‘From thorn to thorn’: commemorating the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland

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‘From thorn to thorn’: commemorating the RoyalUlster Constabulary in Northern IrelandCatherine Switzer a & Brian Graham aa School of Environmental Sciences, University of UlsterPublished online: 26 Jan 2009.

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‘From thorn to thorn’: commemorating the RoyalUlster Constabulary in Northern Ireland

Catherine Switzer & Brian Graham*School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster

Although the literature on memorialisation often stresses the role of the national, there is agrowing understanding of the polyvalency and dispersal of memory. Here, we address therather difficult process of memorialising the security forces of a state which denies that itwas a participant in a conflict. In Northern Ireland, the British state pursued a policy of‘Ulsterisation’ of security forces, the result being that the memorialisation of their dead iseither a partisan unionist process or confined to private institutional space because theseforces were seen as an impediment to the Peace Process. We focus in particular on theRoyal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) which was disbanded in 2001. The paper establishesthe context for commemorating both the RUC dead but also the institution itself, adimension to commemoration that has been largely elided from the vast literature on theTroubles in Northern Ireland and their consequences. We then examine the non-statememorialisation of RUC personnel in public space within Northern Ireland, anambiguous and fragmented process that is then contrasted with the formal but closedinstitutional space of the RUC George Cross Garden, sited within the bounded andheavily monitored precincts of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI)Headquarters at Knock in east Belfast.

Key words: Northern Ireland, memorialisation, Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Introduction

In ‘Neither an elegy nor a manifesto’, written

in 1972, the Belfast-born poet John

Hewitt saw ‘Remember’ as a loaded word

for his province (Ulster) and the people of

Ireland. For him, memory in Ireland was ‘a

cruel web / threaded from thorn to thorn

across / a hedge of dead bramble’ (Warner

1981: 44). Hewitt’s imagery was prescient; for

the issue of commemorating the dead of the

period of unrest known as the Troubles,

which began in 1969, has emerged as one of

the key dimensions to the identity politics

that have characterised the period since the

signing of the Belfast Peace Agreement in

1998. This was fashioned according to the

principles of consociation, a form of govern-

ment that seeks to hold together divided

societies by accommodation at the elite level

*Correspondence address: School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, Cromore Road, Coleraine,Northern Ireland BT52 1SA, UK. E-mail: BJ.Graham@ulster.ac.uk

Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 10, No. 2, March 2009

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/09/020153-19 q 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649360802652129

(Tonge 2005). The subsequent St Andrews

Agreement in 2006 paved the way for the

reinstitution of power-sharing (or power-

splitting) devolved government, which, as

Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell

(2008: 312) remarked, works on the principle

that ‘only the extremes . . . can build a durable

peace because there is no one left to outflank

them’. But this political ‘contract’ has serious

flaws that stem from its underlying premise of

‘constructive ambiguity’, not least its compel-

ling inability to deal with the legacy of the past

(Bell 2003; Dixon 2002; Graham and Nash

2006). Powell (2008: 308) admits, ‘the burden

of history remains, and before the two sides

become truly reconciled they need to find a

way of dealing with the past’.

As a result, commemoration and memor-

ialisation have emerged as a means of

continuing the conflict by other means,

concretising and reproducing identities

(McDowell 2007, 2008). One of Hewitt’s

‘cruelties and entanglements’ is that commem-

oration is an unequal process which has

privileged the paramilitary dead at the expense

of non-combatants or civilian fatalities (Gra-

ham and Whelan 2007). The ultimate aim of

this paper, however, is to examine some of the

paradoxes and compromises that attend

another unequal process of commemoration,

that of the state’s own dead in the security

forces. These comprise members of the locally

recruited Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC)

and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) (later

Royal Irish Regiment; RIR) as well as regular

British Army forces. Between 1969 and 2001,

3,665 people died as a result of the Troubles

(McKittrick, Kelters, Feeney and Thornton

2001). Civilians accounted for more than

2,000 of these fatalities, while the security

forces lost more than 1,000 dead. A 1983

Interpol publication showed that Northern

Ireland was at that time the most dangerous

place in the world to be a police officer (cited

in Ryder 2004: 2). Between 1969 and 1997, a

total of 303 RUC and RUC Reserve officers

died in service during the Troubles. A further

55 officers committed suicide between 1970

and 1996, 47 using their own RUC-issued

personal protection weapon to do so (Hansard

1996). In April 2000 the RUC received the

George Cross (GC), the highest honour that

can be awarded to civilians in the UK. We

focus here on the force, not least because

having suffered this level of mortality, part of

the price to pay for the 1998 Agreement was

its disbandment and replacement by the Police

Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), which

took effect in November 2001. This followed

the recommendations of an independent

commission led by British politician, Chris

Patten (Independent Commission on Policing

in Northern Ireland 1999) and has been both a

contentious and embittered process (see Tonge

2005 for an effective summary).

Within this more general context, the

specific objectives of the paper are, initially,

to establish the context for commemorating

both the RUC dead but also the institution

itself. Excepting only Switzer’s brief comments

(2005) and Mulcahy’s (2000) study of aspects

of the RUC’s ‘official discourse and organis-

ational memory’, which draws largely on force

publications and speeches and gives scant

consideration to memorials as a means

through which memory might be constructed

or shaped, this dimension to commemoration

has been elided from the vast literature on the

Troubles in Northern Ireland and their

consequences. We then develop a dual

approach that, first, examines the non-state

memorialisation of RUC personnel in public

space within Northern Ireland, paying par-

ticular attention to the ways in which this is

interconnected with commemoration of the

dead of the two World Wars. This ambiguous

154 Catherine Switzer & Brian Graham

and fragmented process is then contrasted

with the formal but closed institutional space

of the RUC George Cross Garden, sited within

the bounded and heavily monitored precincts

of the PSNI Headquarters at Knock in east

Belfast. This complex commemorates not only

the dead of the Troubles but all RUC officers

who died in service during the force’s existence

and also the institution of the Royal Ulster

Constabulary itself.

