MUTUAL trust and confidence between Catholics and the RUC has been "totally shattered" following the police handling of the Drumcree Orange parade, the Catholic Primate, Cardinal Cahal Daly, has said.
Dr Daly, who mediated between nationalists and Orangemen during the five day stand off, said it was a lie to claim that residents of the Garvaghy Road and Craigwell Avenue were orchestrated by the IRA or manipulated by Sinn Fein.
He said he was proud of the dignity of the residents and their absolute determination to prevent violence within their community or emanating from their community.
Representatives of SDLP, Sinn Fein and the loyalist parties were genuinely striving to avoid wider violence. "These people deserve our support, rather than the denigration being heaped upon them by some people whose hands have been far from clean during these days," he said.
Dr Daly was giving the homily at Mass in the Church of St John the Baptist in Portadown, Co Armagh, yesterday. He said the decision to "force through" the Orange march was "indefensible and
The Chief Constable, Sir Hugh Annesley, and the RUC should not have been left to accept responsibility for the decision to the parade, "which was clearly taken for political reasons", and to bear the consequences of an "abdication of responsibility", by the British government.
He asked why Orangemen had been allowed to assemble in massive force "when the very purpose of their assembly manifestly was precisely that old overwhelming the police lines.
"There were days leading up to the Twelfth when preventative action could have been taken, if the will to do so had been there.
"Many nationalists are asking whether the RUC would have allowed a comparable multitude of nationalists to assemble with the clear intention of overwhelming the police by force of superior numbers? Are there two systems of law in operation in this land?"
Dr Daly also condemned the Enniskillen hotel bomb and "implored" the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries "not in any circumstances to recommence armed violence".
He called for the "maximum restraint" on the RUC's use of plastic bullets.
There was, especially since Thursday, a "huge crisis of confidence in the police" among the nationalist community. "In my own modest way, I have tried for years to urge both the police and the Catholic public to work to build up mutual trust and confidence. For the present, that confidence has been totally shattered."