JACK HERMON was arguably the most powerful figure on this island during his tenure as chief constable of the RUC from 1980 to 1986; more powerful and influential than any of his predecessors. It is unlikely there will be any more like him. In the 1970s, as head of training, he had helped recreate the RUC from a minor demoralised constabulary to one of the best trained, toughest police forces in history. By the late 1970s, as operational commander of the force, he proved his mettle by defeating the loyalist strike of May 1977 (the loyalists had already singled him out for attention, burning his seaside cottage on the Co Antrim coast).
Hermon led the RUC operation against the strikers, preventing the closure of Ballylumford power station. Shortly after, the RUC broke a loyalist blockade of Ballymena, Co Antrim and Hermon personally arrested Ian Paisley, who never fully recovered from this humiliation in front of his supporters and the TV cameras. There is an abiding bitterness between these two men, who, are alike in background and temperament.
As chief constable, his command abilities were tested to the limit by the IRA campaign surrounding the 1980-1981 hunger strikes, which had divided this island and brought international media attention to the problems of the North. Politicians were floundering. Hermon, whose officers had borne the brunt of the republican onslaught and the intense media criticism over the plastic bullet deaths of children and innocent civilians, turned the tide against violent republicanism. The RUC has been in charge ever since.
In the aftermath of the 1981 hunger strike the IRA again precipitated yet another crisis in unionism by shooting dead the MP for south Belfast, the Reverend Robert Bradford. There was again a political loss of nerve North and South, but Hermon was confident that, having seen off the hunger strike violence, the RUC was well prepared to deal with Paisley's latest revolt.
In, the book he details these events quite candidly and accurately. He recounts that on the evening of November 23rd, 1981 he invited the then Northern Secretary, Jim Prior and the British Army General Officer Commanding (GOC), Richard Lawson, to dinner at RUC headquarters. The room was linked by television, monitor to the NASA-like RUC command and control centre so all incidents could be relayed instantaneously to the diners.
Prior, he says, "thanked me for having him to dinner and allowing him to be at the hub of things. I assured him that there was no need for thanks because my purpose in having him and the GOC there was to enable me to keep a close eye on them until the events of the day were over."
March 3rd, 1986 was another key date for the modern RUC. It again faced the threat of a loyalist "strike" - by which can be read mass intimidation of workers - in protest at the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave the Republic's government a say in Northern Ireland's affairs.
The RUC routed the loyalists. He says: "I regarded that day as the turning-point: it marked the emancipation of the RUC from the yoke, whether real or imagined, of the unionist/loyalist influence. To break that yoke, I had been quite prepared for the Force to withstand even more extreme and prolonged violence than had actually occurred on March 3rd." This from a man branded by republicans as the devil incarnate, dressed in a sash.
Hermon's force had saved the Anglo-Irish Agreement, though the price paid was the mass intimidation of RUC members living in loyalist areas. He also saw off an incipient revolt from within the RUC representative association, some of whose members sided with the Paisleyites. Brushing aside political pressure, he withdrew RUC protection for the DUP's deputy leader, Peter Robinson, when he led a mob across the Border to Clontibret.
Something had to go wrong; there was simply too much pressure. At 11.30 pm. on November 11th, 1982 the RUC in Armagh shot dead three unarmed IRA men at Tullygally Road East, Lurgan. Thirteen days later two innocent youths, Michael Tighe and Martin McAuley, were shot by the RUC in a hayshed a few miles away. The youths had found and were toying with a War of Independence rifle, a relic they had found in the hayshed. Tighe died. Eighteen days after that, another RUC unit shot dead two unarmed INLA members outside Armagh city.
THE "shoot-to-kill" episode was strangely slow in developing. Little comment was made until the SDLP issued a statement that Christmas. Slowly, over the next year or so, the affair gathered attention, turning eventually into a media circus surrounding John Stalker's removal from the investigation. Hermon spent the next seven years trying to extricate his force and himself from under sidebar issues and allegations, some of which were defamatory of Hermon and his officers.
He could not circumvent the damage done to his force's reputation. He became politically isolated, losing friends at Stormont and London (he had given up on the political intrigues of the Republic). He ended his career in argument and acrimony, his depression compounded by the death from cancer of his wife and constant companion, Jean. Hermon's description of the trials endured by his wife, son and daughter during his career, when they were shunted around Northern Ireland each time he was promoted, is made all the more touching by his old-fashioned Ulster peeler's economic use of language.
Still, there were consolations. His libel cases over the Stalker allegations all succeeded and he met and married Sylvia Paisley, a young law lecturer with whom he has had two children. He now spends much of his time sailing or "beach gardening", shifting rocks around the beach with his two young sons at their seaside home.
The book is good on a number of levels as a textbook on modern policing, a history of the past fed decades from a previously silent but central source and as a nice social history about the life of an Ulster police officer.