Healy voices opposition to RIC commemoration

815

Local TD Seamus Healy has called for a commemoration service for the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) to be canceled after he said that he will not be attending.

The event is due to take place at Dublin Castle next week.

Speaking to Tipp Mid West this morning, Deputy Healy said that he cannot agree with putting those he says oppressed the country ‘in the same category as those who died for the creation of the Republic’.

Deputy Healy this morning called the commemoration ‘a deliberant attempt to redraw and rewrite the history of the Irish people and the birth of the Irish state’.

He further went on to say that it is ‘very difficult to accept that in the Ireland of 2020, a mere one hundred years after the War of Independence, that the RIC, who were described in the Westminster Parliament in 1919 as a “semi-military organisation” who as such could not join the National Union of Police Officers, is to be commemorated by any Irish government’.

He called for a boycott of the event.