Since the start of the current 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland in 1969 some 302 policemen and -women have been killed by terrorists, principally the IRA. Shocking as this figure is, the fact remains that there is a certain brutal sectarian logic at work here; the RUC is an overwhelmingly Protestant force and their decimation by the IRA was part of the broad Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland. In Police Casualties in Ireland Richard Abbott, a serving inspector of the RUC, gives a careful account of the killing of some 493 members of the Royal Irish Constabulary during the 'war of independence' in Ireland from 1919 to 1922. These men were, however, overwhelmingly Catholic, 'racy of the soil' as the Irish phrase goes, firmly rooted within local communities, who died at the hands of their co-religionists. It is a startling fact which calls out for rather more serious historical discussion than it has received until recent times in Ireland.

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