HISTORY: EUNAN O'HALPINreviews The Black Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920-1921By DM Leeson Oxford University Press, 294pp. £30

DAVID LEESON writes about two far-from-fine bodies of men, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary Cadets. Making extensive use of British records, he argues that these groups were recruited and deployed in haste, without adequate training, without regard to their collective or individual suitability to act as policemen, and with an implicit licence to give republicans a taste of their own medicine. Ultimate responsibility for their creation, tasking and general conduct lay not with Dublin Castle but with the British cabinet.

Leeson’s careful analysis of Black and Tan recruitment disposes of the widely aired charge that these temporary policemen were the sweepings of the British penal system. Rather, they were a miscellany of British and Irish ex-servicemen, almost none of whom had criminal records. His research also suggests that pre-first World War soldiers were more likely than younger Black and Tans to commit disciplinary and criminal offences in Ireland, challenging the assumption that the chronic ill discipline of these temporary policemen was specifically a manifestation of the brutalising effects of the first World War on impressionable youths.

His study of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary maps them broadly on to the familiar stereotype of restless gun-toters discontented with civilian life. Former officers in name, they were mainly “temporary gentlemen”, promoted from the ranks during the first World War by dint of exceptional individual performance, rather than scions of the middle classes bred and schooled for military service. While the Black and Tans were largely confined to service alongside regular RIC men, waiting for the IRA to attack them, the Auxiliaries were intended as an elite force tasked to take the battle to the IRA. Discipline and effectiveness depended largely on the calibre of company commanders, but their swashbuckling ethos created problems everywhere. Although notionally trainees for eventual appointment as regular police inspectors, few had either the aptitude or the outlook for mundane police work.

It is a pity that Leeson did not include the Ulster Special Constabulary in his work. These operated under the police mantle, and they were both targets and killers not only in Belfast city but also in other counties, including post-partition Monaghan.

It is also unfortunate that, having exploited British official records so effectively, Leeson makes such little use of key Irish sources, such as the Bureau of Military History, and none at all of the crucial IRA GHQ records in the Richard Mulcahy papers at University College Dublin. These provide much food for thought about aspects of the IRA campaign, the effectiveness and coherence of which Leeson is inclined to overstate. They also shed greater light on some of the individual actions he discusses.

Take the killing near Gort, in Co Galway, of Eliza Blake, who was hit by about a dozen bullets, classified by Leeson as a “misadventure” on a par with the death of the unfortunate Ellen Quinn, fatally wounded, also near Gort, by a stray bullet recklessly fired from a moving police vehicle in November 1920. Quinn’s killing inspired WB Yeats to an EJ Thribb-like poetic response, Reprisals. Not so the death of Mrs Blake, who died with her policeman husband and two army officers in May 1921 when ambushed as they left a tennis party: heavily pregnant, she could almost certainly have been spared while the men were killed, as happened in many other cases, because the group was already trapped. From the Mulcahy papers it is clear that IRA GHQ had sought to stiffen the Galway IRA – the men were considered adequate but their officers ineffective – by bringing in hard-headed leaders from east Co Clare. Eliza Blake’s gratuitous killing was one unwelcome consequence.

Leeson uses a number of case studies of ambushes and atrocities to discuss police performance, morale and response to setbacks, including events at Lisvernane (known locally as Lisnagaul), in Co Tipperary, on November 13th, 1920. A large IRA party killed four RIC men (one constable was trapped under the crashed tender and horribly roasted by burning fuel), and disarmed the survivors. The next evening police ran amok in nearby Tipperary town, burning buildings, including the pharmacy of the Sinn Féin TD PJ Moloney (and with it a collection of books belonging to the IRA organiser Ernie O’Malley, who ruefully recorded his loss in his classic memoir, On Another Man’s Wound).

Moloney’s wife wrote bitterly that, although the arsonists attempted to disguise themselves, one of them “was in our house every day”. She did not pause to reflect, if she knew, that her son Jim (my grandfather) had assembled the intelligence for the Lisvernane ambush. Six months later, the Tipperary RIC, acting on what they termed “reliable information”, surprised and killed her youngest son, Paddy, and his battalion OC outside the town. Two weeks after that, Jim Moloney organised an attack on RIC men as they left Mass in Bansha that resulted in the death of the Black and Tan John Nutley. A few weeks later, John Buckley, a young labourer and father-to-be on a Moloney farm, was dragged from his bed and killed by disguised policemen. Within that cycle of terror, at least, there was a kind of logic to the killings by both police and IRA.

Tipperary was a violent county. But most of the instances of police crimes and unofficial reprisals, from arson to murder, that Leeson singles out occurred in relatively quiet areas. The sack of Balbriggan and the unavowed murders of civilians in Drogheda and Ardee should not obscure the point that north Dublin, Meath and Louth were generally peaceful places. (Again, see IRA GHQ’s fulminations in the Mulcahy papers.) The same is true of Laois, where Leeson discusses two Black and Tan killings, one during a bungled burglary, another when a householder refused to admit a drunken policeman seeking a place to sleep. In Laois, truth be told, the threat to Crown forces was very limited: the IRA killed not a single policeman or soldier.

Leeson also singles out the killing of the Protestant magistrate Robert Dickson in Dunlavin, Wicklow, the quietest county of all (it had just seven politically related fatalities between 1919 and 1921). He died during a burglary by two recently recruited Black and Tans. One killed himself the next day; the other was executed in Dublin in June 1921. Dickson’s murder was a straightforward crime, not the act of men who had finally cracked under siege conditions, or who sought revenge for fallen comrades. Leeson makes the important point that such cases were prosecuted precisely because, unlike in Tipperary, the regular RIC would not tolerate such crimes in otherwise quiet areas.

Leeson argues convincingly that deliberate reprisals in violent and relatively tranquil areas alike, including the murder of IRA men and of softer targets such as Sinn Féin activists, generally involved not just temporary police but also regular RIC men. These participated not simply because of their local knowledge but also because they decided to fight IRA fire with fire. This is a significant conclusion. It leads him to reflect on the pressures that can drive ordinary people to carry out murderous acts. He carries his speculations rather too far with his abrupt comparison of police behaviour during the War of Independence to that of South American police death squads waging an informal campaign of extermination against social undesirables in the 1980s and 1990s, but he asks an important question that applies to all those groups involved in killing in Ireland between 1919 and 1923.

The few War of Independence and Civil War veterans of different hues whom I met in my younger days – Todd Andrews, Dan Bryan, Seán Clancy, Seán Dowling, my grandparents Jim Moloney and his wife, Kathy (Barry), Peadar O’Donnell, Moss Twomey, Tony Woods – were neither shell-shocked nor blase but well-adjusted, reflective people who had got on with their lives amid the memories of comrades lost, of enemies dispatched, of privation endured and of political wrongs unrighted.

It is not the drunkenness or temporary madness but the enduring sanity and balance of most of those who fought and killed during the War of Independence – Black and Tan, Auxiliary, RIC, military, Special Constabulary, loyalist, as much as IRA – that historians need to comprehend. Where the police were concerned, David Leeson’s book goes some way to help us do so.

Eunan O’Halpin is professor of contemporary Irish history at Trinity College Dublin. His next book (with Daithí Ó Corráin), The Dead of the Irish Revolution, will be published by Yale University Press