National Police Memorial Day - a chance for reflection and appreciation

A chance for reflection and appreciation. This week is the National Police Memorial Day, coinciding with the feast day of Saint Michael, the patron saint of policing. This draws me to reflect on Garda Memorial Day, the Republic of Ireland’s day in May to remember the fallen blue heroes of An Garda Síochána (which literally translates to “Guardians of the Peace). The day is poignant opportunity for the Irish nation to reflect on the eighty-nine Garda who have lost their lives in the course of doing their duty to the public and defending not only the rule of law itself, but also all the innocent people who abide by that very law. Those who know me may be wondering why I am choosing to focus on the Irish national police force; that of a foreign country. There is a number of good answers for this. Remembering the lost Garda officers gives those of us who value the truth over historical revisionism the opportunity to point out that, during the thirty-year terrorist onslaught from so-called Irish republicans, their victims regularly included police officers in the very jurisdiction they claimed to have fidelity to.

However, prior to the raw politics of the terrorist plague, I believe it is right to look at how the Republic of Ireland defends its men and women in blue. It is, in my view, a very admirable approach. To murder a Garda officer or prison officer in “acting in the course of his duty” in the Republic of Ireland is considered as ‘capital murder’, distinct from an ordinary indictment for murder. This was actually an inherited legal concept from the British, which to our shame the UK no longer enforces. A conviction for capital murder carried an automatic sentence of death, and this withstood the reforms in 1964 which, although not abolishing the death penalty, rowed it back for most cases, but not capital murder. The reason for this is simple, and is one which was widely understood by most of the Irish people. My own mother, who is from the Irish Republic, told me growing up that it was simple; Gardaí are an unarmed police force, so to kill one of them was a breach of a social contract of-sorts, and thus warranted a heavier punishment. Even after Irish President Patrick Hilary, in a deeply unpatriotic move, began regularly commuting capital murder death sentences effectively to sentences of life imprisonment, the subsequent bi-partisan response by the government was to respond by instituting automatic 40-year minimum tariffs for capital murder convicts, rather than the ordinary 25-year life sentences. For all the faults of the Irish Republic, their continued respect for those who wear the badge of law enforcement, those who leave home with markedly lower levels of certainty of returning, and those who take the fight to the parasites who plague the law-abiding, is admirable. In-fact, during the process of releasing terrorist prisoners from jail after the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement in 1998, Irish premier (An Taoiseach) Bertie Ahern was adamant that those who had murdered Gardaí would not be eligible for early release. He was, thankfully successful. While I am the first to recognise this is little comfort for those of us who understand that the mass release of heinous murders, maimers, bombers, gunmen and racketeers, it is worth noting that a government that was otherwise committed to seeing terrorists released as part of a ‘peace process’ were protective of those who had butchered their own defenders in blue.

Of the eighty-nine members of An Garda Síochána who have laid down their lives in the course of their duty, no fewer than thirteen were murdered by terrorists proclaiming to be patriotic Irish freedom fighters. This figure is, in itself, enough for me to conclude that the Provisional IRA propaganda is entirely null and void, but it gets worse I’m afraid. To some more lenient observers, Gardaí who fell as part of a skirmish on or near the border, or as part of intercepting terrorists on their way to do harm, could potentially be seen as combatants and treated differently. I sincerely hope very few of you will adopt this line of thinking. However, even if you do, it does not absolve the Provisional IRA and their bedfellows, because of the 11 incidents which led to a Garda (or, in many cases, two officers) being brutally executed, the average distance from the Northern Ireland border was 122 kilometres, with only two of the eleven occurring within a fifty kilometre distance of the border. Now, distance in itself doesn’t prove much, other than it shows that the terrorists’ actions stemmed will into the southern jurisdiction for their heinous operation. Six of the eleven incidents involved the robbery of a bank, post office, credit union or labour exchange racketeering. Absolutely no sense of Ireland’s national interest, simply an opportunity to steal from the Irish people to finance their brutal campaign of bombing their way to political relevance, and the lives of the brave men who stood in their way to preserve law and order were little more than collateral damage. It would be remiss of me to forget a twelfth incident where a prison officer from Portlaois High Security Prison was also murdered by the IRA, and whose killers, as is so often the case, have yet to be brought to justice.

Coming then, onto the present day. We are constantly berated by the liberal intellectual types that we should ‘move on’ in a spirit of ‘reconciliation’ and stop ‘harking’ to the past and be less bitter. This, as Margaret Thatcher might say, is like “asking for the benefits of forgiveness without renouncing the original sin.” Those who suffered at the hands of terrorists are told that it was such a long time ago that they should move on. However, it is often forgotten that the fight for justice has only had to last for thirty or forty years because terrorists and their political masters have refused to be honest about the past. Sinn Fein, for example want redemption for the past, and thanks to the media appear to have severed any critical links with the IRA (despite their own public memorials for dead terrorists, and naming their offices and branch parties after various republican murderers), and get to paint themselves as the progressive peace-making types, with invitations to Coronations and all sorts of state functions. This omits the very real threat Sinn Fein continue to pose, including the fact that two of their current members of the Irish parliament personally collected two IRA murderers from prison in 2007 with open-armed embraces and all smiles for their “prisoners of war”, and a Sinn Fein Lord Mayor refused in 2006 to confirm whether (nearly 10 years after the Good Friday Agreement) she would go to the Garda if she knew there were illegal weapons being stored. That party continues to oppose the 40-year minimum term for police killers and wants the abolition of the Special Criminal Court; a body which has been pivotal in ensuring that their IRA
apparatchiks cannot intimidate witnesses and jurors in criminal trials.

I began by telling how much I admired the Republic of Ireland’s collective attitude to their police officers. I meant it. However, if the Irish people continue to drift in the direction of the unrepentant collection of evil that is the Sinn Fein party, they will remove one of the last traditional and respected vestiges of the Irish nation. The Irish people have a lot of thinking to do.

As for the families of Garda Thomas Michael O’Driscoll, Garda Richard Christopher Fallon, Inspector Samuel Donegan, Garda Michael Augustine Clerkin, Detective John F. Morley, Garda Henry Gerard Byrne, Detective Seamus Quaid, Garda Patrick Gerard Reynolds, Recruit Gary Sheehan, Detective Frank Hand, Sergeant Patrick Joseph Morrissey, Detective Jerry McCabe and Detective Adrian Donohoe; Amen. Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord. And let perpetual light shine upon them. May the soul of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.

The memory of these thirteen, and the wider eighty-nine Irish officers who died, along with the over three-hundred RUC officers in Northern Ireland be a timely reminder of the sacrifice made by a few so that we may live in peace and order. We should remember those who are valiant enough to stand on the thin blue line.

Conor Boyle (NEO for the CPF, The Queen’s College) is a third year student studying PPE.