Sinn Féin will eventually sign up to Northern Ireland's new policing structures on the back of others' work on the Police Board, Stormont Deputy First Minister Mark Durkan claimed today.
As the third drive for recruits to the new Police Service of Northern Ireland prepared to get under way, the leader of the nationalist SDLP claimed in St Louis, Missouri, that a view was taking hold in Irish America that Sinn Féin's opposition to the police was purely tactical.
"Based on the questions I was getting in Washington, that would have very much been the premise," the Foyle MLA said.
"I have making the point to people that Sinn Féin are running two lines in relation to policing.
"On the one hand they say in a sort of legalistic way: ‘We are not going on the Policing Board while the current legislation remains. There will have to be changes to the legislation'.
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"On the other hand they run a line of attack on the SDLP with a litany of issues which they say are wrong and have to be changed.
"So they have the option when the legislation is changed as a result of the commitment we got in the Weston Park talks last year of saying: ‘The legislation is now changed, we can now go on the board' or they could decide for their own tactical reasons that they do not want to go on it and at that stage they will rely on the litany of other issues," he said.
"There is that double line they are running and people in the States are noting that but I think we will see Sinn Féin moving to take membership of the Policing Board and will do so on the basis of developments hard won by the SDLP and others on the board."
As the new television advertising for recruits prepared to air in the province, Ulster Unionist MLA and Police Board member Mr Fred Cobain expressed concern that a high percentage of Catholic applicants to the new service were coming from across the Republic.
Mr Cobain claimed it was "ludicrous" that there was a high proportion of Catholics coming from the Republic - almost a fifth of applicants. "This process was about getting Catholics in Northern Ireland to play a role in policing here rather than just filling the numbers," he claimed.
However Mr Durkan said: "Given that we in the SDLP have attached a lot of importance to lateral entry of members of the Gardaí into the Police Service of Northern Ireland, then obviously we don't see how applications from the South are problematic."
Mr Durkan, who is in St Louis as the guest of honour for the annual St Patrick's Day parade, welcomed the increase in the percentage of Catholic applicants from 35 per cent in the first drive last February to 43 per cent in the second.
The North’s Deputy First Minister and his wife were taken aback by the lengths to which St Louis's Irish-American community had gone to make them feel welcome.
When they arrived at their city centre hotel, the couple and their entourage were taken immediately to a reception in their honour organised by the Saint Patrick's Day committee.
Judges, teachers, police officers and even a two-time Super Bowl winning football coach were among those who threw a welcome party for the Northern Irish delegation.
PA