I admit: we owe a huge debt to the Sinn Fein leadership for manoeuvring their organisation so successfully behind the peace process. Let me also admit that they got no assistance from this column (not that that made any difference either way). But I did pour scorn on what they were doing, and I was wrong.
With that out of the way, might we not ask ourselves: Are we not plumbing the depths of the utterly ludicrous in asking Sinn Fein to give its approval to the new Northern Ireland Police Service? Is the approval of Maurice Hayes and Monsignor Denis Faul, men of towering integrity and unimpeachable moral authority, not enough to be getting on with?
Join the Garda
For what is the nature of the police force which Sinn Fein will endorse? Since the party does not encourage young nationalists in the Republic to join the Garda Siochana, we may take it that that force falls short of the mark. So what will meet Sinn Fein requirements - other, that is, than equipping the Provi RA with nice state-supplied balaclavas, and nice state-supplied baseball bats?
We have already had a couple of tests to show how strong the Sinn Fein stomach is in these matters. Its leaders, to judge from their refusal to call on people to assist the investigation into the Omagh bombing, would rather the bombers go free than see them apprehended by the RUC. This is the basic benchmark by which we may test the attitude of these people: and we might ask, what rules have they and we got in common if they prefer mass murderers to go free than be processed by the imperfect organisation called the Royal Ulster Constabulary?
They have, of course, some experience of mass murder. Omagh was not unique or pioneering in any sense. The people who lead Sinn Fein-IRA were prominent in the organisation at the time of the Birmingham bombings, which killed 21 people. The authors of that atrocity have never been brought to justice. ???????????ein Ard Comhairle. Should we be surprised that an organisation which can effortlessly close ranks behind the butchers of Birmingham instinctively places the security of the fellow-bombers of Omagh before the rights of the bereaved of either place?
Nor law nor civic duty come before the commands of the Sinn Fein tribe, which claim moral and legal pre-eminence over its members. Sinn Fein lies outside civic society. Its rules are self-generated, discrete, immune to judgment or interference from outside. Sinn Fein in this sense is not a political movement but a sect, whose every instinct is not to support the institutions of the state - any state - except on terms which make it impossible for others so to subscribe.
Omagh atrocity
What kind of Garda Siochana would it be which would win the whole-hearted approval of Sinn Fein, and which young Shinners would be encouraged to join? Would it be a police force in any recognisable sense? And if Sinn Fein culturally is incapable of assisting even An Garda Siochana in its investigations of the Omagh atrocity, is it humanly possible to create a police force in Northern Ireland to which the Shinners would name the Omagh bombers? Or is that rather like asking a mullah to have a bath with a pig?
This is before we even consider that Sinn Fein wants full disclosure from everyone in Derry on Bloody Sunday to the Saville Enquiry, except from the IRA - a position so bizarrely self-contradictory that it makes my head swim. In this hallucinatory hall of mirrors, our temples throbbing in disbelief, we receive sanctimonious little homilies on what constitutes a proper police force, not from the heroes of the RUC who have held the line for decades, but from an organisation which has an illegal standing army that has never stopped recruiting or resupplying itself and which, like the Swiss, has stored vast arsenals against some future requirement (and which - you never know - might include bumping a few of the new police off).
And we are asking this organisation to give us its permission for the formation of a police service for Northern Ireland? Does the Consistory of Cardinals seek the advice of the ladies from the Shangri La Massage Parlour and Escort Service on sexual morality? And do we not know in our hearts that it is not possible for a police force to receive the imprimatur of the Army Council of the IRA and remain a police force?
Cross-community
Paramilitary approval aside, there is no such thing as a cross-community police force anywhere in the world. Police forces are drawn from the lower middle classes, not from the rich, not from the very poor. This is true everywhere, for all sorts of reasons; and it will never be the case that police forces are welcome in very poor areas, be they the Bronx, Kilbarrack or Ballymurphy. The poor do not consent to be policed: they accept that it is so.
Moroever, police forces are seldom if ever consciously created to cope with the peculiar demands of a divided society. The Palestine police, officered by ex-RIC men, was one example. Police forces consciously recruited to be representative of a divided society will inevitably reflect the divisions. Instead of a non-politicised police force, and in the absence of an officer corps of neutral outsiders, as the Irish were in Palestine, you will have a deeply political and partisan one.
In other words, the longer the RUC survives as it is, the better.