Memory is still the reason why Sinn Fein is boycotting the PSNI

Sinn Féin's continued opposition - at times demonisation - of Northern Ireland's new police service is difficult to understand…

Sinn Féin's continued opposition - at times demonisation - of Northern Ireland's new police service is difficult to understand, writes Denis Bradley

Seamus Deane's weird and wonderful novel Reading in the Dark contains many insights to the relationship between the nationalist community and the RUC. One chapter tells of an accident in which a young boy is trapped under the wheel of a lorry. Two policemen arrive and try to free the trapped boy. One of them becomes ill.

Deane writes: "For months, I kept seeing the lorry reversing, and Rory Hannaway's arm going out as he was wound under. Someone told me that one of the policemen had vomited on the other side of the lorry. I felt the vertigo again on hearing this and, with it, pity for the man. But this seemed wrong; everyone hated the police, told us to stay away from them, that they were a bad lot."

The event is dated June 1948.

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The book is full of references to a hate-filled relationship between the RUC and the nationalist people. Those hated most were the small number of Catholics who joined the force. It wasn't the baton charge in Derry's Duke Street in 1968 or the Belfast pogroms that sprouted these feelings. They were already well rooted in the memory long before the Troubles.

But Deane's book is subtle enough to sometimes penetrate the hatred and reveal other feelings of confusion and guilt. Those feelings arose out of a need for policing and a knowledge of individuals within the force who evoked admiration and respect.

Nationalists wanted and needed a police service then and even more so now, but they are finding it hard to get past the memories.

Sinn Féin knows those memories. The journey that many in the nationalist community of the North have to make to embrace and become the police is as long and transforming as a human journey can be. Many have made that journey and have moved past the memory, but they are aware that at times of tension and dispute the memories can be used as a weapon to undermine and embarrass them. They are sensible enough to recognise that only when Sinn Féin makes the journey will those memories finally lose their power.

Some days I am sympathetic and tolerant of Sinn Féin's attitude to policing and some days I would want to strangle them. It is not their alternative viewpoint that I take issue with so much as the methods they have adopted to promote their case. They are both boycotting and demonising the police. They refuse to speak to or be in the same room as a police officer. They picket and placard events and walls with slogans such as "Human Rights Abusers", "Disband Special Branch". It was precisely those methods that were used so often and so destructively in the past against Sinn Féin.

I am also finding it more difficult to find an ordinary Sinn Féin member who knows or understands the substance or the detail of their party's opposition to the new Police Service of Northern Ireland. They talk in generalities and slogans, using words such as transparency, accountability, power and human rights. The last time I saw the leadership articulate their arguments was in this paper sometime last February. It was an article by Gerry Kelly, their spokesman on policing.

Gerry's main objection was that the Patten recommendations had not been implemented in full and he summarised this under four headings. He described the new service as unrepresentative, a cold house for nationalists and republicans. Patten, of course, recognised this reality and laid out a rationale and a methodology to solve it.

There is now a bias in PSNI towards Catholic recruits. As an example, when the service is recruiting 100 new officers and 1,000 Protestants and 100 Catholics apply, the rules demand that 50 Catholics and 50 Protestants are appointed. Protestants find this hard to stomach but to be fair to most of them I find them only too willing to accept it to get more Catholics into the police more quickly.

He also criticises the SDLP for having to meet British ministers about political difficulties pertaining to police. I have been in and out of the Northern Ireland Office quite a lot during the last nine months and I meet as many Sinn Féin delegations coming and going as I do SDLP. As outlined in Patten, control and responsibility for policing would lie between the Policing Board, the government and the Chief Constable. The only variable recommended was that the government should devolve power to the NI Executive as soon as possible. That is on the cards for about a year from now and the only obstacle I can see to it being realised is Sinn Féin's non-participation.

GERRY Kelly's third objection should be the simplest but is, in fact, the most complex. It is about human rights. Sinn Féin believes every officer, old and new alike, should swear an oath to human rights. I believe an oath is in itself important but inadequate. I believe it is a massive cultural and attitudinal change that will take years of hard work and commitment to put human rights at the heart of an organisation like policing. Up to recently every police force in the world would have seen human rights as the business of some other organisation, any organisation but police. Their job was to catch criminals and that was the end of it.

The final and, of course, the big issue in nationalist's eyes is Special Branch, or as Gerry Kelly refers to them The Untouchables. Untouchables they may have been but not any more. They have already been greatly reduced in size. On top of that they are being investigated and reshaped from three different sources at the one time. The most thorough investigation is the one that has been instigated and controlled by the Policing Board.

But the reality is that this issue has moved past Special Branch and the argument is now focused on the question of who will control and staff intelligence-gathering. The irony is that every political party in the North, including Sinn Féin, accepts the need to have an intelligence-gathering unit. The suspicion is that the British government wants it controlled by MI5 and that is the explanation for all the shenanigans going on lately, including Castlereagh.

Like most people I don't know who or what to believe but it is a difficult call for Sinn Féin. It is difficult for them to support the argument that intelligence should be in the hands of Perfidious Albion, but it is also difficult for them to have an input and authority over a local intelligence-gathering agency. That would irrevocably turns poacher into gamekeeper.

These are the technical arguments put forward by Sinn Féin. Whatever about their political and intellectual weaknesses or strengths they are not the reason for Sinn Féin's boycott and demonising. Memory is still the reason and Sinn Féin has used it to put distance between themselves and the SDLP. They can continue to do that through to the Assembly elections of next May, or they can make the transforming leap in October/November of this year after the two governments agree to minor legislative change.

THE former option is, on the surface, attractive but it is not as great a vote catcher as it would have been a short time ago.

Young nationalists from committed republican areas are applying to join the PSNI. Not yet in great but certainly in increasing numbers. They have heard of the memory and they have seen the television pictures but it is not their memory and they have more current memories to challenge the past. They see an SDLP team of politicians tenaciously argue and debate a new beginning to police.

They see a Police Ombudsman's office that is central to the new beginning and which has already proven itself as robust and fearless and fair. They see and hear police acknowledge and apologise for the wrongdoings of the past and hear them challenging nationalists to make the future different. They see a Policing Board containing all the elements and tensions of Northern political life and which, on the whole, gets the business done.

But, ironically perhaps, Sinn Féin itself has the greatest influence. They have witnessed other memories being challenged by Sinn Féin. Republicans swore they would never take seats in the Dáil. But they have. Stormont would never, ever, be the seat of power: but it is. "Not an ounce, not a bullet" would be a fundamental dogma but two acts of decommissioning has changed that.

Young people see and judge all of those actions and they know that their community needs a police service, and in areas of high unemployment policing is an attractive and well-paid job.

Memory is powerful. It has the ability to act as a dead weight or as a lever. It may pull on our feelings in an exaggerated or distorted manner, or it may inform our actions with new commitment and accuracy as to what is needed for the future.

Denis Bradley is vice-chairman of the Policing Board