-week visit to Ireland in April 1900 she had delighted in the ‘endless streets full of enthusiastic people’ in Dublin and the great fireworks display that lit the skies over the city.17 Later she entertained 52,000 children to a ‘Patriotic Children’s Treat’ in Phoenix Park.
Irish separatists demonstrated. W. B. Yeats denounced the royal visit and called attention to the plight of the Boers fighting ‘an empire that has robbed [them] of their liberty, as it robbed Ireland of hers’. A year earlier, when the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain visited Trinity College Dublin, pro-Boer demonstrations turned into full-scale rioting. With a prescience that was generally lacking in Dublin Castle, Under Secretary for Ireland David Harrel warned that the Boer struggle created ‘this idea amongst the younger men of getting the possession of arms’.18 A cultural revolution was under way, encouraged by Yeats and Lady Gregory who wrote of Irish themes in English, and by Irish language activists seeking to overturn English influence in the cultural sphere. The future first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, the son of a Protestant clergyman, deplored the ‘constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions, and ideas’.19
But in those days a rural policeman like Tobias O’Sullivan was more likely to be preoccupied with disputes over rights of way and grazing, petty theft, illegal poitin distilling and prosecuting the owners of unlicensed livestock than with the dangers posed by nationalist agitators. By 1907 he was stationed in County Sligo where his name appears in court reports, a constable prosecuting groups of men involved in agitation against dairy farms. They were men of no property who sought fields in which to plant crops; they drove the cattle onto the roads, a symbol of wealth that lay perennially beyond their reach. My maternal great-grandfather, Patrick Hassett, was a thirty-year veteran of the police force by the time Tobias O’Sullivan joined up. A tall, sturdy figure with a piercing gaze, I know Patrick was physically brave. A newspaper report from 1895 refers to him as a man of ‘rare coolness and self-possession’ and describes how he killed a rabid dog with the stock of his rifle in order to save the life of a young boy.20
Yet the politics of the age seeped through. Two court cases from Patrick’s service speak of an Ireland more unsettled than the British understood. One afternoon in Cork city, towards the close of the nineteenth century, he, his brother and a fellow constable hailed a horse-drawn cab. They asked to be taken to a police barracks on the western fringe of the city. The driver was the worse for drink and, for reasons unknown, resentful of the police. As soon as they had climbed on board he drove the horse at a furious pace, causing a collision with another cart, carrying lumber. My great-grandfather and his comrades were thrown into the road. His brother John suffered a broken collarbone. But when Patrick Hassett made to arrest the driver a crowd gathered and began to jostle the police. My great-grandfather drew his sword. Then the chanting began: ‘Boycott the police!’ Constable Hassett emerged unscathed with his prisoner, but the newspapers would later describe how the case had caused ‘some stir in the city … when it was reported that a serious conflict took place between the police and the people’.21
Three years later in rural Waterford, Patrick was dispatched to arrest a land campaigner and local Home Rule councillor who had shot at a wealthy Catholic farmer. Patrick succeeded in disarming the assailant who told him: ‘God is on my side … I had every right to do it.’22 The fight was about land and the big farmer’s purchase of ground rented by the poorer man. Land and who lost it, who stole it, who worked