If police reform is not carried out the situation in Northern Ireland will deteriorate, Ms Kathleen O'Toole, a member of the Patten Commission, has said.
Although she was concerned at the first proposal for legislation on police reform, since amendments have been added "the legislation is getting much closer to our actual recommendations".
Ms O'Toole was speaking at a conference in University College Cork on Northern Ireland.
"I sincerely hope this opportunity is not lost. If it is . . . time will pass and at some point later the police issue will be taken up again - it will not go away. And if it is taken up again, the answers and recommendations will be the same," said Ms O'Toole, an expert in policing from Boston.
While the Patten report was considered controversial in Northern Ireland, elsewhere it was referred to as a "brilliant model for policing in a democracy", she said.
Symbols were one of the most difficult decisions the Patten Commission faced, she said. "But we made the recommendation to do away with the current symbols. We did so primarily because we heard so much about the necessity to de-politicise the police."
The police themselves said they wanted to be excluded from the political agenda, she added. "Although many police expressed pride in their uniforms, badges and the title of the organisation, most said that they would accept changes if they were required to solidify `a new beginning' for policing in Northern Ireland."
The composition of the police force between the two communities was also an important reform recommended, Ms O'Toole said. "A police department will not be effective, will not be credible, and will not be trusted unless it is representative of the community it serves."
Public meetings were the most valuable means of getting the views of ordinary people on police reform, she said. Nationalists told members of the commission that while the RUC was 93 per cent Protestant, it was 100 per cent unionist. Unionists were opposed to dramatic change as this would be an insult to police officers who had been killed, she added.
Mr Fintan O'Toole, a columnist with The Irish Times, told the conference the Belfast Agreement came at a cost as in return for peace people in Northern Ireland were asked to give up "a fixed sense of where their nation begins and ends".