The setting this week for a public meeting just outside Armagh lacked crisp modernity: damp woodland surroundings; a low tunnel of an entrance, writes Fionnuala O Connor
Since this was an attempt to advertise and explain the official fightback against organised crime, a stark office block might have seemed a more obvious choice than the Navan Centre, downbeat name for the "heritage centre" built mostly underground beside what legend has it is the prehistoric fort of the Red Branch Knights, Emain Macha - or Navan Fort, in modern mouths.
On the other hand nobody suggests that organised crime is new, and the life-sized figure in the entrance of a "prehistoric warrior" brandishing teeth and spear had a degree of tongue-in-cheek aptness. Threatening, but by the look of him stuffed with wads of paper, he might have been a symbol of what the joint forces of the law, North and South, hope to do to fuel launderers, smugglers and assorted others. But the overwhelming impression from the evening was of a society in transition. It is not easy to chart or even to observe, except on public occasions, the slow and painful emergence of nationalist support for a policing service still mid-evolution from a quasi-military and largely Protestant force. This was a glimpse of what that support entails in practice.
The SDLP made a leap of faith and joined the central Policing Board and district partnerships, which are meant to hold the service to account. Sinn Féin hangs back, waiting for the final deal with the DUP and the share-out of ministerial posts for policing and justice. In the meantime, as police are given to pointing out wherever the lofty concept of impartial policing is discussed, there is fury and dismay at every mugging and burglary. (Some dismay came very close to home this week in Belfast when a senior officer, off-duty, was apparently mugged and had his mobile phone stolen as he left a bar near his own station.)
Most public snapshots of Northern policing show riots or the aftermath of violence. When an officer is asked about a particularly shocking crime, like the killing of Ballymena teenager Michael McIlveen, both the Police Service and the SDLP must cross their fingers that the response is well-judged. They rarely are.
Ballymena SDLP councillor Declan O'Loan is husband of the Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan and could be described as one of the most participationist and least traditionally nationalist in the party. He criticised district commander Terry Shevlin's assessment that sectarian violence in the town was "not a one-way affair" and that he feared republican retaliation for the killing. Mr O'Loan pointed out that Ballymena's nationalists had been the targets of most attacks and the reaction of young Catholic friends of the dead boy had been dignified and anti-violence - though he did not doubt dissident republican readiness to manipulate reaction. Careful and deliberate, it was the kind of response easily mocked by those satisfied to write off present-day policing without offering an alternative.
Armagh council is evenly balanced between unionist and nationalist, but most questions at the Navan Centre came from the SDLP. Dull presentations portrayed police, customs and Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) working with their counterparts across the Border and in Britain; and their successes to date. The tone was cautious: no names of those investigated or convicted, nor many details. Alan McQuillan, a former RUC officer who is deputy director of the ARA, came closest to a vivid description of the agency's preferred mode of operation.
His message to the suspected criminal was: "If I can't lock you up, I'll try and take your money." A slight young SDLP councillor asked the first question: what mechanisms did the ARA have to respect and enshrine human rights? A youthful colleague wondered what happened if they froze the assets of an innocent person. Mr McQuillan said they worked through the courts and there was provision for compensation.
Several older members of the party worried about the efficacy of powers to seize large new homes from those without visible earnings, and how they might be reassured about the origin of the diesel they bought. They were told in different ways by Mr McQuillan, the senior customs officer present and the head of the police "economic crime unit" that nobody could give absolute assurance that the fuel they bought was honest, and that the only way to ensure more effective action was to give information. The small audience fell back into silence.
Outside the centre, police stopped drivers and searched car-boots, a reminder that much of the North's organised crime, like that across the Border, comes packaged with paramilitary menace as well as creative accountancy. Many of today's appearances by ministers and the like are almost showily free of security. But here was the past beneath the thinnest veneer, like Emain Macha sharing its grassy mound with the Navan Centre's cafe.