Page 17 - Garda Journal Winter 2019

GARDA HISTORY | A Passage Garda’s Life
Patrick J. Brennan with his mother
A Passage Garda’s Life
“When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done, A policeman’s lot is not a happy one”. By John J.Brennan.
Although written in the Victorian era, the quotation from William S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s musical “Iolanthe” rings true more than a century later and will continue to do so as long as there are laws on the books and lawbreakers to defy them. The world has changed considerably since then. Two world wars, demographic changes, technology, economic developments and social upheavals have all affected crime and law enforcement. Some things never change, however. There will always be those who commit crimes and a pressing need for people of exemplary character to minimize the negative impacts of criminal activities. The police of Gilbert and Sullivan’s era dealt with crimes such as assaults, petty larceny, burglary, prostitution and murder. Crime was localised in city ghettos and probably easier to control. There were exceptions, of course. “Jack the Ripper” comes to mind. Today, police deal with organized crime related to addictive drugs, extortion, smuggling, pornography and monetary fraud on an international scale.
Growing up and living in the Garda Barracks in Passage West (telephone number Passage 10), where my father, Patrick J. Brennan, ID number 1615, was the sergeant from 1931 to 1963, made me an observer of the scene over sixty years ago and gave some close insights as to what his duties entailed. They were the World War II and post-war years. They followed the turbulent and violent years following the Civil War in 1922 and 1923. The ‘thirties saw a major change in government with Eamon DeValera and Fianna Fail gaining control in 1932. They were times of severe economic hardship as the country struggled to create a sound economy that would provide jobs and decent wages. The ability of the government to succeed was adversely affected by its own nationalistic policies and the hostility of the British government. It was determined to punish DeValera for repealing the annuity payments and establishing a new constitution in 1937. Almost all our exports involved agricultural products and our basic market was England. The imposition of punitive tariffs during the “Economic War” left already poor farmers in dire distress. The withholding of rates led to seizures of livestock which were then auctioned off. Clashes throughout the country between farmers and gardai led to violence and to death in Marsh‘s Cattle Yard in Cork City in August 1933. “Burn everything British but their coal” became a patriotic but meaningless phrase.
The war years of the early ‘forties brought new hardships and changes in the role of the gardai. They now were an indispensable part of the maintenance of security and were
responsible for organising the Local Security Force (LSF) as a watchdog force of older people to complement the more active military role of the Local Defence Forces (LDF). Constant vigilance was required to identify foreign agents or saboteurs and signs of an impending invasion by either Allied or Axis forces. Cork was a particularly sensitive area as it was a likely site for an invasion to secure the magnificent harbour and its dockyard facilities. As the memoirs of Winston Churchill and others clearly show, we came very close to invasion by airborne forces to take back the ports which Chamberlain surprisingly (but luckily for us) handed back in 1938.
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