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Birth of Graham Shillington, Northern Irish Police Officer

Sir Robert Edward Graham Shillington CBE, a senior Northern Irish police officer, is born on April 2, 1911, in Portadown, County Armagh. He serves as Chief Constable of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) from 1970 to 1973.

Shillington is the youngest of six children born to Major David Graham Shillington, who goes on to become a Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland, and Sarah Louisa (née Collen). He is educated at Castle Park School, a preparatory school in Dublin, and Sedbergh School, a public boarding school in Sedbergh, Cumbria, North West England. He then attends Clare College, Cambridge, where he studies natural sciences. He graduates Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1932.

Shillington originally plans to join the Northern Ireland Civil Service, however he wants a more varied career. He joins the Royal Ulster Constabulary on February 8, 1933, as a cadet officer. He completes his training at the Newtownards depot in County Down. He is promoted to district inspector in 1935, and serves as officer in charge of D District in Belfast. In 1944, he is promoted to 1st Class District Inspector and is posted to Derry, County Londonderry.

In 1953, after nine years in Derry, Shillington is promoted to County Inspector and returns to Belfast. There, he joins the Inspector General’s Headquarters and serves in an administrative post. On January 16, 1961, he is appointed Commissioner of Belfast City.

In 1969, Shillington is appointed Deputy Inspector-General of the RUC, as second-in-command to the Inspector-General, Anthony Peacocke, who, like Shillington, had been educated at Sedbergh and Cambridge. When the Battle of the Bogside breaks out in Derry in August 1969, he requests permission to use CS gas for the first time in the United Kingdom. When that does not halt the rioting, he requests that the British Army be brought in. He telephones Peacocke on August 13 in order to persuade him of this. Peacocke, who has long denied the need for army involvement, eventually agrees, but his reputation never recovers and following the publication of the Hunt Report in October he resigns as Inspector-General.

Shortly thereafter, Sir Arthur Young is seconded from the City of London Police to be the last Inspector-General and the first Chief Constable of the RUC. James Callaghan, then Home Secretary, sends him to implement the Hunt Report. Young’s measures introduce the standard British rank system for police officers in Northern Ireland and disbands the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC). Shillington remains as Young’s deputy, and when the latter returns to the mainland in 1970 he succeeds him to become the RUC’s second Chief Constable.

In the 1952 New Year Honours, Shillington is appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). He is promoted to Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1959 Queen’s Birthday Honours. He is knighted in the 1972 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Shillington marries Mary (Peggy) Bulloch in 1935. They have two sons and a daughter. He dies on August 14, 2001, at the age of 90, in a County Armagh nursing home.


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Birth of Sir Ronald Flanagan, Northern Irish Police Officer

Sir Ronald Flanagan, a retired senior Northern Irish police officer, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on March 25, 1949. He is the Home Office (HO) Chief Inspector of Constabulary for the United Kingdom excluding Scotland. He is previously the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) since its creation in 2001 to 2002, and is Chief Constable of its predecessor, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) until 2001.

Flanagan joins the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in 1970 while studying physics at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). He serves his first three years in the Queen Street Police Station before achieving the rank of sergeant and transferring to the Castlereagh station. He is promoted to Inspector in 1976. In 1982, he becomes a Detective Inspector in the Special Branch and is promoted the following year to Chief Inspector.

In 1990, Flanagan takes on the role of Chief Superintendent and transfers to the Police Staff College in Bramshill, Hampshire, England, where he is the First Director of the Intermediate Command Course, progressing to the Senior Command Course.

In 1992, Flanagan returns to duty with the RUC as Assistant Chief Constable of Operations, later taking on the responsibilities of Operational Commander for Belfast. He is appointed as head of Special Branch in 1994 and is promoted to Acting Deputy Chief Constable the following year. He becomes the Deputy Chief Constable proper in 1996, and when Chief Constable Hugh Annesley retires later that year, he succeeds him. When the PSNI is established in 2001, he serves as Chief Constable until his retirement the following year. He is replaced by Hugh Orde.