Setting RUC commemoration in context

The RUC was founded as the police force for

Northern Ireland on 1 June 1922 following the

partition of Ireland. While the police force in

the newly established Irish Free State were

styled as Civil Guards, later Garda Siochana,

the RUC largely maintained the insignia and

title of its predecessor, the Royal Irish

Constabulary (RIC), including the use of the

prefix ‘Royal’. From its inception, the RUC

was handed ‘a dual role: to protect the new

state from armed subversion, internally and

externally; and to provide a service of more

routine law enforcement’ (Ryder 2004: 10).

For much of the force’s history, the threat to

the state was deemed to come from Irish

republicans, with the result that Catholics/na-

tionalists in general could be subject to

aggressive policing (Ryder 2004).

From the onset of the Troubles in 1969, the

RUC continued to perform a dual role,

working in tandem with the British Army to

combat terrorism while, at the same time,

investigating and attempting to prevent

‘ordinary’ crime. In April 1970 the force was

supplemented by the UDR, and throughout

that decade the RUC and UDR were given

primacy in security matters as part of the

British Government policy of ‘Ulsterisation’

(McKittrick and McVea 2000). The RUC’s size

was greatly increased from 3,031 in 1968

(Ryder 2004) to nearly 13,000 by 1999

(Independent Commission on Policing in

Northern Ireland 1999), the number of regular

officers being supplemented by a full-time and

part-time reserve. Ulsterisation meant that

RUC personnel as armed and uniformed

representatives of the British state were also

prime targets for republican paramilitaries in

their ‘war’ against that state. These officers

were also, however, fairly easy targets,

vulnerable to attack as a result of their

alternative roles as members of local commu-

nities and many were killed in squalid

circumstances when off-duty. The vast

majority of these individuals were Protestant,

and for unionists, violence directed by militant

republicans against the security forces was

therefore sectarian: ‘the murder of Northern

Ireland Protestants’ (Fay, Morrissey and Smith

1998: 16). This perception is particularly

relevant in the apparent targeting of members

of the security forces by the IRA in border

areas, a process seen by many unionists as

being tantamount to ethnic cleansing (see, for

example, Dawson 2007; Murray 1984).

Conversely, for nationalists and republicans,

the RUC both lacked accountability and also

‘was seen . . . as a Unionist defender of the

state rather than as a policing service’ (Murray

and Tonge 2005: 217), a point of view largely

shared by Patten.

As these irreconcilable perspectives

imply, in Northern Ireland, the particular

difficulties surrounding the commemoration

of security forces in general stem largely

from the irreconcilable ideological mindsets

on the Troubles. Especially since the 1980s,

the British state has depicted itself as an

arbiter, a ‘neutral’ agency seeking to negotiate

between the warring parties (even though its

armed forces and covert agencies have been

implicated in violence and collusion with

Commemorating the Royal Ulster Constabulary 155

loyalist paramilitaries). The role of arbiter

reflects the realisation that the state was

‘unable to militarily defeat guerrillas, so

concessions . . . [were] necessary to end the

conflict’ (Gallaher 2007: 21). Physical-force

republicanism was—and remains by other

means—engaged in resistance against the

British state rather than loyalists. That state

is held to have been responsible for the

oppression and torture of republicans while,

simultaneously, trying to deny that it was an

active participant in the war. Security force

collusion with loyalist paramilitaries remains

a key issue from the past, albeit one which is

being addressed through judicial inquiries.

For loyalism, the conflict was much more

straightforwardly a ‘civil war’, being caused

by republicans seeking to ‘bomb’ northern

Protestants into a united Ireland. But union-

ists more widely had very ambivalent atti-

tudes towards the loyalist paramilitaries

because anyone seeking to defend Ulster

should properly have joined the RUC or

UDR. It was held that ‘young Protestant

males had legitimate outlets for their patri-

otism’ (Gallaher 2007: 32). As one loyalist

former prisoner comments:

Unionists seem obsessed with this notion of

respectability. If my brother had his state uniform

on and slaughtered all round him it would have

been quite acceptable. He had the legitimacy of the

state around him. Because I stepped outside the law

to do what I engaged in—that wasn’t acceptable,

even within my own family. (cited in Shirlow et al.

2005: 49–50)

Clearly, the issues raised in this paper

concerning the commemoration of the RUC

intersect with and are illuminated by the

extensive conceptual literature on memory

work, particularly within the context of

conflictual societies. This often derives its

context from Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de

memoire or sites of memory. In her study of

the memory landscape of the new Berlin, Till

(2005) argues that memory is constructed

through the interplay between highly selected

rememberings and forgettings of past conflicts.

She contends that a dominant set of ‘culturally

place-based practices . . . comes to define how

people think about a place’s location,

social function, landscape form . . . and even

personal experiential qualities’ (Till 2005: 11).

In Northern Ireland, however, the priorities of

the Peace Process have largely necessitated the

elision of the cultural and its cognates,

memory and identity. The only exceptions to

this generalisation have occurred when invest-

ment in culture is seen as being politically

expedient for ‘parity of esteem’ reasons, the

most notable example being the creation of an

Ulster-Scots Agency as a Protestant/loyalist

counterweight to the republican embrace of

Gaelic culture. As part of this process, the

British state has consciously eschewed partici-

pating in public commemorative practices,

only for the rival territorial ideologies—most

especially Sinn Fein and republicanism—to

reinforce the geography of territoriality by

inscribing their own narratives of time, place,

memory and commemoration on to the

cultural landscapes. Thus, Nora’s ‘melan-

cholic, and exclusionary, yearning for the

coherent power of national identity’ (Legg

2005: 483) has to be extended to accommo-

date the contested construction of memorial

sites, their undetermined readership and the

very ability of sites to carry and interpolate the

polyvalency and dispersal of memory through

a play of different scales and actors. RUC

commemoration is one of several competing

memory discourses that, given the ‘memorial

agnosticism’ of the state, point to cultural

memories in Northern Ireland as comprising

internalised narratives that are less contested

than speaking largely only to their

progenitors.

In advancing such a polyvalent conceptual-

isation of memory, one salient consequence is

that there are going to be sites of counter-

history and countermemory ‘that fight against

forgetting and reread events by using a

separate narrative’ (Legg 2005: 496). Clearly,

such sites may be representative of subaltern

or resistant narratives to a collective memory

‘that excludes rival interpretations and is thus

haunted by the potential to remember differ-

ently or to refuse to forget’ (Legg 2007: 459).

