THERE WAS surprise when Peter Sheridan, the most senior Catholic officer in the PSNI said he was leaving the force. However, all going according to plan, the police service's loss will be a gain for all Ireland, North and South.
"Peace with bigotry," is how he describes the current new political and "social dispensation" in Northern Ireland as he embarks on a new assignment to break down what he sees as the last major challenge in the North, its embedded sectarianism.
Bertie Ahern's announcement last week that he was standing down as Taoiseach overshadowed Mr Sheridan's announcement that same morning that he is to resign from the PSNI to take up the chief executive post in Co-Operation Ireland in September.
An assistant chief constable, Mr Sheridan is close to Hugh Orde - "Orde will miss him," says a friend - and was tipped as a likely successor to the chief constable in the next year or so.
Had he been successful this 48-year-old native of Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh would have been the first Catholic in the job.
Mr Sheridan is the most senior Catholic in the PSNI. He has served 30 years in first the RUC and then the PSNI, had reached and passed full pension age, and rather than hold on in the hope of the PSNI chief constable post, was searching for other challenges.
As regards the chief constable position, he says: "There was no vacancy. Who's to know what would have happened when the job came up."
He says his main function as a police officer was to "stop people murdering each other".
He rose from the ranks, working initially in the Derry area, from constable to assistant chief constable responsible for rural operations. Two years ago he took over overall anti-crime operations.
Mr Sheridan is quietly ambitious and well-qualified - he graduated from the FBI Academy in 1999 and also holds an honours degree in applied sciences and a diploma in criminology from Cambridge University.
He was first attracted to a police career when he was 16, taking the advice of a teacher at St Michael's College in Enniskillen, Fr Peadar Livingstone.
That was 1976, a violent and bad time to be pursuing such a vocation.
He was conscious that an uncle of a schoolmate was killed on Bloody Sunday, but nonetheless wasn't particularly politically aware at the time, more "focused on playing football and chasing girls".
Against all the allegations of anti-Catholic sectarianism within the RUC and claims of collusion, he admits he worked with some bigots.
But, he avows, the vast majority of his colleagues "were hugely decent people".
Married with two children, he and his family were regularly under threat from the IRA. They had to move house a number of times.
He says he loved his time in the force and that policing is a "superb career".
Mr Sheridan was unsuccessful in his recent application for the civilian deputy commissioner post in the Garda Síochána.
Then the Co-Operation Ireland opportunity came up, which he was delighted to take.
Co-Operation Ireland's brief is to improve relations within Ireland and that includes within Northern Ireland, where Mr Sheridan will face his severest test.
With his experience and high profile, he has an opportunity to reinvent the organisation, which does useful work, but generally behind the scenes.
Tackling sectarianism is the last major frontier in Northern Ireland.
Mr Sheridan has too much experience of frontline policing to approach his job with rose-tinted glasses. He can only do so much. But he has a hard-nosed vision of what needs to be done to start toppling the walls that divide Catholics from Protestants.
"The job of peace-building must continue," he says.
