Sir, - Your Editorial of April 23rd makes a dangerous and insensitive error. The release of prisoners held for the murder of gardai is among the most difficult issues in the peace process. A debate on it is perhaps premature.Equating the Garda with the RUC is, however, both a misunderstanding of the sensitivities of Northern nationalists, and a slur on the Garda.The RUC is not a normal police force, any more than the old Orange state was a normal Western European democracy.RUC officers took part in sectarian attacks on Northern nationalists at the very outset of the Troubles - Conor Cruise O'Brien mentions this in his States of Ireland. The force has just come under severe criticism from the UN for abuse of judicial practice. Questions of the gravest kind hang over the RUC as a body, though it may well contain brave and decent men and women. To equate it with the Garda, which has never been accused of sectarianism, illegal violence or collusion with terrorists, is profoundly unjust to the Garda and to the institutions of this State.Your Editorial implies that before the present Troubles, in say 1965, or some other halcyon era, the RUC was, and was seen as, an impartial police force. In this golden age, it policed a normal society by normal methods.
Very few Northern nationalists would see this picture as accurate. It is this very issue that the Commission on Policing will address.
Noone should seek to prejudge it. - Yours, etc., Frank Fitzpatrick,Dunville Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.