We argue here, however, that the particular

curiosity of the commemoration of the RUC is

that—agent of the state that the force was—its

memorialisation constitutes a subaltern dis-

course due to the state’s elision of memory

work whereas the republican narrative has

been accorded legitimacy if not hegemony by

Sinn Fein’s manipulation of narratives of

victimhood and its participation in the

power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive.

As Gallaher (2007) argues, the Troubles

constituted a low-intensity conflict in compari-

son with events elsewhere although they

occurred in a deeply-divided society of just

over 1.5 million people. While there is a

growing literature on state-sponsored terror-

ism in pursuit of the ‘War on Terror’ (e.g.

Gregory and Pred 2007) and an enormous body

of work on war commemoration, there are very

few specific studies of the memorialisation of a

police force that, having suffered extensive

casualties, has been seen as an expendable item

of negotiation in a peace process that necess-

arily led to an unpalatable government of

political extremes. Indeed, given the scale and

commonplace nature of war commemora-

tion—which obviously resonates with Nora’s

ideas concerning memory and national

lineages—there is a remarkable general lack

of state interest in commemorating police dead.

The UK National Police Memorial, for

example, unveiled in London in 2005 to some

1,600 police officers killed while making

arrests or by criminal acts, was funded by the

Police Memorial Trust rather than the British

state. One of the very few relatively unproble-

matic examples of police memorialisation is to

the sixty officers killed on 9/11.

Directly stemming from Britain’s self-figur-

ing as an ‘honest broker’ and ‘outsourcing’

through Ulsterisation to the RUC and UDR of

at least the footsoldiering in its own war on

terror, the state’s interests are arguably best

served by sponsoring a distant and geographi-

cally obscure form of commemoration.

Indeed, it is characteristic of the commemora-

tion of the dead of the Troubles ‘that actual

state-sponsored commemoration of police and

British Army fatalities in public space occurs

only beyond Northern Ireland’ (Graham and

Whelan 2007: 491). The formal memorialisa-

tion in public places within Northern Ireland

of its own dead ‘is not necessarily congruent

with the reading of the Troubles that the

[British] state seeks to portray’ (Graham and

Whelan 2007: 491). This nuances Till’s

(2005: 11) observation that ‘central to the

ways that people create meaning about

themselves and their pasts is how they expect

places to work emotionally, socially, culturally

and politically’. Or, it might be said, not ‘to

work’ for in addition to the idea of ‘distan-

cing’—which has connotations of Foote’s

(1997) ‘sites of obliteration’ or the idea of

memorycide—there is also the distinction

between public and private memorial space.

In Northern Ireland, the memorials to dead

paramilitaries are often located in public

space, fulfilling their roles as territorial

markers of self-identity and sites of memorial

practices. These reflect the absolute nature of

residential segregation in many parts of

Northern Ireland that has produced an

embittered human geography of territoriality

which is supported by competing memory

discourses and is fundamental to the pro-

longation of conflict by other means (Shirlow

and Murtagh 2006). The RUC has either been

elided from these landscapes of memory or

become the subject of partisan—or what is

interpreted as being partisan—unionist com-

memoration. We now turn to discussing two

distinct forms of RUC commemoration, that

which occurs in public space and the

contrasting and closed institutional environ-

ment of the RUC GC Garden.

Public memorialisation of RUC officers

In dealing first with public memorialisation,

we focus on two dimensions: the location of

memorials and their commemorative language.

The location of memorials

Hitherto, security forces memorials have more

generally been sited in private or closed

institutional spaces such as administrative

complexes, barracks and churches as well as

in the hidden memorial practices of the home.

One consequence of demilitarisation, or what

the British government prefers to call ‘security

normalisation’, is that many security forces

installations have been dismantled or closed,

thus reducing the number of memorial sites.

More than 250 memorials of various kinds

have been relocated from military premises

earmarked for closure to other more secure

sites, such as the Memorial Garden at Palace

Barracks at Holywood, Co. Down (Daily

Telegraph 2007). Similarly, a memorial com-

memorating the twenty-nine Northern Ireland

Prison Service staff killed during the Troubles

has been removed from the former Maze/Long

Kesh prison site and relocated within the closed

institutional space of the Service’s Training

College at Millisle, Co. Down (Graham and

McDowell 2007). One consequence of devolu-

tion, however, is that, unlike the British

government, the unionist element of that

administration does not subscribe to ‘distan-

cing’ and this will probably lead to more

examples of security forces memorials being

sited in public places, along with the attendant

inevitability of contestation, given the persist-

ence of the republican perception of the RUC

and UDR as colluders and participants in their

narrative of oppression. In February 2008,

planning permission was given for a UDR

memorial in Lisburn city centre ‘to be sited on

the pavement at the south east corner of the

Irish Linen Centre’ (Ulster Star 2008). In all,

197 members of the UDR were killed during

the Troubles (Potter 2001; Ryder 1991).

It is impossible to separate any discussion of

the public commemoration of RUC personnel

from the ambivalence that surrounds the

force. For republicans, the force was a

legitimate target in the war against the British

state that was oppressing and brutalising the

nationalist population, whereas for unionists

its personnel were Ulstermen and Ulster-

women defending the constitutional integrity

of Northern Ireland and the Protestant people.

The state’s distancing of security forces

memorialisation in general means that the

principal public memorial site is not in

Northern Ireland at all but at the Ulster Ash

Grove sited within the National Memorial

Arboretum near Lichfield in Staffordshire,

England. An ash sapling, marked by a plaque

giving name, regiment and date of death, has

been planted for each soldier killed in the

Troubles and, separately, for each of twenty-

nine prison officers. This is ‘the only public

place where all the Armed Forces dead,

including those from the locally recruited

UDR and also the officers of the Northern

Ireland Prison Service are commemorated by

name’ (Graham and Whelan 2007: 491). The

military dead are also commemorated by

the Armed Forces Memorial, dedicated at the

Arboretum in 2007 to honour all those killed

on duty or as a result of terrorist action since

the Second World War (allegedly, this has

sufficient space for 15,000 additional names).

