There has never been much energy behind demands that policing be more transparent and accountable, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR.
THE PROTEST at the prospect of an undebated Criminal Justice Bill, signed by 133 lawyers in The Irish Times yesterday, managed to sound as though the Bill’s provisions were novel. But juryless special courts and conviction on uncorroborated garda testimony became practice during the Troubles, and protests were scanty enough.
It was easy to understand. Terror on an unprecedented scale in the name of an idealised Irish republic outraged the sovereign Irish State and silenced many qualms. Beyond a comparatively small civil liberties lobby and self-interested republican campaigns, there has never been much energy behind demands that policing must be more transparent and accountable.
The gardaí had, and have, sufficient identification with the people they police to easily counterbalance doubts about the potentially corrupting effect of extending their powers. At this point, the dread of gangland violence looks likely to be a powerful deterrent to criticism.
In any case, there is a problem in defining “community confidence in policing”, much invoked in Northern Ireland without interrogation.
It was shorthand in the past for the sharpest point in the alienation of nationalists, who objected to the old police force’s origins as a unionist militia. It has now become a measurement of unionist enthusiasm, or lack of it, for the Stormont regime that yokes together the DUP, Ulster Unionists, Sinn Féin and the SDLP.
The question is when, not if, control of policing is devolved from the control of the British Northern Secretary to the unwieldy Executive. A distant observer might think unionists are rightly withholding support because they are not ready for a Sinn Féin justice and policing minister. But that is not on the cards. To the fury of the SDLP, which should have been eligible for the job, Sinn Féin has signed up instead to support Alliance leader David Ford as minister, or an Alliance member nominated by him – although Alliance is too small to be in the Executive.
When the current leader of unionism insists on community confidence in policing, he is plainly enough talking about his own self-confidence, and the backing his electorate will continue to give him, or not give him. What he is not talking about is the belief the population have, or do not have, in the competence of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). If he were, the question might be more serious, and more unanswerable.
The PSNI has not covered itself in glory recently. Questions linger about policing in advance of the loyalist mob murder of Coleraine man Kevin McDaid. A June 18th court judgment which refused to force a journalist to divulge information made the PSNI case look ill-considered. Police failed dismally to protect Romanian immigrants against unorganised attacks. Then, last weekend in Newtownbutler, Co Fermanagh, thieves used a digger to remove the only cash machine from a supermarket wall. The village watched in amazement and waited for police assistance. The ram raid began at 4.30 in the morning; detectives arrived at 4.30 in the afternoon.
But Newtownbutler is Border territory, where dissident republicans have tried to lure police into lethal traps. PSNI embarrassment is more than balanced – in the general population – by sympathetic awareness that Constable Stephen Carroll was shot dead in April while responding to a distress call in Craigavon, Co Armagh. Dissident republicans admitted responsibility for his murder, as for the two soldiers killed days earlier. That claim sparked the police attempt to compel the Sunday Tribune’s Suzanne Breen into co-operation.
But the DUP is not focused on PSNI tactics or performance. First Minister and DUP leader Peter Robinson repeated this week that funding from Gordon Brown was still a prerequisite for devolution of policing and justice.
As London Editor Frank Millar reports, Robinson also wants to be sure that mainstream unionism supports him to nullify the abuse he will take on the issue from anti-powersharing unionist “dissident” Jim Allister.
So Robinson wants to meet Ulster Unionist leader Sir Reg Empey and even the single Assembly representative, and leader, of the UVF-linked Progressive Unionists, Dawn Purvis. He has promised to consult his own party simultaneously, but their support seems fairly settled.
Robinsonian stagefright is unsurprising. The IRA’s last spasm of recidivism and bad faith, including the Northern Bank robbery, left a nasty aftertaste with unionists who backed the Stormont deal and badly damaged Sinn Féin.
The jigsaw will be completed sooner or later. A Stormont policing minister was always likely to be the last part in place.
Given the aftertaste, the first incumbent was never likely to be former IRA leader turned politician Gerry Kelly, now excluded in advance. (Jokers call it a new gerrymander.)
The new minister will no doubt examine community confidence in policing afresh. But at least now some cross-community sympathy exists for the police, instead of views inherited, and diametrically opposed.