OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Exhibits of force

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

His computer is placed on another desk, however, close to one window. And from there, the Garda sergeant and archivist deals with email enquiries from around the globe, many from people seeking the service details of forebears who were members of one or other Irish police force.
King John ordered the building of the castle, and it began in 1204 with the Round Tower, which is the oldest secular structure in the city and these days home to the Garda Museum and Archives, of which McGee is also curator.
Dublin Castle, the king said, should be “suitable for the administration of justice and, if need be, for the defense of the city.”
“It’s very appropriate to have the museum here because Dublin Castle has always been synonymous with law enforcement,” McGee said, speaking in that part of the complex that alone survives from the early 13th century.
“At one stage it was a prison facility,” he added. Red Hugh O’Donnell was an inmate for almost four years. In 1592, along with Art and Henry O’Neill, he slid down the tower’s toilet chutes into the moat and escaped through the city’s gates to freedom.
But the museum visitor is directed to concentrate mainly on the last couple of centuries, particularly the 82 years since Michael Collins formed the Garda Siochana, which translates as “guardians of the peace.”
Collins handpicked the men who would establish a different type of police force for independent Ireland. Prominent among them were the first commissioner, Michael Staines, a Sinn Fein politician who’d led the Republican police; Patrick Walsh, a sympathetic senior officer in the Royal Irish Constabulary, which had been disbanded by the 1921 Treaty; Eoin O’Duffy, a loyal prot

Other Articles You Might Like

Sign up to our Daily Newsletter

Click to access the login or register cheese