Although the RUC is denoted in the Ulster Ash

Grove only by an individual tree for each

Divisional Headquarter, all police officers

killed in the Troubles are also named at the

National Police Memorial, while a memorial

and plaque listing the names of the dead marks

the remote site of the 1994 Chinook helicopter

crash on the Mull of Kintyre that killed

twenty-five RUC and MI5 officers and four

RAF personnel.

Within Northern Ireland, a number of

different groups have been active in commem-

orating the deaths of members of the security

forces and, more specifically, the RUC. These

include: local government; the Royal British

Legion; the loyal (Orange and Black) orders;

and the colleagues and families of the dead; as

well as the RUC itself as an organisation. The

activities of these groups have resulted in quite

complex but often low-profile patterns of

memorialisation in that much of it occurs

within the closed institutional spaces of

security force premises (Leonard 1997;

McDowell 2006). Commemoration of security

forces dead is far less prevalent or visible in

public space than is that of the paramilitary

organisations and, moreover, as we have

observed, is never directly sponsored by the

state within Northern Ireland. It also occurs

only in places considered unionist. Although

predated by many memorials inside churches

and security force premises, the first public

memorial honouring RUC officers who died as

a result of the Troubles seems to have been that

unveiled at Scarva, Co. Armagh, in 1980 in

memory of two local men (Police Beat 1980).

The location of the Scarva memorial is unusual

in the sense that it stands alone; the majority of

such memorials, which often commemorate

RUC officers alongside UDR soldiers, are

located adjacent to existing memorials hon-

ouring the dead of two World Wars. These

have often been erected by unionist-dominated

local councils and the proximity of these

memorials to existing war memorials means

that the sites and practices of Troubles

commemoration have become entwined with

those traditionally linked to war commemora-

tion and unionist identity narratives.

Like many other polities which were

formerly part of the British Empire, Northern

Ireland has a tradition, dating from the years

immediately following the First World War,

which establishes conventions for publicly

commemorating deaths in warfare (Switzer

2005, 2007). The memorials erected during

the 1920s were bound up with a raft of

meanings, ranging from the intensely personal

to the political. On one hand, they provided a

place, ‘where people could mourn. And be

seen to mourn . . . [providing] first and fore-

most a framework for and legitimation of

individual and family grief’ (Winter 1995: 93).

On the other, they and the ceremonies held

around them were also political symbols,

capable of being co-opted by all hues of

political opinion (Gregory 1994). Ultimately

war memorials embody a whole range of

meanings about power, social status and

ideology, being ‘composite sites where the

commemorative element was only one amid

many possible readings’ (Moriarty 1997: 125).

The vast majority of Northern Ireland’s war

memorials were erected through local sub-

scriptions during the interwar years, with the

intention of honouring the dead of a particular

locality. Over time these memorials have been

rededicated in order to include the dead of

subsequent conflicts, including the Second

World War and the conflicts in Korea and the

Falklands. The ceremonies which take place

around these memorials have also broadened

and now honour the British military dead

more generally. Historically, in Northern

Ireland these ceremonies have been seen

largely as the preserve of the Protestant or

unionist community (although there is some

evidence that this is changing). Commemora-

tion of the Great War dead (and by extension

the dead of subsequent conflicts) has con-

tributed to a myth that in the years around the

First World War, Ulster unionism ‘had made

good its claim to statehood, if not nationhood,

[a] claim . . . sealed in blood: the blood of the

men at the Somme’ (Boyce 2002: 191). This is

the tradition within which much security force

commemoration is located since, as Loughlin

contends, unionists have drawn on their

perception of two World Wars:

to provide a mode of understanding—and added

legitimisation—for their struggle with militant

republicanism, with the scope of the remembrance

ritual itself being extended to include security force

personnel and civilians killed by republican

paramilitaries. (Loughlin 2002: 147–148)

Each existing war memorial is thus a confla-

tion of the memorialisation of local people

who died in the service of the armed forces at a

variety of times and in widely varied locations

into one geographical location. This process

can be thought of in terms of Foote’s ‘symbolic

accretion’, in the sense that, once established,

the sanctity of these sites is reinforced through

the construction of additional memorials or

practices of memorialisation (Foote 1997:

231). The combining of a number of conflicts

into existing memorials provides an example

of this but, as referred to above, the siting of

new security forces memorials alongside war

memorials might also serve to reinforce

existing meanings while further adding new

layers of significance to these established sites

of commemoration. The connections thus

brought into existence provide a powerful

geographically based link between the com-

memoration of members of the security forces

and that of the war dead. The spatial

proximity implies a temporal continuum of

service and sacrifice over a period of almost

100 years. This aspect finds its clearest

expression in the small number of new war

memorials erected in recent years in localities

where no public war memorial previously

existed. One such example can be seen in

Castlerock, Co. Londonderry (Figure 1),

where a small black obelisk was dedicated in

2002 to the memory of the dead and those

Figure 1 The war memorial at Castlerock,

Co. Londonderry.

who served ‘in two world wars and subsequent

conflicts’. While the idea of ‘subsequent

conflicts’ can be construed as referring to

wars elsewhere in the world, its meaning can

also be interpreted as being much closer to

Although their location suggests a common-

ality of purpose, consideration of the form

which security forces memorials take shows

that they are generally somewhat less

ambitious than their earlier counterparts. In

Banbridge, Co. Down, for example, the

security forces memorial, a plain block of

polished stone bearing the names of more than

two dozen local men, is dwarfed by the

adjacent Portland stone column, standing

thirty feet high and topped by a soldier figure,

which was erected in 1923 to honour the

town’s First World War dead. Similarly, in

Lurgan and Portadown (both in Co. Armagh),

simple polished blocks at the base of much

grander war memorials commemorate local

security forces dead. The security forces

memorial in Comber, Co. Down, carries the

insignia of both the RUC and UDR but is again

a relatively simple polished block placed at the

foot of an already existing war memorial. It is

evident therefore that memorials commemor-

ating members of the security forces derive

little, if any, meaning from their form; rather

the key lies in the inscriptions engraved upon

The language of public security forcesmemorials

The inscriptions chosen for public memorials

in the aftermath of the Great War were

reliant on what Fussell has called ‘high diction’

which gave meaning to the war and instructed

the public on how to understand it

(Fussell 1975: 21). Memorials might exhort

‘Glory to the Dead’, be dedicated to the

‘Memory of our fallen heroes’, or those

‘who gave their lives’ (inscriptions from the

First World War memorials at Armagh,

Gilford, Co. Armagh and Dungannon, Co.

