The Royal Ulster Constabulary now waits, with cynicism and resignation, for a report on its future which some of its officers think will be the end of it. That report will probably be delayed till the autumn, mainly to avoid the fissile material of a summer marching season likely to be one of the roughest of recent times. But it must come, and it must say something of how the force is to be reformed, because such a promise was part of the Good Friday Agreement whose anniversary is next month. Further, one of the many underlying obstacles to decommissioning, on which the future of the Agreement may hinge, is the widespread perception in the Catholic community that the IRA must protect people whom the RUC will not protect.
The chairman of the commission that will produce the report is Chris Patten – one of the growing list of Tony’s Tories, senior liberal Conservatives who care little for their nominal leader and have lent their time to a big job. Soon after he took it, he did a meet-the-people evening on the Republican Falls Road in Belfast. He joked that he was the last colonial oppressor of Hong Kong and learnt, there and then, that jokes about colonial oppression go down very badly on the Falls Road. He was submitted to an evening of harangue, a catalogue of discrimination, a history of brutality – presented in speech, in petition, on posters and even on a Sinn Fein video. Father Des Wilson, an activist priest, said that if even one RUC man were employed by the new police force which must replace it, Patten’s commission would have failed. “Would you propose reforming the Ku Klux Klan before an audience of black Americans?” shouted a young man. When Patten called for some “generosity of spirit”, he was accused of disrespect for nationalists. Patten’s sang-froid and self-deprecating wit, the hallmarks of his career, hit flint on the Falls.
It was a measure of what the RUC now faces. Sinn Fein wants the RUC disbanded and an unarmed “community” police force created for which anyone who had served in the RUC’s special branch, anti-terrorist forces or CID could not apply, but ex-paramilitaries could. The Social Democratic and Labour Party wants a force that is split into four divisions, with two to the east and two to the west of the River Bann – the boundary which broadly separates the Protestant east of the province from the Catholic west.
On the hard unionist side, the notion of diluting the effectiveness of the RUC is regarded splenetically. Only the unionism that David Trimble, the Northern Ireland First Minister, now embodies argues that the police are reformable short of dismantlement.
Somehow the RUC has to convince people that it can leave behind a sectarian history, that a 92 per cent Protestant force can police sensitively and inclusively a 40 per cent (at least) Catholic province. Does that sound like the RUC?
Inevitably, when the solicitor Rosemary Nelson was blown up last week by a loyalist car bomb, republicans alleged RUC involvement. (It is a measure of the RUC’s anxiety to be seen doing right that its chief constable, Ronnie Flanagan, asked a colleague from another force, David Phillips of Kent, to head the inquiry.) The government is reviewing separate allegations about the loyalist murder in 1989 of Patrick Finucane, another solicitor who specialised in defending IRA suspects.
The origins of the RUC, and much of its history, are mired in sectarianism. It was carved out of the old all-Ireland Royal Irish Constabulary in the early twenties, as partition took effect. The first Ulster home secretary, Sir Dawson Bates, was an anti-Catholic ideologue who would not have even the most junior post in his ministry filled by a “papist”. The RUC was quickly augmented by an auxiliary force which came to be called the “B” specials, responsible for anti-Catholic reprisals up to the 1970s, when they were disbanded to vast unionist protest; and the strong links with the Orange Order and other exclusively loyalist institutions were neither challenged nor actively discouraged. Catholics did join the RUC – well over 20 per cent of the force was Catholic in the 1920s – and they were promoted; but they had to acquiesce in a heavily Protestant culture.
For much of the period until the troubles, there was such acquiescence. But when peace began to break down, the Protestant hegemony appeared oppressive. In his memoir, Killing Rage, Eamon Collins, the former IRA man turned penitent community worker (murdered recently by unidentified republicans), remembered seeing “B” specials swagger about his native town when he was a teenager in the late sixties: “There seemed to be hundreds of them and they all carried long black rifles with polished wooden butts. They were the local ‘B’ specials . . . I recognised people we knew . . . the bogeymen were our neighbours. They were armed, we were not. I was looking at the organisation that was beating Catholics daily on protest marches . . .”