Since then Flanagan has served in Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and is appointed as HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary in 2005. He is tasked to review the police arrangements in Iraq in December 2005 as part of the British involvement there. Following his retirement in December 2008, Denis O’Connor succeeds him as Her Majesty’s Acting Chief Inspector of Constabulary.

After leaving British policing, Flanagan takes up the post of strategic adviser to the Abu Dhabi Police Force, a post he holds for almost two years until he succeeds Paul Condon, Baron Condon, as chairman of the International Cricket Council‘s Anti-Corruption & Security Unit (ACSU).

On January 22, 2007, a report by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O’Loan, makes findings of collusion between members of the proscribed paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and officers under the command of Flanagan. The reports are acknowledged by the then Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde who apologises for the wrongdoing of his officers, and by the then British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Hain.

Flanagan denies any wrongdoing or acting with any knowledge of the events in question. He agrees that these events had taken place. In the aftermath of the ombudsman’s report, Irish nationalist politicians say he should be forced to resign from his job as Chief Inspector of Constabulary.

The Police Ombudsman criticises Flanagan’s role in the RUC inquiry into the Omagh Bombing of August 15, 1998, in a report published in 2001, to which his response is that he would “publicly commit suicide” if he believed her report was correct, though he later apologises for the form of words he used.

In July 2010, Flanagan appears before the Iraq Inquiry into the UK’s role in the Iraq War. In 2005, he had conducted a review into the UK’s contribution to policing reform in Iraq. As he gives evidence, he has to apologise for the amount of acronyms in his report on Iraq, which is presented to the government in January 2006:

“In my view, and I would like to almost apologise for the number of acronyms in this report – but it wasn’t written with a view to being read publicly. It was written for the people who invented the acronyms…”


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Bridget Dirrane Featured in the Guinness Book of Records at Age 104

Bridget Dirrane, who was imprisoned with Kevin Barry and who canvassed for John F. Kennedy in the United States, celebrates her 104th birthday on November 15, 1998, with news that she is to be featured in the new edition of the Guinness Book of Records. Earlier in the year, she receives a Master of Arts honorary degree from NUI Galway which makes her the oldest person in the world to be awarded a degree.

Dirrane is born in Oatquarter in the townland of Kilmurvey on Inishmore, Aran Islands, County Galway on November 15, 1894. She is the youngest child of Joseph Gillan and Maggie (née Walsh). Her father is a weaver of flannel cloth and has a small farm. She has four brothers and three sisters. Her oldest brother is a fisherman, who dies at age 21 in 1901, and her father dies before 1911. Despite this hardship, all of the children go to school, with one of her brothers becoming an Irish teacher, and later an Irish inspector. The family speaks Irish at home, but they are all bilingual with English. She is schooled at the national school in Oatquarter until the age of 14. She leaves to work in local homes, looking after children. When she writes her memoirs late in life, she claims to have met Joseph Plunkett, Éamonn Ceannt, Thomas MacDonagh, Thomas Ashe and Patrick Pearse when they visited the island, visiting a house where she looked after the children, discussing politics and plans for the Easter Rising with them. She is a republican, becoming a member of Cumann na mBan in 1918 while she is working for Fr. Matthew Ryan as a housekeeper. She is involved in drilling and assisting fugitives from the authorities. Because of their known republican sympathies, the Black and Tans raid the Gillan family homes.

Dirrane moves to Dublin in 1919 to train in Saint Ultan’s Children’s Hospital as a nurse. She is still under surveillance, being arrested alongside her employer, Claude Chavasse, when she is working as a nurse in his house. She is held in Dublin’s Bridewell Garda Station for two days before being transferred to Mountjoy Prison. In the time of her imprisonment, she is not charged or put on trial. Her refusal to speak English angers the guards, culminating in her going on hunger strike for a number of days in 1920 until she is released. She takes part in the Cumann na mBan vigil outside of Mountjoy Prison in November 1920, when Kevin Barry is hanged.

