Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s grandfather Robert Carney was one of the first Garda recruits in the Free State and took part in a heroic stand in which he and three others held off a mob of 50 men who tried to storm a Garda station.
Robert Carney enlisted in the Civic Guards as recruit number 87 on February 27th, 1922 just five weeks after the State was formed.
Then just 19, he was recommended for the force by Brigadier General MJ (Joe) Ring, a great-uncle of the former Fine Gael junior minister Michael Ring.
Robert Carney’s first instructor was Garda recruit number one, PJ Kerrigan, another Mayo man coincidentally from the same parish of Aughagower, near Westport. Kerrigan had been in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), but was regarded as being sympathetic to the republican cause in the War of Independence.
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Nevertheless, Kerrigan was dismissed from the force just seven months later when he struck a recruit who called him a “Black and Tan”. He eventually emigrated to the United States, never returned to Ireland and had another family there unbeknown to his family at home.
Robert Carney found himself in the middle of a revolt in Kildare Barracks in May 1922 when many Civic Guards objected to former RIC officers being in the higher ranks.
During the Civil War he was posted to Baltinglass on November 16th, 1922, two days after Garda Henry Phelan became the first garda shot dead in the line of duty during the Civil War.
On January 13th, 1923, Garda O’Halloran was one of four gardaí who defied a group of 50 anti-Treaty men who attacked Baltinglass Garda station armed with crowbars and sledgehammers.
It was a particularly fraught time during the Civil War when the anti-Treaty side, though militarily defeated in large-scale engagements, resorted to guerrilla tactics to try to undermine the Free State government, much as the IRA had done to the British during the War of Independence.
Feelings were running high on the morning of January 13th, 1923, when three republican prisoners were executed in Dundalk and a crowd praying outside the jail was dispersed with gunfire.
The mob tried to storm Baltinglass Garda station to claim it for the anti-Treaty side, which was still active in Co Wicklow at the time.
They broke down the doors and stormed the building, ransacked it, taking beds and furnishings and burning them in the streets, but the four men inside, including Robert Carney, refused to surrender the building.
A year later, one of the gardaí involved, Patrick O’Halloran, was shot dead during a bank raid in the town.
For reasons unknown Robert Carney resigned from the Civic Guard in November 1924 and emigrated to Canada from Belfast to Quebec on the Montnairn in 1925. He is listed on the Canadian-Pacific steamship as “a labourer”, and his fiancee Nora Moran as “a domestic”.
Perhaps the hostility to members of the Civic Guard even after the end of the Civil War or the general animus in the country were factors in his emigration. He would not have been alone. Thousands of combatants in the War of Independence and the Civil War left Ireland in the 1920s.
As a consequence Robert Carney is not listed in the 1926 Irish census. His father Patrick (53) and mother Bridget (45) – Mark Carney’s great-grandparents – are listed, along with a daughter Mary (10) and son John Martin (8) as living in Aughagower.
John remained in Ireland and it’s his direct descendants who will be greeting the Canadian prime minister when he visits Co Mayo on Sunday.
Whatever the reasons were for Robert Carney quitting the Civic Guard, it did not stop him pursuing a career in policing.
He got a job in the Canadian Pacific Railway Police and later joined the Canadian Royal Mounted Police, known as the Mounties. His son, Robert jnr, was born in 1933 and later became a professor of education at the University of Alberta. He was also a liberal candidate in the 1980 federal election.
Mark Carney was born in 1965 in the Northwest Territories of Canada, where his father was then a school principal and brought up in Edmonton, Alberta.
