The Vice-Chairman of the Police Authority for Northern Ireland, Prof Herb Wallace, has urged nationalist leaders to encourage more Catholics to join the RUC.
He was speaking during a public meeting hosted by the Authority in Omagh, Co Tyrone last night designed to address policing issues in the North. Proposals from the meetings will be passed to the Patten Commission on Police Reform.
Prof Wallace said he believed there was a serious imbalance in the RUC's composition when almost 90 per cent of its members were Protestant. However, recruitment figures demonstrated a marked increase in recruitment from nationalist areas, he said.
"We in the Police Authority and indeed in conjunction with the Chief Constable of the RUC, have been doing our best to make it a more attractive career for members of the Catholic community and we are gratified that the most recent recruitment composition is something like 22-23 per cent from people who have declared themselves to be Catholic.
"Until there is encouragement from within the Catholic community for people to join from the leaders of that community, then all the efforts that we make will certainly improve the situation but they will not bear as much fruit as we would like to see," he added.
The authority wanted to see a police force which was fully representative of the different traditions within the North, he said.