PRESIDENT MARY McAleese has told graduating PSNI officers that they enjoy overwhelming community support from all the people of Ireland, even though there are still dissident paramilitary “wreckers” out to try to destroy the peace process.
She told the graduates that regardless of the many challenges that faced them, including the dissident threat, they were “not alone”. She quoted Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy who, after meeting PSNI Chief Constable Matt Baggott earlier this year, said: “An attack on one member of one force is an attack on both forces.”
President McAleese was guest of honour at the invitation of Mr Baggott at the police training college in Belfast yesterday, where she addressed 41 new graduate officers, presented the best recruit prize, and reviewed the passing out parade. She is the first Irish president to attend such an occasion.
She made her speech at a time when dissidents have been targeting police officers in gun and bomb attacks, and more than a year after the Continuity IRA murdered Constable Stephen Carroll in Craigavon, Co Armagh. She was also speaking in the wake of the serious rioting in her home parish of Ardoyne in north Belfast.
President McAleese said “many thousands within the former RUC, and now the PSNI, worked courageously to facilitate the [policing] transition process, so much so that today Northern Ireland is rightly recognised internationally as a model for police reform”.
“On this day we think with respect of all those who have honoured that trust, those who have paid with their lives and their health and the families that live today with loss and heartache,” she said.
“We think of you, today’s graduates, holders of that trust, commencing your careers, welcomed enthusiastically by the vast majority of citizens, still vulnerable to the tiny minority of wreckers who have set their faces like flint against the humanly decent dynamic of this peace,” she added.
“In facing down the many challenges ahead you are not alone, the PSNI is not alone. You have the support of all the major political parties, North and South; you have the overwhelming backing of local communities; you have the solidarity and fluent co-operation of your colleagues in An Garda Síochána, with whom you now co-operate so closely and to such great effect.”
She said the PSNI “more than ever” reflected the diversity of the community it served and enjoyed overwhelming community support. “You will be working in a context where the old embedded culture of paramilitarism, and the violence which hallmarked it, is fading but not yet fully extinguished,” she added.
“The peace that was endorsed by the Good Friday Agreement 12 years ago, when many of you were still youngsters, is growing and consolidating by steady and remarkable increments,” said President McAleese.
“You face a local context of ongoing sectarianism and inter-communal strife but against an encouraging backdrop where so many people at community level are trying hard to turn the tide of history in favour of this precious peace.”
Separately, Mrs McAleese decrying the violence at Ardoyne, said she was “scandalised” that young children and teenagers were involved in the disorder. “If they were my children I would want to know where they were,” she said.
She said a date had still not yet been set for the expected visit of the British monarch Queen Elizabeth to the South, although the “circumstances have been set” for the visit. She hoped the projected visit would help create a “transforming” moment in British-Irish history.