Patten meets mixed response
by Laura Friel
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One thing is for certain, the RUC is finished.
Gerry Adams
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This week, nationalists and republicans throughout Ireland start the process of examining and discussing the Patten Report on policing in the Six Counties.
The issue of policing is vital to the success of the Agreement and of the peace process. One thing is certain, however. Nationalists and republicans will never accept the RUC, not reformed, repackaged, renamed, nor presented in any other guise. These people's daily experience of the RUC is one of routine harassment and ignorance at best and of murder at worst. If the RUC and Ronnie Flanagan are to remain in situ, the confidence among nationalists that is vital if real change is to come about will simply not exist. The task ahead of us is to decide if this is a fresh start.
Sinn Féin greeted the long-anticipated report with reserve last Thursday, 9 September, pointing out that nothing less than disbandment was acceptable for a force as fundamentally flawed and with as atrocious a record as the RUC. The party, however, will study his lengthy proposals and consult with members before making a definitive decision on the report itself.
``The future of policing is inextricably linked with the fate of the Good Friday Agreement,'' said Gerry Adams, outlining Sinn Féin's response. ``It is clear that a new policing service, democratically accountable and reflecting the society which it seeks to police, is essential if the Agreement is to be implemented in full and political progress achieved.
``Nationalists and republicans need to be convinced that the Patten Report is indeed a `new beginning'. A repackaged RUC will not attract any measure of support.
``But one thing is for certain - the RUC is finished.''
The party would take its time and look carefully before making a decision, said Bairbre de Brún. ``We want to establish whether or not what is being proposed is effectively the creation of a new police service,'' said Martin McGuinness, ``because if we create a new police service, then we have effectively disbanded the RUC.''
Whatever about the republican response, Patten had barely presented his recipe for policing in the Six Counties when David Trimble declared the Commission's handiwork ``the shoddiest he had seen in 30 years''.
Furthermore, Trimble assured us, when it comes to shoddiness he had plenty of experience. Not that anyone watching Trimble's performance since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement needs any reminding of that. Proposals to change the name and emblems of the RUC were a ``gratuitous insult'', said Trimble. A betrayal, added the Police Federation, of the widows of murdered officers.
It's not often that a former British cabinet minister and colonial governor is treated with such dismissive discourtesy. This has been ``the most difficult and gruelling job I have ever done'', admitted Patten. The Commission's report was exactly what the Agreement had ordered, he said.
In marked contrast, the SDLP welcomed the report, which Seamus Mallon said was a ``watershed in the history of policing in the north of Ireland''. It had the ``potential to create for the first time a truly representative and accountable police service'', he felt.
The SDLP pledged to work in every way to achieve a new policing dispensation. ``As part of that encouragement we will call on nationalists, especially the young, to seek careers in the police,'' said Mallon.
Somewhere out back, the DUP were sharpening their knives. Ian Paisley was the first to plunge the dagger. Patten, said Paisley, had presided over the commission and done the work of `Mother Church'.
Peter Robinson's knife was out, but Trimble, not Patten, was to feel the edge, as he blamed those parties who signed up to the accord. The RUC was ``being emasculated and destroyed with the support of those who signed the Belfast Agreement,'' said Robinson.
Deputy leader of the UUP, John Taylor, had both Trimble and Patten in his sights. Pouring oil on the troubled waters of Trimble's leadership, Taylor announced, in the wake of the Patten Report, he was quitting the Mitchell Review. Paisley had already played the sectarian card, it was left to Taylor to wheel out the racist response.
To put it bluntly, Patten is not only a taig, he's also Irish, at least according to John Taylor's criteria. Describing the report as ``outrageous, a total surrender of all our Britishness,'' Taylor concluded ``but of course Mr Patten's roots come from Galway, so I wasn't surprised that was the kind of report he'd finally bring out.''
Meanwhile, an astute Ronnie Flanagan is already unveiling his counter-Patten strategy. Leaving the temper tantrums to David Trimble, the RUC Chief Constable appeared calm and reasonable. The RUC ``stood ready for change'', pledged Flanagan. There were many changes his force would welcome and had been eager and willing to introduce, he said.
``There are many of those recommendations that are simply good for policing,'' continued Flanagan, BUT ``I have an overarching responsibility to protect the public from the threat of terrorist violence and if that's ignored, and I don't think for a second that it can be ignored, then I would not be part of any arrangements.'' So Flanagan expects to be the final implementation gainsayer.
Within 24 hours of the report's publication, Flanagan was warning of a ``new'' terrorist threat. ``Dissident republicans now outnumber IRA,'' dutifully reported Alan Murray of the Sunday Life. ``Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan has warned that dissident IRA elements are planning a major attack in the border area, to destroy George Mitchell's attempts to salvage the Good Friday Agreement.''
The briefing to senior RUC officers on Friday indicating that IRA dissidents now outnumber the Provisional IRA was based on Special Branch assessments, we are told. The same Special Branch which Patten recommends incorporating into the CID, whose covert operations carte blanche is to be curtailed and whose notorious interrogation centres are to be closed down.
Is it any wonder that republicans are reluctant to embrace a report which leaves the door open for Flanagan and his ilk to stay in office and influence.
Media Reaction to Patten
``Betrayed'', ran the Newsletter's front page banner headline across a photograph of a Union Jack-draped coffin carried by uniformed RUC officers. ``They still stand proud and salute their colleagues and families who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against terrorism,'' ran the front page, but inside the message was more restrained. ``What we are obliged to do is to ask that the recommendations be considered at length and their merits and shortcomings weighed carefully in the balance, `` said the editorial.
