Opinion

Tom Kelly: PSNI should not be asked to police the past and the present

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly is an Irish News columnist with a background in politics and public relations. He is also a former member of the Policing Board.

PSNI chief constable George Hamilton is to retire in June. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire
PSNI chief constable George Hamilton is to retire in June. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire PSNI chief constable George Hamilton is to retire in June. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire

Peter Barry is a name probably unfamiliar to younger readers but to an older generation, Barry (of the famous Barry’s Tea) was well known throughout Northern Ireland as the Fine Gael foreign minister who helped create the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

So hated was Barry by unionists when they resigned their seats in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement that they fielded paper candidates against themselves named Peter Barry.

During the infamous midnight invasion of the Monaghan village of Clontibret by loyalists in 1986, attacking an unmanned garda station and painting graffiti (unknown to them) on the walls of a Protestant church, Peter Robinson, the sole arrestee, is reported to have initially given his name as Peter Barry.

Barry, a Corkman, was one of the most famous nationalist figures on the island of Ireland in the mid-80s.

Unionists misunderstood Barry in very much the same way the DUP are currently making a similar misjudgement of the current Fine Gael foreign minister, Simon Coveney. But despite his talents Barry could get it wrong too.

Amid the myriad of paper scraps and notes I hold from that time, I came across a very robust handwritten response to Peter Barry from the then SDLP justice spokesperson (and my boss) Seamus Mallon on the issue of policing.

Following a meeting with secretary of state Tom King, Barry said the Anglo Irish Agreement had secured the conditions of support for the RUC. Mallon quickly and eloquently disabused Barry of that notion. Mallon was right, such conditions would not be right for another fourteen years with the implementation of the Patten reforms.

So concerned that Northern Ireland policing should have whole-scale reform, Mallon went on to fiercely and successfully challenge attempts by Peter Mandelson to water down the policing bill to appease David Trimble.

A history lesson lost on Mrs May, who is currently finding out to her cost that appeasing unionism is like trying to draw water from an unfathomable well.

Mallon warned: ‘Without broad consent for policing arrangements the whole political process risks being undermined’. That was 1999. We are now twenty years on. Policing is widely accepted throughout Northern Ireland. For six years as a policing board member I played a small part in bedding down those reforms.

Of course, legacy issues still haunt the PSNI. It is inescapable. But successive chief constables - Orde, Baggott and Hamilton - all have said it is not possible for the PSNI with their current resources to police both the past and the present whilst at the same time shaping a service for the future. In the mind of this writer, not only is it not possible but it’s not desirable either. Asking the PSNI to undertake this role is anchoring the police service to the past forever.

The recent revelations about the failure of the PSNI to hand over certain files to the Police Ombudsman over the murders at Sean Graham Bookmakers almost beggars belief. And saying ‘sorry’ just doesn’t cut it. The Police Ombudsman, Dr Michael Maguire, is right to ask for the Department of Justice to commission an independent review into the methods police use to disclose information. It is unlikely to have been an ‘intentional’ error but if it is, then the families of victims need to know the truth.

But as for others - butt out.

In recent years policing has for far too long become the dog in the legacy manger.

Due process, investigations, reviews, courts, oversight and inquiries have all been able to track, expose and make public the extent of collusion or illegality by security force personnel during the Troubles but little has been done to hold to account the paramilitaries, their godfathers and propagandists for the murders of over three thousand civilians and injury to nearly 50,000 casualties. Truth recovery and justice is not a one way street.

If the Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald really believes such issues and reconciliation are above the constitutional question then she has a funny way of expressing it. She clumsily and foolishly took herself into a policing debate without thinking. It would seem, however well intentioned, she frequently and fluently speaks without fully engaging her brain. Her recent comments on the PSNI were not only ill-founded but have the potential to undermine years of carefully crafted consensus on policing. Subsequent comments by a Sinn Féin MLA on confidence in the PSNI would appear to be even more careless.

Sinn Féin needs to realise legacy is a two way mirror.