Until this week Alex Attwood, the SDLP representative for West Belfast, might have merited just a footnote in any history of modern Ireland. But with his party leadership's decision to agree to the implementation of the Patten reforms of policing he achieved one of the major political coups in Northern politics.

Attwood is the architect of the policing plan that has earned the support of the Government, the Dail Opposition, the Catholic bishops and his own party. It may also, in the coming weeks, be supported by the Ulster Unionist Party and the Rev Ian Paisley's DUP. Sinn Fein is against it.

The deal was worked out with senior officials from Iveagh House and Stormont Castle at the Weston Park Hotel talks in England last month.

Attwood, whose paternal antecedents came to Ireland from Cornwall, is as selfeffacing as politicians come. He has been a solicitor in west Belfast for most of his working life.

He has had to endure the collapse of the SDLP's electoral support there in the face of a rampant Sinn Fein with its huge, wealthy infrastructure.

Sinn Fein has a brand new, three-storey office complex on the Falls Road and several other "constituency" offices staffed by dozens. Attwood has two offices paid from his modest salary as a member of the Stormont legislative Assembly.

On Wednesday he called a press briefing at a city-centre hotel in Belfast to outline the gains the SDLP had made on policing, dismissed by Sinn Fein as "half a loaf". Three reporters attended. Far less important press "events" organised by Sinn Fein were attended by dozens of media people.

He delineated 33 major reforms of policing practice in Northern Ireland. These cut to the heart of policing practice. The new Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) - if it comes about - would have layers of accountability and management control that far surpass the equivalent structures in the Republic.

Attwood is, in his quiet fashion, passionately dedicated to the reform of policing. When The Irish Times spoke to him three years ago at the outset of the inquiry into the RUC by Chris Patten, he recounted details of a case that had come into his office the previous day concerning the RUC and a family living in Andersonstown, in the heart of Catholic west Belfast.

A respectable family was at home on a Saturday evening watching television. Without any warning their front door was knocked in and heavily armed RUC officers in body armour burst in and demanded the identification of their eldest son. The young man was unceremoniously dragged outside into the garden in the rain.

The senior RUC officer then contacted his station and said the house had been secured and the subject apprehended and asked what to do next. He was told to deliver a notice to the young man that he was to appear as a witness in a case concerning an ordinary road traffic accident. The RUC squad passed the information on and left in embarrassment, making their apologies. They had evidently thought they were there to apprehend a "terrorist" suspect.

The behaviour of the new police service in Northern Ireland would be subject to a rigorous amount of "accountability" structures. There would be an Ombudsman with over 70 staff, which is seeking enlargement, institutionalised human rights oaths, and practices and cross-community boards that would oversee every aspect of policing.

Overarching all this is the Policing Board, representative of the political and religious breakdown of Northern Ireland society. And there would be 29 District Police Partnership Boards (DPPBs) that would include local political and community representatives. The local PSNI divisional commanders would be accountable to these boards.

The critical response of the nationalist community in Northern Ireland to the policing implementation plan will become apparent in the coming months. Already almost 3,000 Catholics have applied to join the new force. Intake of the first 270 recruits would be 50-50 Catholic and Protestant and should begin soon.

When it was announced in June that there were 2,745 Catholics among the 7,843 people seeking to join the new police service, Sinn Fein immediately dismissed the significance of this, saying "no republicans or nationalists" were among these 2,745.

Sinn Fein continued on this line when it yesterday issued its detailed document rejecting and denouncing the policing implementation plan. The Sinn Fein document accurately states that there is no guarantee when the new PSNI will achieve religious balance reflecting the make-up of the Northern Ireland state, around 40 per cent Catholic to 60 per cent Protestant.

WITH the slow level of intake even the 50-50 recruitment would mean it would take many years before this parity of representation was achieved, if ever. But Northern Ireland has powerful antidiscrimination laws, and it would be illegal as well as morally questionable if a policy of 100 per cent Catholic intake were to be pursued.

This week the SDLP sought assurances from Sinn Fein that it would not interfere or abuse Catholics who sought to join the new police service.

Sinn Fein made little response to this. But in an unusual twist on Wednesday someone in the Sinn Fein offices in west Belfast accidentally faxed the agenda of a meeting on policing to the newsroom of Ulster Television. The document contained directions on how the party would conduct a campaign of agitation aimed at "secondary schools" and the "GAA". The document exuded an air of coercion.

One point absent from Sinn Fein's document on policing, under the heading "Recruitment Arrangements", was that the very small Catholic representation in the RUC was almost entirely caused, not by discrimination, but by the fact that killing Catholic members of the IRA was a key feature of its terrorist campaign.

One of the first RUC men shot dead in north Belfast by the IRA was Mr Dermot Hurley, a 50-year-old Catholic, fluent Irish speaker and father of five, from Co Wicklow. Within a short time of the "Troubles" starting in the early 1970s no Catholic police officer could live in peace in any area that might be termed "nationalist" for fear of assassination by the IRA.

If the new political and policing dispensation is to work in the North there will have to be acceptance by Sinn Fein and the IRA that Catholics have a right to serve in a police force without their lives and those of their families being endangered.