Sinn Fein has said the RUC has no role to play in its vision of policing for Northern Ireland and has called for the force to be disbanded, writes Louise Flanagan.
The Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, speaking yesterday at the launch of his party's submission to the Independent Commission on Policing, said the RUC was not "a normal police service" and it had "routinely violated, often on a massive scale, the rights of nationalists".
Nationalists deserved a police service that they could trust, said Mr Adams, who stressed that this right was centralised in the Belfast Agreement. Nationalists and republicans would judge the effectiveness of the peace process by the way it tackled issues such as policing.