A report by the Police Authority of Northern Ireland in 1996 into public confidence in the Royal Ulster Constabulary was “little short of propaganda” for the RUC, according to a Department of Foreign Affairs review.
The police authority carried out a detailed public survey in September 1996 just weeks after the RUC chief constable Hugh Annesley had reversed an earlier ban on the Orange Order marching from Drumcree through Garvaghy Road in Portadown.
Published late in September, a report by the authority on the survey’s findings said that 90 per cent of Protestants and 60 per cent of Catholics, when asked about ordinary policing duties, had “confidence in the ability of the RUC to provide a service”.
However, Department of Foreign Affairs official Eamonn McKee said the figures offered a far less optimistic picture when they were broken down, since 40 per cent of Catholics had no confidence in the RUC, while 36 per cent more only had “some confidence”.
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“Those opting for ‘some confidence’ may include those Catholics reluctant to declare on the doorstep to [the Police Authority] that they had little, or no confidence in the RUC,” he told superiors.
“To interpret ‘some confidence’ in the survey as ‘confidence’ in the report and to conclude therefore that 60 per cent of Catholics expressed confidence in the RUC’s ordinary policing is at best open to question and at worst misleading,” he wrote.
Equally, the Foreign Affairs analysis argued that the survey hid the damage that had been done to the RUC’s reputation among Protestants in the wake of the decision firstly, to ban the Orange Order’s Drumcree march ban, and then to let it through.
“A more accurate conclusion is that Drumcree dealt a major blow to confidence in the RUC with both communities,” wrote Mr McKee in Foreign Affairs’ Security Section in December 1996.
The Police Authority report voiced the body’s extreme concern “that the RUC’s role in enforcing public order legislation appears to have had such a damaging effect on Catholic perceptions” of the force.
However, Mr McKee was scathing about the report’s judgment: “It beggars belief that [it] could declare that the parades issue is the convincing source of the RUC’s difficulties and not their aggressive and sectarian tactics during and after Drumcree.”
The authority report said two-thirds of Catholics believed that plastic bullets were used more frequently against their community, while three-quarters of Protestants thought that they were used equally.
“What [the Police Authority] must mean is that it reflects the accuracy of Catholic perceptions, not Protestant ones,” said Mr McKee, since 90 per cent of the 6,000 rounds were fired on Republican crowd disturbances.
The authority’s presentation of the arguments surrounding baton rounds were “little short of propaganda” and had failed “wilfully to address the real issues underlying the sectarian use of plastic bullets”, Mr McKee wrote.
The report’s “studied neutrality” was not intended to reflect Catholic attitudes accurately, he complained: “To do so would require a range of words – too harsh, excessive, needlessly aggressive, brutal, criminal – not found in the [authority’s] lexicon”.
The authority argued that it was “grossly unfair” to blame the RUC for the drop in Catholic confidence levels in the force following the months of disturbances surrounding the Drumcree marches.
The RUC, it argued, was in “an impossible position” and the summer disorder “had cruelly dashed” hopes that had existed less than a year before that the RUC stood “on the verge of a new future”.
However, Mr McKee thought otherwise: “[The authority] appears to have started with its desired conclusions and worked backwards to interpret the finding of the survey to suit themselves.
“In so obviously, if not abjectly, serving the RUC, the authority simply reinforces those who dismiss it as an agent of propaganda. Indeed, there is no other conclusion to be drawn from its misleading interpretation of the results,” he wrote.