It was never simply what the IRA still calls it – the armed wing of unionism. Violent loyalism hated the RUC, too: the first RUC officer killed in the troubles was Victor Arbuckle (29), murdered by a loyalist gunman during rioting in the Shankhill Road in October 1969. But its job was unique among police forces of developed nations: it had to enforce the law over a part of a state of which between a third and a half of the population professed itself at best enforced citizens. Even most moderate Catholics were fundamentally hostile to the government the RUC served: they did not recognise the right to rule of the monarch to whom RUC officers swore their oaths and they owed no allegiance to the flag that flew over RUC stations.
The RUC, only 3,000 strong when the troubles started and largely untrained in riot control, was swamped by the scale of the disorder. The army’s deployment in 1969 displaced the force from the front line (though not from the sights of republican Armalites) for years. Only when Sir Kenneth Newman (an Englishman) took over in 1976 did the RUC recover its primacy. It grew to more than four times its sixties strength; it became hugely skilled in intelligence work and anti-terrorist operations; it developed, after a long period of non-existent, then strained, relations with the Irish Gardai, an effective cross-border co-operation; and it ground down the IRA, at times (it believed) almost to the point of extinction. But it also tortured suspects. In Castlereagh barracks, the interrogation rooms were used to beat and prise confessions out of suspects such as Tommy McKearney in 1977: “For the best of seven days I was subjected to physical torture . . . towards the end . . . they brought in maybe four to six hefty policemen in civilian clothing. They pressed me to the floor and brought in a bin liner and put it to my head and started to tighten it so I couldn’t breathe.” By 1985, physical torture had largely been stopped, but not verbal abuse (including abuse of lawyers who defended terrorist suspects), which attracted international censure, notably from the UN Human Rights Commission. The routine denials now cut less ice.
Against this background the RUC may find it impossible to convince people that it can become a non-sectarian police force. Many believe, however, that hatred of the RUC among the republican population is more apparent than real. Chris Ryder, author of A Force under Fire, a history of the RUC, and himself a former member of the Police Authority, argues that “people in nationalist areas would come back to trusting the RUC if they weren’t intimidated; it’s still difficult for Catholics to be seen to be co-operating with the police”. Indeed it is: the Donegal Celtic football club has effectively been stopped from playing an RUC team, while Sinn Fein leaders urged parents to take their children out of a primary school last year when its head asked the RUC to give road safety lessons.
Sinn Fein has succeeded in persuading or terrorising many Catholic areas (and after three decades, the two communities are all but wholly separate) into rejecting the RUC. Some loyalist groups have tried the same, with less success. The RUC runs recruitment campaigns saying that Catholics are “particularly welcome” and Ken Maginnis, the Ulster Unionists’ security spokesman, says that anti-discrimination legislation should be suspended to allow a rapid recruitment of Catholics to the force. Yet the Catholic rejection seems more complete than ever. When, in the early 1920s, a bigoted home secretary was commending the sacking of Catholics from government posts, the RUC was over a quarter Catholic. Now, as the new First Minister pledges constant allegiance to equality of treatment, respect and esteem, the proportion is less than 10 per cent.
The RUC will only be genuinely open to both Catholics and Protestants when the state itself can command the civic (not necessarily the emotional) allegiance of both communities. People join the police force to uphold the law; the law’s jurisdiction must thus be agreed, at least as a working assumption. Patten knows that any recommendation that breaches this basic truth will not work; but he has also felt, in the passionate denunciations he has heard in halls across the province, that holding to it will cause that passion to rise further. “He must,” said a former cabinet colleague, “be rather regretting taking the job.” Hong Kong, indeed, was easier. The Chinese had a sense of humour about British imperialism.
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