Tyrone, respectively). Like the ‘whole and

unmaimed’ soldier figures which stand sentinel

on many memorials, these inscriptions divert

‘attention from the horror of the war and the

tragedy of death and injury’ (Moriarty 1995:

20). Notwithstanding the extent to which

notions of mud, death and futility are central to

present-day popular understandings of the

First World War, the words inscribed into

memorials in the aftermath cause the often

brutal and bloody truth of death in warfare to

slip from view (Todman 2005).

Equally, the memorials to the RUC dead

necessarily construct and present a version of

the past in which these deaths occurred.

The deaths are placed into a context from

which they may derive meaning, but the two

forms of memorials discussed in this paper—

memorials in public space and the RUC

Garden—seem to offer differing versions of

the deaths they commemorate. By virtue of their

location and, to some extent, their inscriptions,

security forces memorials in public places utilise

existing war commemoration as a framework

for interpreting death in conflict. Yet the

connections between commemoration of the

World Wars and the Troubles are not uncritical;

in fact, while interconnections between the two

do exist, the evidence of public memorials

suggests that they do so alongside fractures and

discontinuities of meaning.

The inscriptions etched into RUC memorials

often borrow wording from existing memor-

ials and commemorative practices, tending to

employ what have become the stock phrases

of war commemoration, such as Kipling’s

‘Lest We Forget’, and Binyon’s ‘We Will

Remember Them’. Ironically, perhaps, the

same language has been adopted by loyalist

paramilitaries, particularly the Ulster Volun-

teer Force (Graham and Shirlow 2002).

Mulcahy (2000) observes the use of terminol-

ogy such as the ‘ultimate’ or ‘supreme’ sacrifice

in official RUC documents referring to the

force’s Troubles deaths and suggests that these

words serve to place the force ‘at the pinnacle

of a moral hierarchy’, while also implying

‘innumerable other sacrifices that are sur-

passed only by death . . . [and] establishing the

frequent character of the dangers that faced

RUC officers’ (Mulcahy 2000: 76). The theme

of sacrifice is therefore extended to include a

wider spectrum of brave acts than those which

end in death. Mulcahy’s examples of the use of

such language are drawn from Chief Con-

stable’s Annual Reports, various speeches and

Ryder’s history of the force (2004) and, within

this context, his conclusions are convincing.

Yet the evidence of public memorials suggests

that there are alternative ways of narrating

RUC deaths which have just as much currency

as the discourse of high diction.

Although a memorial in Newtownards, Co.

Down, commemorates those who ‘made the

ultimate sacrifice’, this more traditional inscrip-

tion is very rare on public security forces

memorials. The word ‘fallen’, commonly

employed on First World War memorials, is

rarely used, perhaps because it would imply a

level of dignity at odds with the unionist

perception of these deaths as cold-blooded

sectarian murder. Assertions that those mem-

bers of the security forces being commemorated

‘gave’ their lives are also relatively rare, again

conveying the impression that these individuals

had their lives violently taken from them.

The allusions to ‘Freedom’, ‘Honour’ and

‘Glory’, common on existing war memorials

are thus virtually absent from security forces

memorials. Instead less elevated language

is more commonplace and, indeed, some

inscriptions appear to invite the viewer to

dwell on the manner of death of those being

commemorated. One common security forces

inscription,observable, for example, inRichhill,

Co. Armagh, and Broughshane, Co. Antrim, is:

‘Murdered in the execution of their duty’; a

phrase with multiple potential meanings which

hinge on the different ways in which ‘execution’

can be carried out. Police officers and soldiers, it

is implied, execute their duty, both as represen-

tatives of the state that they defend, but also,

because of the process of the progressive

‘Ulsterisation’ of the security forces during the

Troubles, as members of local (unionist/Protes-

tant) communities. Paramilitaries, on the other

hand, although not identified explicitly (the

unspoken being republican/Catholic), execute

other human beings. Several memorials, includ-

ing that in Caledon, Co. Tyrone, use the word

‘killed’ as an alternative to ‘murdered’, but this

does not bring them much closer to high diction.

These inscriptions actively encourage the viewer

to dwell on the manner of the deaths being

commemorated, and to remember them specifi-

cally as cold-blooded murders.

As we have observed, such inscriptions

might partially be explained by unionist

attitudes to the status of the Troubles.

Republicans may have been engaged in a war

against the state in which members of the

security forces were regarded as part of the

state apparatus. For unionists, however, this

‘war’ was a terrorist campaign and the security

force deaths which were one of its results were

nothing more than murder. From this perspec-

tive, the security forces are seen as being

concerned solely with the maintenance of law

and order, rather than being active partici-

pants in the conflict. Public security force

memorials could be regarded, then, as to

some extent a pre-emptory writing of history

and the unionist experience of the Troubles.

The dead are commemorated, but alongside

their names a record of violent and what are

construed as sectarian acts is also being

preserved. Commemorating the ‘murdered’

dead as such also serves to commemorate

violence against the Protestant or unionist

community. Finally, the emphasis on the word

‘murdered’ also narrows the focus of memor-

ials, placing it very much on the dead at the

expense of those who served but were not

killed. This might seem a rather obvious point

but as we will show, it is one on which public

memorials and the RUC Garden show a

marked divergence.

Thus, while there is commemoration of the

RUC in public places, it is a sporadic and

piecemeal affair and inevitably much less

powerful than the processes and practices of

paramilitary commemoration which are far

more heavily orchestrated—especially the

republican version—and implicated in the

territoriality that still characterises Northern

Ireland. As such, public RUC commemoration

is more akin to that of civilian victims of the

Troubles, in that it lacks a material cultural

landscape of composite memorialisation. That

latter set of practices can still occur only

within closed institutional space.

