PSNI data breach makes it easier to kick the force - but other problems get lost under the headlines

The latest crisis headlines in the North tell the story of a major PSNI data breach and of Chief Constable Simon Byrne being once again under pressure.

Yet, this policing calamity represents only a part of what is broken in Northern Ireland.

The policing expert and Ulster University academic Dr Jonny Byrne is forthright in his choice of words to describe events: “The breach is only relevant because Northern Ireland is still f***ed up.”

That blunt summation speaks loudly of his frustration that nearly 25 years on from the Patten report that showed the way to “a new beginning” for policing in Northern Ireland, officers are still having to check under their cars for bombs and having to vary their routes to work.

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“Why can they not hang their uniforms on the washing line? Why do they have cover stories?” he asked.

In other words, why do police officers still have to hide their careers?

[ Independent review commissioned into PSNI data leak ]

He knows the answers to his questions.

It is because of the continuing threat from dissident republicans, and that is the major concern after a data breach that mistakenly disclosed information about all serving officers and civilian staff.

What might the dissidents of 2023 do with that information?

In September 1999, at the time of that report by the Independent Commission on Policing, the dissidents were in hiding.

They had been forced to retreat after the August 1998 bomb in Omagh, by the number of dead, and made to hide because of the shame of that day.

[ Omagh bombing: Timeline of families’ campaign for justice ]

But they have since re-emerged and have reorganised under so many different titles that it is difficult to keep track of them.

Are they still dangerous? Yes.

Could they kill another police officer? Yes.

But that threat was there long before this data breach, and Catholic recruitment to the PSNI had also slowed down.

The new beginning has been a long, slow road. Change in Northern Ireland is never easy.

“Why do people still have to hide their identities?” Former assistant chief constable Peter Sheridan, the most senior Catholic officer in the PSNI when he left the force in 2008, and now head of the peace-building organisation Co-operation Ireland, asks that same question.

Like Dr Byrne, he knows the answer and understands the seriousness of the data breach, but also sees the wider picture and knows what else is broken.

“Policing is far too important to be left to the police alone. Some of this is also the responsibility of all of us, to support the policing project.”

[ PSNI data breach may undermine ability to combat dissidents, DUP leader says ]

Last week, in conversation with Irish Times Northern Editor Freya McClements, I spoke about this at the community arts festival Féile Derry: you cannot have new policing with broken politics, with an unanswered past, with MI5 still part of the present, and with only lukewarm support from inside the republican community.

This is the wider context and wider responsibility that Sheridan is pointing to – what he means when he says policing is not just about the police.

The past is still a political battle, and bricks from the conflict years are still being thrown in the many glasshouses found in this place

He is taking us back to September 1999, to the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, and to the comments made by its chairman, Conservative politician Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and now Chancellor of the University of Oxford: “We believe that it is possible to find a policing solution to the policing problem, but only if you take the politics out of policing. That is a key part of this report – the depoliticisation of policing.”

That report coincided with political negotiations that would eventually open a path to the formation of a Stormont Executive as part of the implementation of the Belfast Agreement.

Today, that Executive is once again lost in some purgatory, and the euphoria and the hope of that period of 1998-1999 has been lost as many have become complacent about peace.

I was at that Patten news conference in 1999, and there in April 2002 at the graduation ceremony when the first of the PSNI recruits stepped out into that new beginning.

But taking politics out of anything in Northern Ireland is always easier said than done.

The past is still a political battle, and bricks from the conflict years are still being thrown in the many glasshouses found in this place. Policing is still a political argument. Stormont is not working.

All of this gets lost under the headlines of the data breach, but all of it is part of the policing problem; a failure of leadership – a broken politics playing into everything, making peace a struggle, turning young people away from the PSNI.

The dissident threat is different now; not the same as it was in the late 1990s, when those who split from the mainstream IRA left with all the know-how and capability to continue.

We saw that in the bombs in Moira, Portadown and Banbridge in 1998 – so similar to the actions of the IRA that it took time to work out that this was indeed a new threat from those who had just left.

This conversation should not wait until the next police officer is killed. It is too late then. It should start now

Omagh is what actually stopped them, and, today, there is the challenge to stop them again.

That is a political and community challenge, as much as it is a policing task.

The Irish Government needs to be part of that conversation, along with political parties across the island and all of those who know the pulse of their communities and who have influence.

The Policing Board also needs to wake up and to be part of this.

This conversation should not wait until the next police officer is killed. It is too late then. It should start now: a dialogue that is about getting the dissidents to stop and about achieving meaningful support for policing.

Former chief constables Ronnie Flanagan and Hugh Orde took the difficult first steps that enabled that transition from the RUC to the PSNI.

[ Explainer: What we know about PSNI’s ‘major data breach’ ]

They were leaders at the right time.

The learning since is that you will build nothing new until you address the old.

I found a line in a Police Federation speech that dates back to October 1999, that reads: “The key to Catholic recruitment is peace: not a change of name.”

It is both. The dissidents have not allowed that peace, and that threat is part of what still needs to be addressed.

It is easy – and the data breach has made it easier – to kick policing, but we are fooling ourselves if we think this is the only problem.

Either it all works, or it all fails, and that takes us back to that comment from Peter Sheridan, that it is not just about the police.

· Brian Rowan is a journalist, former BBC security editor and author of several books on the peace process