The religious mosaic of the Black and Tans

Wednesday's Irish Times reports on (subs. req'd) an interesting history research paper that estimates religious affiliations of two notorious Crown paramilitary forces that operated in Ireland during the War of Independence -- the Black and Tans, and the Auxiliaries, both of which represented ill-conceived attempts by Britain to reinforce the Irish police, in terms of men, equipment, and tactics [and by the way, by Black and Tan, we don't mean the bizarrely cheery references to the alcoholic beverage of that name].

Indeed, the experience of the "Tans" (the popular umbrella term for both forces) has become a template for how not to deal with insurgencies, as in: don't send hastily recruited, poorly trained, and predominantly overseas men to fight a guerilla war. But that was over 80 years ago and we don't make that mistake anymore, right, Dubya?

Anyway, an intrepid researcher has come up with some findings about the demography of the Tans that are superficially surprising but upon reflection (on the things that people will do for money, adventure, or because they are told to) are less so:

"Extrapolating from the sample, more than 2,300 of all Black-and-Tans and 225 of all Auxiliaries were Irish," according to the study.

A breakdown of the religion of the Black-and-Tans and Auxiliaries found that 82 per cent of them were Protestant, 17.4 per cent were Catholic, and there were 10 English Jews.

Overall, nearly one fifth of the paramilitary forces were Irish, and about half of those were Catholic, leading to the historian's headline finding that 1 in 10 of the Tans were Irish Catholic. Which we suppose is surprising if your expectation was for zero Irish Catholics, but as we said above, people can wind up in weird places for a variety of motives and reasons.

And what about those 10 Jews? P O'Neill's father had the bizarre recent experience of meeting a cranky Belfast tourist in Killarney, who patiently explained (in the context of Bill Clinton's current visit to Ireland) that Clinton's only problem was that the Jews conspired to bring him down with the Lewinsky business. The only evidence for which is that Monica herself is Jewish. Doubtless the carriers of such theories are lapping up these new revelations about the Tans.