RUC GC Garden

The RUC GC Garden was opened officially in

September 2003 by the Prince of Wales. The

complex has its historical roots in the post-

Patten period when a working party drawing

its members from across the policing family

was formed. Thus retired and disabled officers

and the bereaved, including widows and

parents groups, were able to contribute to the

discussion about a RUC memorial. Following

the establishment of the RUC GC Foundation

for the purpose of ‘marking the sacrifices

and honouring the achievements of the

Royal Ulster Constabulary’, under the Police

(Northern Ireland) Act 2000, this organisation

took over responsibility for the Garden and

its development, while the former working

party was retained as an Advisory

Group. The Garden is divided into two areas.

The first, described in an information booklet

as a ‘public area’ contains a History Trail and

several sculptures by local artists (RUC GC

Foundation 2003). The second area is an ‘Area

of Peace’ where the names of RUC officers who

have died since 1922 as a result of terrorism or

in service are listed on a series of plaques.

As such, the Garden resonates with Azaryahu’s

(1996: 312) description of a memorial place as

being ‘invested with symbolic meanings and

apparently devoid of obvious utilitarian func-

tions’, ‘sacred spaces’ outside the ‘mundane

geography of everyday life’.

Constructing a past for RUC Troublesdeaths

Whereas public RUC memorials rely on the

interpretation of location and inscription to

locate them in a commemorative tradition, the

memorial area in the RUC GC Garden is

placed much more deliberately within a

historical framework, an aspect of its design

which will only be enhanced when the scheme

is completed by the opening of a Museum.

Before reaching the memorial itself, a visitor

following the directed route through the

garden passes along the ‘History Trail’, a

series of panels which trace out a brief history

of policing in Ireland since the time of Sir

Robert Peel. Each panel features both text and

colour images, and is displayed by an abstract

police officer figure. Thus the story of policing

the Troubles is located firmly within a longer

history of policing in Ireland, which is, in turn,

located to some extent within a broader Irish

history. The Garden itself was located within

the grounds of PSNI Headquarters, partly for

its protection, but also to place it at the heart

of policing. Police employees continue their

day-to-day work close to the Garden, but

hedges and fencing form an effective screen

which largely obscures modern office build-

ings from view.

Other elements of the Garden serve more

subtly to insert the RUC into a longer

legitimating narrative. One result of the

protracted debate over the Patten recommen-

dations regarding the crest and uniform of the

RUC was to raise the profile of these symbols,

the history and iconography of the crest in

particular (a crowned harp surrounded by

shamrocks) being widely debated in the media.

The crest is used sparingly in the Garden’s

representations but, following the controversy

which surrounded Patten’s proposed re-bad-

ging, few local visitors will be unaware of its

symbolism. Within the planted areas of the

Garden, red and green, the colours inherited

from the RIC, are intentionally dominant,

plants providing dark green foliage having

been chosen specifically to represent the RUC

uniform (RUC GC Foundation 2003).

The Area of Peace also functions to ground

the commemoration of the RUC dead of the

Troubles within the longer history of the force

and the state. The details of name, rank and

date of death of each RUC officer who died

while in service are listed on a series of stone

tablets. With the exception of those covering

the years 1922–1939 and 2000–2001, and a

tablet listing the names of former officers

killed after their retirement, each tablet lists

those who died over a period of a single

decade. Troubles deaths are therefore seen as

an integral part of a longer story. The straight

pathway by which the tablets are reached

serves to link them into a timeline, as, to some

extent, does the continual flow of the stream

alongside the path (Figure 2). As visitors move

along the timeline, they draw closer to the

present day and the number of names viewed

both accumulates and multiplies. The chrono-

logical arrangement of the tablets means that

those listing the Troubles dead are amongst the

last to be encountered, and the sheer volume of

names on the tablets for the 1970s and 1980s

is all the more dramatic when viewed in the

context of the relatively small numbers on

preceding tablets. The identical design, size

and arrangement of the names on each tablet

only enhances the impact as spaces which had

been empty on previous tablets become filled

with names and numbers.

Commemorating both death and service

In common with its attempt to place Troubles

deaths in a longer and broader context, the RUC

GC Garden further honours service and bravery

beyond that of those who died. This is also in

keeping with the spirit of the award of the

George Cross to the force in November 1999,

which was presented ‘to recognise the collective

Figure 2 The Area of Peace, RUC Memorial

Garden, PSNI HQ, Belfast: the tablets listing

the names of all those officers who died in

service are located to the left.

courage and dedication to duty of all of those

who have served in the Royal Ulster Constabu-

lary and who have accepted the danger and

stress this has brought to them and their

families’ (RUC 2000: np). Acts of bravery are

marked in the Garden through a sculpture

entitled ‘The RUC George Cross’. Standing

symbolically at the end of the History Trail,

this installation consists of a large number of

blue crosses similar to the George Cross,

representing individual acts of courage.

Mounted on metal rods, the crosses are ‘held

within a solid, unifying and collective profile

based on the disciplined outline of a topiary tree’

(RUC GC Foundation 2003: 9; Figure 3).

The whole is supported by a circular stainless

steel base on which are etched words from the

speech made by the Queen at the presentation

of the George Cross; these include ‘gallantry’,

‘courage’, ‘heroism’, and ‘valour’. As a sculp-

ture it is perhaps the most effective in the

Garden; certainly its blue colouring makes

it stand out amidst its predominantly green

surroundings. Combined with the History Trail,

this sculpture ensures that before reaching

the ‘Area of Peace’ where those who died are

honoured, visitors are aware of the wider

service of all members of the RUC and place

the deaths within a broader context of service

and bravery.

The Area of Peace is itself highly symbolic.

It is divided lengthwise by a stream into two

distinct parts, one ‘organised, regimented,

formal’ and the other ‘uneven, random and

informal’, mirroring, according to the guide-

book, ‘the history of the RUC where there

have been times of order/disorder and genuine

experiences of hope/fears, love/hate, life/death

and beginning/end’ (RUC GC Foundation

2003: 8). The tablets bearing the names of

the dead form a line along the formal side of

the Garden, symbolically guarded by abstract

sentries with allusions to cap, collar, buttons,

belt and weapon. The tablets record the same

deaths as public memorials, but those officers

inscribed on public memorials as having been

‘murdered’ are listed here as having been

‘killed as a result of terrorism’. The word

‘murdered’ with its implications of anger and

accusation is absent, but so too is the discourse

of high diction. Instead the inscription treads a

middle ground somewhere between the two,

although it should be recognised that when

viewing the tablets the inscription at the top is

to a large extent secondary to the ranks of

names listed below.