Dirrane works in Richard Mulcahy‘s house for two years, before emigrating to the United States in 1927 to continue her career as a nurse. She works in Boston where she is an active member of the Irish emigrant community alongside former neighbours from the Aran Islands and some relatives. She works in a hotel for a time but returns to nursing after her marriage to Edward ‘Ned’ Dirrane in November 1932 in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. Ned, a labourer in Boston and also from Inishmore, dies from heart failure in 1940. Dirrane continues her career nursing in hospitals and as a district nurse. On May 13, 1940, she naturalises as U.S. citizen. During World War II, she works as a nurse in a munitions factory, and at a U.S. Army Air Forces bomber base in Mississippi. She canvases for John F. Kennedy in the Irish community in South Boston when he runs for president in 1960. Jean Kennedy Smith visits Dirrane in 1997 in Galway to acknowledge her contribution. She also meets Senator Edward Kennedy.

Following her retirement, Dirrane lives with her nephew, but she returns to the Aran Islands in 1966 at age 72. There she lives with her brother-in-law, Pat Dirrane, a widower with three grown sons. They marry in a private ceremony on April 27, 1966. She continues to live on the island after Pat’s death on February 28, 1990, living with her stepson. She eventually moves into a nursing home in Newcastle in the suburbs of Galway. When she celebrates her 100th birthday, she funds a statue of Our Lady Mary at a holy well in Corough on Inishmore. At age 103, the matron of her nursing home arranges for a local writer, Jack Mahon, to record her memories and collate the information into a book. The book, A Woman of Aran, is published in 1997 and is a bestseller for several weeks. She is awarded an honorary degree, an MA honoris causa, from NUI Galway in May 1998, the oldest person to ever receive one.

Dirrane dies at age 109 on December 31, 2003, in Galway. She is buried on Inishmore.


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Birth of Thomas Traynor, Member of “The Forgotten Ten”

Thomas Traynor, a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), is born in Tullow, County Carlow, on May 27, 1882.

Traynor is an experienced soldier having been a member of the Boland’s Mill garrison during the 1916 Easter Rising. After the Rising he is interned in Frongoch internment camp, Wakefield Prison and Mountjoy Prison where he shares a cell with Seán Mac Eoin.

Traynor works as a boot maker and is married with ten children. At the time of his death the eldest is 18 years and the youngest 5 months. The eldest son, Frank, represents Ireland at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, competing as a bantamweight boxer.

Traynor is captured during an ambush on Auxiliaries in Brunswick Street, Dublin, on March 14, 1921, and is tried on April 5 at City Hall. He is part of a party of IRA volunteers keeping watch outside a meeting at 144 Brunswick Street that includes Seán MacBride. During the fight an IRA volunteer, Leo Fitzgerald, is killed, as are Constable James O’Farrell and Cadet Bernard Beard of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Traynor is reportedly badly beaten by members of the Igoe Gang.

Traynor is hanged in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin on April 25, 1921, one of a group of men, commonly referred to as the Forgotten Ten, hanged in Mountjoy Prison from 1920–21, during the Irish War of Independence. He is 38 years old at the time of his death.

Mark Sturgis, assistant to the Under-Secretary for Ireland, writes, “Traynor, captured red handed with an attacking party when Auxiliaries were killed in Brunswick Street, was executed this morning. I don’t think they will make much fuss as there is no sort of ‘alibi’ business this time – nor is he the usual ‘youth’, dear to ‘The Freeman‘, as he is over 40 and has a pack of children, the poor deluded idiot.”

On the day following Traynor’s death, Gilbert Potter, a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) District Inspector based in Cahir, County Tipperary, and being held for Traynor’s safe treatment is executed in reprisal by members of the 3rd Tipperary Brigade of the IRA. Another IRA volunteer, Jack Donnelly, captured with Traynor, is sentenced to death but is reprieved by the declaration of an impending truce in June 1921.

In 1965 a statue is erected to honor Traynor in his native town of Tullow. The Ballad of Thomas Traynor is written in his memory.

In 2001 Traynor and the other nine, including Kevin Barry, are exhumed from their graves in the prison and given a full state funeral. He is now buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.