Remembering the Tans for what they were

It was half a century after the event, but she could remember every grisly detail.

The old woman in Westport County Mayo was telling her twelve-year-old grandson what horrors the Tans had inflicted on a local lad of her acquaintance.

They drove up from the Quay in their truck and dumped his body on the Octagon.

His corpse had no face.

The lady stared into the middle distance looking at the video in her head.

It was very important for her to pass on this information to the future sitting at her knee.

The twelve-year-old grandson was me.

I find it very fitting that I am writing this on Nollaig na mBan because so much of the terror visited on the Irish people by the Tans and the Auxies was directed at defenceless women.

With many of the men on the run, someone had to mind home and hearth.

The Brits knew where they lived.

In Ken Loach’s brilliant film “The Wind That Shakes The Barley”, the flying column looks on helplessly as the Tans subject a young woman to a haircutting ordeal.

It is an excellent use of film grammar.

All writing is metaphor, whether it is for the page, the stage or, in this instance, the screen.

Had Loach depicted a gang rape by the Tans, then that would have been the only thing that would have been talked about when the film was released.

The British had perfected the techniques of terror on women during the Second Boer War when they came up with a new wheeze the “Concentration Camp”.

The Kaiser’s boys in Africa were mightily impressed and quickly copied the idea to commit genocide against the Herero people in South West Africa.

Last night and this morning, I re-visited this excellent work by Dominic Price.

Specifically this chapter.

They were indeed “demons”.

My reason for going over this part of my family history is the decision by the government of this Republic to commemorate and honour the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

It is the logical destination of the revisionist lobby that is rooted in the Stockholm syndrome.

It is an open secret that Fine Gael has a sizeable cohort of closet Royalists.

Some of them have come out.

In 1995 the then Taoiseach John Bruton said that meeting Prince Charles was “the happiest day of his life”.

One of the places that Charles Saxe Coburg stayed during his two-day trip was Delphi Lodge in my father’s county.

Now it is an upmarket retreat.

However, during An Gorta Mór, it was the Big House.

For the uninitiated, just Google “Doolough Tragedy”.

Of course, I’m sure none of this invaded the thoughts of that weak chinned slobbering Dauphin of the Windsor crime clan during his sojourn in Mayo.

During those genocidal years, the RIC made sure that the food made it to the docks for export to Britain.

This is the force that Charlie Flanagan wants to honour.

A century ago my Father’s county was a warzone.

The RIC was augmented by two forces that still live in infamy, the Royal Irish Constabulary Special Reserve and the Royal Irish Constabulary Auxiliary Division.

The former is known by their nickname the “Black and Tans”.

The latter was comprised entirely of ex-British Officers.

Handpicked and battle-hardened, the “Auxies” were the SAS of the day.

Both forces acted with legal impunity as they terrorised unarmed civilians across this country.

For the avoidance of doubt, they were both formally part of the RIC.

The Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) was nominally an unarmed force.

However, the detective branch or “G Division” were armed and in plain clothes.

They were the central nervous system of the surveillance apparatus in the Irish capital.

When British Intelligence brought in the infamous “Cairo Gang” to catch Mick Collins they were formally part of G Division.

It was these fine fellows who were targeted on Bloody Sunday.

The reprisals later that day on the innocents of Croke Park were carried out by, yes you guessed it, the RIC.

This is the force that the Irish government want us to fondly remember.

I cannot imagine that the French Government would want to honour the Vichy police who hunted Le Résistance.

I was heartened to learn that the Mayor of Clare Cathal Crowe will not take part in this pathetic charade in Dublin.

Good man, Cathal!

He clearly knows his history as a Clareman.

I hope that this is a releaser cue for others to follow his lead.

History forgotten is a betrayal.

For more background, this is excellent from Breandan Mac Suibhne.

“…there was no moral equivalence between those who fought for a sovereign republic and those who fought, against the will of its people, to keep this country in the union and the British Empire.”

Quite so…

That same day in Westport, my grandmother told me of a narrow escape that she had during those awful times.

One of our lads had passed a revolver to her at a British Army checkpoint in the town.

She was putting it down the front of her dress as they would probably not search women.

A young squaddie manning the checkpoint saw herself in the act of concealing the IRA weapon.

It was eye contact, and she knew that he knew.

He then purposely looked away.

The Brits had sent him there from his home in England, but he wanted no part of it.

My grandmother found out the soldier’s name.

Perhaps she had some plan to get some communication of gratitude to him.

She was in tears as she told me the same young fella was killed shortly after the checkpoint incident.

His lorry was hit by a roadside mine.

If memory serves me correctly it was down the Leenane Road.

A half-century after the fact, she cried for that lad.

He wasn’t her enemy, but she hated the Tans.

For the avoidance of doubt, her grandson is similarly minded.

This is from the Mayo News in 2016 commemorating the 31 Westport men sent to Frongoch Camp in Wales after the Rising.

Michael’s sister Julia was my grandmother.

“The Derrig family was subjected to a great many cruelties by the Black and Tans”. 

That simple sentence, like Loach’s scene, covers a great deal.

The Tans and the Auxies were sent here to keep us down.

They failed.

It is a testament to the basic decency of the Mayo Volunteers in the Flying Column that they accepted the surrender of 16 surviving Tans at the Carrowkennedy ambush on June 2^nd 1921.

That was despite the fact that GHQ IRA had authorised summary execution for these war criminals.

The previous month the same unit of Tans had committed atrocities at Kilmeena.

They were no innocents.

Moreover, the RIC as a whole had been, since its creation, a British police force whose main function was to spy on the Irish people.

History is usually written by the victors in any conflict.

This appalling event in Dublin later this month shows that here in Ireland, we do things differently.

At the start of a decade of centenaries, this is the start of the Eirebrushing.

Flanagan and his ilk should be sick with shame