Perhaps the most marked way in which the

‘Area of Peace’ provides a context for deaths

as a result of terrorism is the way in which the

commemorative net is drawn more widely

than simply those officers who were killed by

terrorists. Serving RUC officers have met their

Figure 3 The RUC George Cross memorial,

RUC Memorial Garden, PSNI HQ, Belfast.

deaths in many and varied ways, and the

tablets acknowledge this by also listing the

names of those who ‘died in service’, including

officers who died in road and helicopter

accidents, were drowned, killed in the Blitz

or, most problematically of all, who took their

own lives. Smaller additional plaques within

the ‘Area of Peace’ are dedicated to groups and

individuals who worked alongside the RUC.

‘Police Authority, Civilian staff & the wider

police family’, ‘The emergency services &

support services’, ‘Ulster Special Constabu-

lary’, and ‘The Armed Services’ are all

honoured with a plaque. Although these

plaques are substantially smaller than, and

set apart from, those listing the names of RUC

officers, they do serve to broaden the scope of

the memorial far beyond that commemorated

by public memorials.

Conclusion

We have explored here how two forms of

memorialisation that draw on and construct

past events. Their origins reflect the memorial

agnosticism of the state and the ways in which

the RUC has thus become one of an array of

sometimes competing individual actors

attempting to inscribe its own particular

narrative on to the cultural landscape. Never-

theless, public memorials marking the deaths

of RUC officers and the RUC GC Garden may

honour the same organisation and individuals

within it, but the paper has illustrated that

they do so in different ways, using different

strategies and emphases. Each draws on a

different construction of the past, and there-

fore represents the dead and the events being

commemorated in different ways. The two

dimensions to RUC memorialisation also have

dissimilar origins, which picking up on Till’s

(2005) ideas of selective and multiple remem-

berings and forgettings, draws attention to the

multi-authored nature of the memorial land-

scape. This in itself gives an indication as to

just how fractured and polyvalent cultural

memory is within Northern Ireland; even a

single organisation is commemorated in

multiple ways as different authors work to

leave their mark for posterity. As comprehen-

sive as the RUC Garden is as a memorial, it is

only part of a much larger landscape of

commemoration honouring RUC officers,

which, in itself, is only part of the commem-

orative complexities of the Troubles memorial

landscape. Clearly, there is a marked disso-

nance between the language, scale and

sporadic nature of RUC commemoration in

public space and the sombre grandeur and

focused representations of the memorial

garden sited in its—as yet—closed and

defended institutional space. It is this sense

of bounded, protected space—which evokes

Bender’s (1998) arguments concerning Stone-

henge—that conditions the interpretation of

the Garden. It is not open to contested

interpretation but, as with the paramilitary

memorials in their segregated socio-political

spaces, it speaks internally, its commemorative

practices hidden and institutionally private.

Moreover, the devolution of policing and

justice is one of the most contentious issues

facing the Northern Ireland administration.

This raises the possibility that just as

paramilitary commemoration has been altered

to present a less overtly violent imagery that

reflects the new political dispensation, RUC

memorialisation may be just as dissonant with

the ‘new’ Northern Ireland. Because political

space is dynamic, memory and its materialisa-

tion are also dynamic, often resulting in

tensions in reconciling past and present

motives and material forms. As an institution,

the PSNI has to be distanced from the legacy

of the RUC (which it has also done through

attractive early retirement ‘packages’ for

former RUC personnel).

Despite these contrasts, the two forms of

RUC memorialisation share a traditional form

in that their points of reference are those of

war commemoration: in particular, they

resonate with the ‘naming, and the evocation

of names, [that] were central to the cult of

commemoration after the Great War’ (Gough

2008: 220). In this form, RUC memorials

remain among the ‘reverential monuments of

the twentieth century’ whereas public space

has become ‘fragmented, serialized and digi-

tally accessible’ (Gough 2008: 226), open to

‘the mundane and dispersed practices of

cultural spatializations’ that undercut the

‘more formalized geopolitical visions and the

high practical politics of statecraft’ (O Tuathail

2008: 341). But if they are also sites of

countermemory that seek to disrupt linear

state time (Edkins 2003) in a struggle of

competing narratives, then their power is

diminished by the relative inertness of the

socio-political places that they create through

this formality. The polite practices of com-

memoration around the sites are again largely

those associated with the World Wars and

thus, not especially contested but rather

largely ignored by non-unionists.

The quotation with which this paper began

is taken from John Hewitt’s poem, ‘Neither an

elegy nor a manifesto’. Hewitt was writing in

1972, a year which would later bear the

dubious distinction of being the most costly of

the Troubles in terms of lives lost. He wrote

that the victims of the conflict should not be

differentiated since, ‘distinctions are not

relevant’; instead, using words ‘as neutral/and

unaligned as any I know’, he urged his

countrymen and women to ‘bear in mind

these dead’. The memorial landscape spawned

by the Troubles has, however, eschewed

Hewitt’s approach, instead following the

lines of the conflict itself: fractured, partial,

relative and interwoven with the difficult and

ambiguous dissonances between the public

and private domains. These memorials can

provide a focus for grief: in the case of the

RUC Garden, guides report visitors in tears,

and taking photographs and rubbings of

particular names to take home. Yet grief is

not the only emotion it might inspire: the same

memorial was sited within security force

premises partially in order to protect it from

vandalism. Indeed, the morphology of the

‘Area of Peace’ conveys a strong sense of the

tablets being protected. This is both symbolic

and more tangible; the tablets are symbolically

guarded by the abstract sentry figures, and

visitors gain access to them via a heavy metal

gateway reminiscent of the fortified entrances

to police stations (although this allusion is not

intentional on the part of the designers).

In a more real sense, the Garden’s location

at PSNI Headquarters entails armed guards

and attendant layers of fortification. Intending

visitors must arrange their visit in advance.

