Policing may be crucial last moment

In Northern Ireland, policing has been such an emotive subject that it has seeped even into the poetry. In The Ministry of Fear by Seamus Heaney, raised as a Catholic, the RUC swing their crimson flashlamps, crowding round

The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing,

The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye.

They ask his name and when he says Seamus, they bristle at the alien, Gaelic sound which marks him as a suspect.

But in Lament for a Dead Policeman, written by James Simmons, raised as a Protestant, the widow of an RUC man murdered by the IRA grieves for a fallen hero, her "darling", "honey" and "dearest love". The dead constable is brave, kind, infinitely decent, a quiet family man whose savage slaughter leaves an unassuageable desolation:

I wiped the blood

From our front door

With lukewarm water

And Fairy Liquid.

Next week, the British government will introduce legislation to give effect to the Patten commission's proposals on the reform of policing in Northern Ireland. After the potentially momentous events of last weekend, with the IRA finally acknowledging the primacy of democratic politics, what happens to Patten may well be the last crucial moment of the conflict.

Though the subject probably seems a bore to most people in the Republic, the sensitivity and generosity with which it is handled could have a decisive bearing on the future of this island.

It is easy for those who have the luxury of living in a relatively settled democracy to react with smug impatience to the passions aroused by the symbolism of what a police force is called and what kind of badge its members wear.

But this issue is not really about names and badges. It's about grief and rage, pride and humiliation. It's about the possibility of mediating between the ferocious emotions engendered by Catholic memories of men who point Stenguns and Protestant memories of having to wipe the blood of decent men off their doors.

To some extent David Trimble has only himself to blame for his current dilemmas over the RUC. When the Patten report was published, Mr Trimble, as First Minister-designate, was supposed to be creating the political climate for changes clearly signalled in the Belfast Agreement. Instead, his response was almost hysterical, describing the report as shoddy, offensive and "a gratuitous insult to the RUC and the community".

Chris Patten was entitled to respond, as he did, by asking Mr Trimble what he expected was going to happen when he signed the Belfast Agreement.

On the other hand, the Patten Commission itself was the result of the inability of those who negotiated that agreement to get to grips with the issue of policing. And, as with so many other issues, what the agreement says depends on who is reading it.

The agreement commits its signatories to a police force which is "professional, effective and efficient, fair and impartial, free from partisan political control; accountable, both under the rule of law for its actions and to the community it serves". This might seem to be a clear political mandate for precisely the changes Patten has proposed.

But the apparently straightforward language masks a deep ambiguity. The meaning of the words depends on whether you are inclined to read them in the future or the present tense. Catholics tend to assume that a professional, impartial force is something that has to be created. Protestants tend to assume that it already exists.

As Brendan O'Leary and John McGarry point out in their lucid and insightful book Policing Northern Ireland, "unionists of goodwill . . . think that the police already meet the requirements of the Good Friday agreement".

This division was always going to be mirrored in conflicting attitudes to the Patten proposals to divest the RUC of its British symbolism. An independent survey conducted in December 1997, a few months before the Good Friday deal was concluded, found that 77 per cent of Catholics thought it either essential or desirable that the RUC be given a new name and new emblems. Some 60 per cent of Protestants, however, declared these changes "unacceptable". In that sense, the RUC itself is already a symbol of sectarian division.

Part of the problem is that the RUC is neither the sectarian monster of republican myth nor the thin blue line of civilisation which many unionists like to imagine.

That the force is overwhelmingly Protestant (just 8 per cent of its membership is Catholic) is beyond dispute. That this is merely and solely the result of bloody-minded official bigotry is not.

The bigotry has been there, of course. The RUC officers in Portadown in May 1997 who sat in their Land-Rover and watched as a young Catholic man, Robert Hamill, was kicked to death by a Protestant gang represent the same kind of "institutionalised racism" which surfaced in the Stephen Lawrence case in England.

But it is also true that the RUC has been caught in a vicious circle: Catholics don't join because the force is overwhelmingly Protestant; the force is overwhelmingly Protestant because Catholics don't join.

The present RUC has been as much a victim of the underlying political divisions as a cause of them. Those divisions can't be made to disappear simply by adopting a set of neutral symbols which seeks merely to deny their existence. Since names and symbols continue to mean so much, surely the new democratic institutions should be able to incorporate the words and signs that resonate with each community.

It must be possible, after all, to show at least as much sensitivity to the RUC's pride as the new decommissioning proposals show towards the IRA's.

fotoole@irish-times.ie