Now hold on there one second. We were told that Sinn FΘin didn't approve of the replacement for the RUC, the Police Service of Northern Ireland; but we were never told that within a couple of weeks of Psoni coming into existence its members would be pelted with iron bars, petrol bombs, bottles and fireworks by Shinners, and at least 22 of its officers injured.
Psoni was not put on this earth to have its members' heads shattered by mobs. It's not a police "force" at all. Force is a term which has been deliberately witheld from Psoni's letters of inauguration. Nope, according to the intentions of Nuala O'Loan, Psoni's ombudsman, Psoni is a human rights enforcing agency. Ideally, its members will give concerts for deprived children, raise money for third world charities, give ballet classes to the UDA, and be tolerant of all forms of sexual orientation. Male Psoni officers will no doubt be encouraged to shave their legs and be in touch with their female side.
Bad old days
There will be some training in routine police work - such as courses in feeling paramilitaries' pain and learning by rote the 28 clearly enunciated human rights warnings which a Psoni officer must utter before returning fire on attackers. But these are theoretical, for everyone thought - did they not? - that the paramilitaries were going to disarm and disband, so that the rudimentary policing skills which Psoni officers would learn would simply be relics of the bad old days.
The bad old days were meant to be over in the newly created elysium of O'Loanland, where peace and harmony would reign, where cheery, whistling, human-rights-enforcing Psoni officers would stand on street corners, as reformed Shankill Butchers perform neat little pas de deux along the Woodvale Road, and lo, down the Falls comes F Coy, 2nd Batt, Provisional IRA, performing Riverdance. In other words, Toytown, with Noddy and Bigears and Constable Plod, Psoni's intellectual precursor.
But not content with beating the bejasus out of the bewildered bobbies of Psoni in South Armagh, Sinn Fein is now revising history. It was with humming ears and a brain turning to suet that I heard Pat Doherty last week accuse the RUC Special Branch of effective complicity in the Omagh bombing, and he demanded full disclosure of the RUC and MI5 files on that atrocity. He also added (for good measure) that the Special Branch had been operating a murder campaign against nationalists.
Beyond refutation
Pinch me, someone. This is not real. This is like hearing the Ku Kux Klan denouncing the lynching of blacks by the Civil Rights Movement. This is beyond words, beyond refutation, beyond the rule of science, beyond the meaning of logic, beyond the laws of human experience and beyond the rules of common sense. Pat Doherty is so outside the ordinary conventions of argument that when he quivers with indignation at the role of the RUC Special Branch in the Omagh bombing, he is almost safe.
But not quite. Keep our feet on the ground and our wits about us. The allegation which caused him to embark upon his tour d'horizon of RUC infamies came in a leak from the ombudsman's report on the Omagh bombing. That allegation was that the Continuity IRA was planning to smuggle four guns and two rocket-launchers into Omagh.
This is a radically different proposition from the Real IRA smuggling half a ton of high explosive into the town - not merely in intent, but in operational response by those whose duty it was to keep people alive: the much maligned men and women of the RUC.
Listen: I really don't want lectures from Pat Doherty about what the RUC should or should haven't have done prior to the Omagh massacre. The people who bombed Omagh were, not long before, associates of his in the Provisional movement. Has he told the authorities in either jurisdiction all that he knows about his former chums? And when he asks for disclosure of MI5 files, will he ask for the disclosure of the lot? That would be interesting reading indeed.
Will those files identify the IRA leader who 29 years ago last Friday had Jean McConville taken from her home, and who authorised her interrogation, murder and secret burial, leaving 10 orphans? Will they identify the IRA leader who organised Bloody Friday? Will they identify the IRA Army Council member from South Armagh who arranged the Whitecross massacre of 10 Protestant workmen? Will they...? Ah. So you get my drift.
Appeasement
Actually, I don't blame Pat Doherty for talking the way he does. He has been given every reason - by the media, by the NIO, by the Department of Foreign Affairs - to believe that there are two sets of rules in the grisly machinery of appeasement that is the peace process. One is for the IRA, whose hands are covered in the blood of thousands (including some 20 nationalists murdered since the Belfast Agreement), and about whose deeds one may now say nothing; and the other is for the Northern security forces, who to be sure, sometimes performed illegal, even terrorist deeds, but for the overwhelming part didn't.
These people gave their lives by the hundred in the protection of the rule of law and of human life; and of them, it's now possible to make any calumny, to utter any lie, to declare any falsehood. But soon we will have the Psoni dance troupe limbering up outside Drumcree. Then, dear God, the RUC-bashing Toytown simplicities of O'Loanland might finally vanish, once and for all.