The vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board has said the Provisional IRA approached him just over 30 years ago and asked him to set up a police service to police the then "no-go" areas of the Bogside and Creggan in Derry.
Mr Denis Bradley said the request, from the Provisional IRA's then army council leader, Mr Daithi O'Conaill, who died 13 years ago, proved that the IRA recognised then the need for a policing service.
Mr Bradley, who was a local priest at the time, said the then RUC chief officer in Derry, Supt Frank Lagan, backed the proposal and offered to train nationalist recruits and to give them a degree of autonomy to police nationalist areas.
Mr Bradley made the remarks during a speech on policing to an audience at the Gasyard Wall Feile in the Bogside on Monday night.
As he arrived to deliver his address, he was heckled by several dozen republicans, one of whom thrust a placard into his face.
Mr Bradley said that just over 30 years ago a fatal accident occurred in the Bogside home of "an icon of the republican movement".
After the accident, three young members of the Provisional IRA arrived on the scene.
"One of them told me afterwards that the reaction of the three was that they first of all didn't know what to do and, secondly, didn't want to do it because there was some instinctive knowledge that there was a difference between an army and a policing service and they did not want, in any way, to be contaminated by or become engaged in a policing issue which the accident was.
"They were young volunteers, they were not very long in the movement at the time and the knowledge amongst the three of them was to leave this to the police.
"Not long after that Daithi O'Conaill asked me to come to see him in a house not far from here.
"He was the then commander in chief of the Provisional IRA and in a room not more than four streets from here, there was Daithi O'Conaill, myself and a very coming prominent member of the Provisional IRA in this city.
"Daithi O'Conaill asked me would I consider setting up a police force for Free Derry on the grounds that the IRA could not properly police, on the grounds that policing was a distraction to their main target of fighting a war and that that target, that aim, that energy, was being dissipated by the fact that they had to deal with domestic problems, with thievery, with the normal social and criminal things that take place in any society.
"I didn't think it was such a good idea but I did think that it was well intentioned and I understood the thrust of his argument." Mr Bradley said the proposal was then discussed and debated by the RUC
"The then superintendent of the RUC in Derry considered the possibility of setting up a training college for policing in Magee College here in Derry," Mr Bradley said.