If the police duck confrontation with sectarian and racist bullies, people are entitled to fret, and ask hard questions, writes FIONNUALA O'CONNOR
POLICING MATTERS everywhere, but the North’s body politic has anxiety about it in the nervous system like never-to-be eradicated shingles. One English chief constable in the North is about to be replaced by another – implicit acknowledgement that the revamped police service, like the made-over Northern Ireland, is not ready yet to choose a local leader.
No matter how professional a candidate might appear, she or he – and there was talk of a possible female chief – would have to overcome fears that their origins would skew their judgement.
Incoming chief constable Matt Baggott arrives from Leicester, a multi-racial city, talking about his enthusiasm for “community policing” to a society with no sense of itself as a civic entity. But for the first time republicans were part of the policing board that chose him: the choice was unanimous, and apparently made in under an hour.
Baggott bows in at a fine moment. As tearful radio phone-ins and the facsimiles of old front pages have been reminding anyone who can bear to notice, the failure of policing 40 years ago this month gave the place, and a fair number of the people, the final push over the precipice into the Troubles.
Now all parties to those Troubles are bound into arrangements that ensure a minority will never again look for protection, only to find the state’s forces lined up with their attackers.
Oversight of policing and justice by the Stormont administration is the last jigsaw piece to be installed.
For the moment, it remains clutched behind the DUP’s back. Agreement to claim control of policing and justice from London is being withheld – as yet another reminder to Sinn Féin that the DUP is the bigger party and can stymie where they cannot overrule; or out of funk at taking the final step and in a race backwards with Ulster Unionists away from the challenge of Jim Allister, champion of the unreconstructed.
Sinn Féin went into powersharing with Ian Paisley on the understanding that taking the IRA out of commission would enable sharing power over policing. As acknowledged in an editorial yesterday by the Belfast Telegraph, the voice of middle unionist Ulster, which commended the argument for devolution by Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness as “compelling”, Sinn Féin kept its side of the bargain.
It went further, and waived its right, under the complex administrative rules that govern powersharing, to nominate one of its own as first minister for policing. A fat lot of good it did the party.
The tiny Alliance party is in line for the post, despite having too few votes to nominate a minister as of right. Its leader, a former senior social worker with an inclination to sermonise and less than loved by his own supporters, looks likely to nominate himself as minister. At street level, in a community much given to political chit-chat if not always deep debate, dismayed republican supporters struggle to make the situation sound other than humiliating.
The new chief constable will have noted the outstanding small matter of devolving power over policing. He may also have been advised by the outgoing Sir Hugh Orde, adept on Northern politics, that he should just get on with the job. Given the system already in place of local district policing partnerships that hold regular public meetings, a Stormont minister might make little impact on Chief Constable Baggott.
But the sourness about delaying devolution is a worry in the background, a reminder that Stormont may still come adrift because DUP and Sinn Féin cannot work properly together.
For Baggott, the immediate challenge is to improve police performance. If he is listening to daily northern news he must notice the hum of aggressive sectarianism affecting both Catholics and Protestants, interspersed with examples of racist violence.
Centuries-old marching season friction brings burned GAA and Orange halls: not easy to police, but more often than is reasonable, police on the beat seem to be absent. There are few charges, fewer convictions. In Coleraine cars drive up to the home of Catholic Kevin McDaid – beaten to death in May – in the night so bottles can be thrown through the windows, the attackers speeding off.
Sufferers from intimidation down the years have reported being told that it is not possible to protect them, and the answer is for them to move house.
That tack had 100-plus Romanians flown home recently at the expense of the Stormont executive. A total of two youths subsequently faced charges. The mixture of activists from small left groups and evangelical churches who supported the immigrants voiced dismay that police patrols materialised slowly, or not at all.
What price safeguards of impartiality if the police are ineffectual?
Catholics may now make up a quarter of the PSNI, but if the PSNI ducks confrontation with sectarian and racist bullies people are entitled to fret, and ask hard questions.