If the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement had been honoured (by republicans), argues the Newsletter, many of Patten's recommendations would be more acceptable to unionists. As things stand, reorganisation seems premature. ``Worse still, as politicians begin to get their teeth into the real meat of the document, fears are rising that the proposed changes will... open up a tradesman's entrance through which some of society's most dubious characters could pass.''
For the Irish News, it's ``A new beginning'', with Chris Patten ``in the hot seat''. ``Chris Patten and his team were faced with an immense task, and they had to proceed in the full knowledge that their deliberations would have a central impact on a delicately balanced political process. The Patten Commission has responded with a comprehensive, authoritative and challenging document, which deserves to be studied in detail by every responsible individual.'' It is left to columnist Brian Feeney to strike the more cautious note.
``The central structure that Patten proposes is the worm at the heart of the apple,'' says Feeney, ``If everything else in the structure depends on it, it hands unionists a veto. Already, they've tied it to the formation of an executive and decommissioning, and will raise it with Mitchell as an obstacle to the implementation of the agreement. So far unionists are concentrating their fire on what to nationalists seem contrived objections to issues like flags and emblems..their real objection is to nationalists and republicans running `their' police.''
d then we have the 26-County revisionists. The torture of detainees, summary execution and collusion with loyalist death squads are forgotten, as is the northern nationalist experience of decades of RUC harassment, as Ruth Dudley Edwards poses the question ``Why inflict pointless wounds on Ulster's Protestants?''
``For 30 years the RUC has stopped Northern Ireland from descending into anarchy and through its vigilance and intelligence work has stopped innumerable republican and loyalists bullets and bombs from hitting targets on the British mainland and in the Republic of Ireland,'' wrote Dudley Edwards in the London Independent.
The courage and suffering of these `decent Ulster policemen' has been ignored while their tormentors have been rewarded. The ``ludicrous aspiration'' of providing a police force which would be acceptable to the whole community, argued Dudley Edwards, ``is at the heart of the report's deficiencies.''
``In Britain, society does not aspire to have a police force that is acceptable to anarchists, Yardies and Triads. So why should the RUC be made acceptable to the IRA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and all the other fascists who hate the forces of law and order?'' Here we go again, Ruth, air brushing northern nationalists, Catholics, even the SDLP out of the picture. Or is everyone who criticises the RUC to be dismissed as fascists, or the dupe of fascists? Stalker? Stevens? Param Cumaraswamy? Diane Hamill?
Meanwhile Eoghan Harris of the Sunday Times considered the RUC's record of ``courage under fire''.
``When I was a boy, belting out the ballad of Sean South in Cork pubs, the IRA were the heroes and the RUC were the fascists. Today I would look at it the other way round, `` admits Harris. He continues, ``When northern nationalists wonder why I think the way I do, then in turn I wonder what's wrong with them. Why do they not see the RUC as by and large a decent body of men and women as many of us in the republic do?''
From a more sensible contribution to the debate, Anne Cadwallader in Ireland on Sunday acknowledged Patten as emerging ``from the RUC minefield with credit.'' ``Implicit in every line of the Patten report, in every recommendation, the message was unavoidable. The RUC was, and is, a force that demands change of the most radical nature.''
It isn't disbandment, said Cadwallader, but it's pretty close. ``Whatever the merits of the recommendations they have made, the sheer scope and depth of their work shows they did, after all, conclude something was very rotten in the state of the RUC.''
The amount of money available to pay off members of the RUC who wish to go, is telling in itself. A staggering £148 million in the first year. RUC officers can opt for the early retirement plan at 50 years of age with those under 50 but with five years in the force also eligible. Jim McDowell of the Sunday World suggests that over 40 per cent would leave right away if the package was right. Cadwallader puts the figure at closer to 800.
The Patten report has many sound recommendations, but it all depends on how the British government deals with them, writes Johnny Connolly of The Sunday Business Post. ``If the recommendations.. are ever implemented, they have the potential to produce one of the most democratically accountable and effective policing processes in the world. But that is a big `if `.
In sharp contrast to the unionist line that the only thing wrong with the RUC is lack of Catholic recruitment resulting from republican intimidation, the report acknowledges that ``failings in public order policing in the 1960's were partly responsible for the `troubles' of the following 30 years and for deepening nationalist estrangement from the RUC.''
Connolly criticises the reports failure to ban the use of plastic bullets. ``It justifies the retention of plastic bullets largely on the basis that they are preferable to live rounds. It is far from certain that the police would feel as free to use live rounds in riot situations as they tend to do with plastic bullets.''
Connolly reminds us that during the Orange marching season of 1996 ``in a clearly sectarian use of this deadly weapon, 5,340 plastic rounds were fired at nationalists while 662 were fired at unionists.''The failure of the report to recommend that police officers should be precluded from membership of the Orange Order is also criticised.
One point which ``significantly undermines the report'', says Connolly, ``is its reluctance to envisage former political prisoners in the new police force. While Connolly is positive about many of the recommendations, he's less optimistic about them ever being implemented. ``The hysterical reaction of the unionists..at best suggests a serious failure to understand the most modest aspirations of the Good Friday Agreement and at worst, a complete repudiation of its basic principles.''
``It is important not to allow the howl of rage from unionism at the loss of it's private army,'' writes Tom McGurk, ``to disguise the immensity and importance of the Patten Report.'' But in his enthusiasm for Patten, McGurk gets carried away. ``Last Thursday, the last surviving element of the one party partitioned state that was Northern Ireland disappeared in 175 swingeing recommendations.''
In sharp contrast to Brian Feeney, who sees any attempt to link the issue of decommissioning to the implementation of the Patten Report as a stalling tactic of unionism, McGurk embraces the idea: ``The Patten report is nothing less than the official disarming of legally armed unionism and the IRA must now bite the bullet and recognise that if all these recommendations are carried through their arms have to disappear as well.''
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