That such protection, both symbolic and real,

is necessary is illustrative of the contentious

nature of security forces commemoration in

Northern Ireland. To some extent facilitated

by the role in which the British state has

positioned itself, there has been an appropria-

tion of memorialisation by the paramilitary

organisations and their political parties. There

is a very real and ironic subaltern sense of

‘RUC alone’ in the commemorative practices

explored here, of the force being tainted

through the commonplace perception that it

was representative of a failed, indefensible and

unjust unionist polity. The British state does

not want the loyalty of Ulster unionists and

thus the memorialisation of its forces can

safely be distanced from state practices in a

form of memorycide or amnesia. As Gregory

(2004) observes, amnesia can be counteracted

by the production of lieux de memoire but, in

this case, the memorial landscape can be read

as talking largely only to those who produced

it, the RUC and the unionist councils whose

claim to the force’s memory merely underlines

the legitimacy of republican antipathy. Simi-

larly, the RUC is distanced from the PSNI, the

latter’s Chief Constable, Sir Hugh Orde, being

quoted as referring to the vestiges of the old

force as the ‘Continuity RUC’ (an allusion to

the Continuity IRA which portrays itself as the

true keeper of the flame of militant repub-

licanism) (Powell 2008: 258). It is unusual,

perhaps, to see security forces as ‘disempow-

ered actors’, a description usually reserved for

the ‘marginalized communities’ (Bosco 2004:

382) but entirely logical if the state chooses to

portray itself as a facilitator of peace rather

than a participant in and cause of conflict.

Yet memory is dynamic and testament to

this is the revisionism of First World War

commemoration in Ireland now being pro-

moted as a symbol of reconciliation. The Peace

Process is, after all, just that—a process, a

transition—which is as yet unfinished, and it is

impossible to say how the future will view

these memorials or assess the past which

produced them. Troubles commemoration

may not always prove as controversial as it is

today and we have emphasised the poly-

valency and dispersal of practices of cultural

memory that complicate notions of the

national hegemony of the state. Nevertheless,

it is tempting to see a parallel between the

sporadic public and essentially hidden com-

memorative practices and memorial landscape

of the RUC and the ways in which the

politicians who initiate and facilitate peace—

Trimble, Hume, Blair, de Klerk, even Gorba-

chev—rarely claim the succession because they

are outflanked as the process continues by

other means. The elision of the RUC was part

of the sacrifice to ‘lubricate’ the Peace Process

because of its long history of enmity with

republicanism. Thus the memory of the

Troubles still remains threaded across the

bramble, taking on its barbs along with their

potential to draw blood.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Jim McDonald, Chairman

of the Royal Ulster Constabulary George

Cross Foundation, to an anonymous former

RUC officer, and to Dr Sara McDowell. We

would also like to acknowledge the very

helpful and constructive referees’ comments

on the initial version of the paper.

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Abstract translations

«D’epine en epine»: la commemoration de laGendarmerie royale d’Ulster en Irlande du Nord

Bien que la litterature scientifique portant sur lamemorialisation mette souvent l’emphase sur leselements d’ordre national, il en decoule unemeilleure comprehension de la polyvalence et ladispersion de la memoire. La question passablementcomplexe se pose alors sur le processus dememorialisation des forces de securite d’un etatqui refuse de reconnaıtre son implication dans unconflit. En Irlande du Nord, l’Etat britannique amene une politique de centralisation des forces desecurite sur le territoire d’Ulster, ce qui a eu pourresultat que la memorialisation de leurs defunts estsoit un processus unioniste partisan, soit elle se

limite a un espace institutionnel prive etant donneque ces forces etaient vues comme un frein auProcessus de paix. Nos travaux portent plusparticulierement sur la Gendarmerie royale d’Ulsterqui a ete dissoute en 2001. Dans l’article, lecontexte entourant la commemoration des agentsdefunts et de l’institution elle-meme est recree afinde pouvoir se pencher sur une dimension de lacommemoration qui a ete largement supprimee del’immense litterature consacree aux Troubles enIrlande du Nord et de ses consequences. L’analyseporte ensuite sur la memorialisation non-etatiquedu personnel de la Gendarmerie dans l’espacepublic en Irlande du Nord. Une comparaison estetablie entre ce processus ambitieux et fragmenteet l’espace institutionnel formel mais prive qu’est lejardin George Cross de la Gendarmerie. Celui-ci estsitue sur le terrain cloture et hautement surveille ducommissariat central de la Police de l’Irlande duNord a Knock, un quartier de l’est de Belfast.

Mots-clefs: Irlande du Nord, memorialisation,Gendarmerie royale d’Ulster.

‘De espina a espina’: conmemorando el RoyalUlster Constabulary en Irlanda del Norte

Aunque la literatura sobre memorializacion muchasveces hace resaltar el papel de lo nacional, hay uncreciente entendimiento de la polivalencia y ladispersion de la memoria. Aquı, tratamos losprocesos algo difıciles de memorializar las fuerzasde seguridad de un estado que niega haberparticipado en un conflicto. En Irlanda del Norte,el Estado Britanico seguıa con una polıtica de‘Ulsterizacion’ de las fuerzas de seguridad, elresultado siendo que la memorializacion de susfallecidos es, o un proceso partidista de losunionistas, o es limitada al espacio institucionalprivado, porque estas fuerzas eran consideradas unimpedimento para el Proceso de Paz. Nos centra-mos en particular en el Royal Ulster Constabulary(RUC), que se desbando en el ano 2001. El papelesablece el contexo para la conmemoracion de losfallecidos del RUC y tambien de la propiainstitucion, una dimension de la conmemoracionque, en gran parte, ha sido elidida en la amplialiteratura sobre el Conflicto en Irlanda del Norte ysus consecuencias. Seguimos con un estudio de lamemorializacion no estatal de personal del RUC en

lugares publicos dentro de Irlanda del Norte, unproceso ambıguo y fragmentado que luego con-trastamos con el espacio institucional formal, perocerrado, del George Cross Garden del RUC, situadoen la constrenida y vigilada sede del Police Service

of Northern Ireland (PSNI) en Knock, en el este deBelfast.

Palabras claves: Irlanda del Norte, memorializa-cion, Royal Ulster Constabulary.

‘From thorn to thorn’: commemorating the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland

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