By Lesley Walsh
A UNIQUE new memorial to the police force which preceded modern day policing across Ireland has been erected in Newtownards.
What is believed to be the first ever monument to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which served across the island of Ireland from 1867 to 1922, was unveiled on Sunday at the town’s War Memorial at Court Street, before a cross-community service including RIC descendants and retired and serving police officers.
The black Indian monolith erected to the RIC follows a two-year campaign by former RUC members who lamented the fact that no such legacy existed on the island, despite the era of bloodshed which accompanied the partition of Ireland and led to the establishment of new forces on either side of the border.
The memorial also pays homage to all of Ireland’s police forces pre-1920, including the harbour police in Belfast, Derry/Londonderry and Dublin, as well as the Belfast Borough Police, which served in the city from 1800 to 1865.
Commissioned by the Newtownards branch of the RUC George Cross Association, the stone of remembrance was funded through events and donations and spearheaded by local couple, Connor and Caroleen Cunningham, who met during their time in the force which preceded the PSNI.
Though a few individual memorials to RIC members exist in the Republic of Ireland, and plaques to the force are erected at Westminster and St Paul’s Cathedral, it is understood that no standing memorial to the force itself existed in Ireland prior to Sunday’s unveiling.
Mr Cunningham, a committee member of the RUC George Cross Association, was keen to remember the RIC and its legacy, “I have been thinking about this for going on about three years. There is nowhere, anywhere else in Ireland that there’s any monument to the RIC. This is the only one,” he explained.
He acknowledged that the RIC’s history was controversial for its connection to British rule in pre- partition Ireland, and its efforts to quell Irish republican resistance. “The main reason for that was the political upheaval in the south between 1916 and 1922 and how quickly things escalated,” he said, referring to the unrest from the 1916 Easter Rising up to partition, and after, up to 1923.
“There was quite a lot of bad feeling in the south due to the fact that it was the ‘Royal’ Irish Constabulary but that only started in 1916,” he continued, maintaining however, that its membership made for ‘good relations’ with much of the public prior to the unrest.
“They had a good working relationship with the public; they were well accepted because the RIC was 85% Catholic,” he said.
Reiterating that resentment to the ‘Royal’ tag ‘didn’t really surface until 1916’, Connor spoke of how that came about. “They were the first police force in Britain to be named ‘Royal’, on September 6, 1867,” he said, by a ceremony at Dublin Castle, by the presiding Lord Lieutenant.” The honour had come straight from Queen Victoria as a result of her ’satisfaction of the conduct of the Irish Constabulary’.
A planned commemoration in Dublin in 2020 to honour the RIC was cancelled due to its legacy, despite the then Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan, who had proposed most of the police force’s members had been ‘ordinary Irishmen doing the job that policemen everywhere do and had been unfairly treated by Irish history’.
Mr Cunningham said Newtownards was chosen as the location of the monument, due to the fact that the RIC trained in the town’s airfield until 1922, and the town’s old RIC station also still stands at Court Street.
“Of course there were locals in the force at the time,” he said, with some of them among the 425 RIC members killed between 1916 to 1922 and the 725 wounded by the newly formed IRA – now the ‘Old IRA’ which existed between 1919-1922.
Commenting on the raising of memorial stone, hewn by mason and sculptor, Hugh Brown, Caroleen Cunningham revealed the laying of the stone warranted an archaeological dig to check for remains dating back to a grave yard once belonging to the nearby 13th century Dominican Black Friary.
