Yet he was under no illusions about his prospects. The bulk of the DMP’s rank and file were Roman Catholics. They were country lads, sons of farmers, tradesmen or, as in his own case, small publicans or shopkeepers. Almost all of the top ranks of the force were preserved for Protestants and Freemasons. In the uniformed ranks, he might get to be a sergeant or inspector at best. When he transferred to G-Division he knew his chances of advancement were reduced further, although paradoxically the chief superintendent of G-Division, John Mallon, was a Roman Catholic. But Mallon, the son of a small Catholic farmer from near Crossmaglen in County Armagh, with an outstandingly successful record in the service of the Crown, was the exception that proved the rule. One or two Catholics had gone through to superintendent rank in the aftermath of the 1867 Fenian rising when the authorities came to a greater appreciation of the loyalty of the Irish police forces. But the majority of those in command of the divisions were members of the Church of Ireland.

Sometimes Swallow thought he had been born too soon. The late Cardinal Cullen, Catholic Primate of All Ireland, had denounced the new ‘Queen’s Colleges’, established in 1850, as ‘Godless institutions’, so the Englishman John Henry Cardinal Newman established the new ‘Catholic University’ in Dublin. It had proven itself an effective vehicle for the social and economic advancement of young men whose faith or political inclinations were incompatible with the Protestant ethos at Trinity College. Catholics were beginning to make it to the higher levels in business and in the professions. There were even a few Catholic judges now. And the Catholic hierarchy was finding new ways of demonstrating its growing power, even with the country gripped in political turmoil and violence.

Little more than a generation after Daniel O’Connell had secured emancipation, and with the Great Famine within living memory, the Catholic bishops were putting up cathedral-scale buildings, right in the faces of the Protestant classes that still led commerce, business and the administration.

He had spent some time in the summer trying to do a panoramic sketch of the city skyline, using the Castle’s Bedford Tower as a viewing point. It had been a not-very-successful project for the course he attended weekly at the Municipal School of Art. It dawned on him that outside the immediate city centre all the significant landmarks on both sides of the river were new Roman Catholic domes and spires. The great copper dome of the Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, dominated the Rathmines Road. Its Corinthian columns and high pediment, studded with golden lettering and topped with statues of Mary, St Patrick and St Laurence O’Toole, loomed out onto the thoroughfare. It embodied the new confidence and wealth of middle-class, Catholic Ireland.