The chief constable of the PSNI Hugh Orde has confirmed that he has briefed US President George Bush on the state of the Peace Process.
In an interview in today's edition of The Guardiannewspaper, Sir Hugh Orde described how a key part of the power-sharing strategy has been to persuade senior politicians in the United States that policing was being conducted in a fair and even-handed way.
“The work we did in the States for the past six years has been unravelling 35 years of a very one-dimensional interpretation of policing,” Sir Hugh, who took over his current post in 2002, told the newspaper.
Mr Orde confirmed that he had also spoken with Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy “and dear old President Bush, who I visit once a year to tell him about policing and that it’s working”.
He said: “It’s not the content of the conversation that’s important but that the conversation that takes place.”
The moves came in the wake of the inquiries into collusion between the security services and Loyalist paramilitaries, which led to the murder of a number of Republicans. Orde set up the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) to re-examine more than 3,000 killings that took place between 1968 and 1998.