Despite reforms, Catholic representation in the PSNI is falling—raising questions about identity, loyalty, and the future of policing in a divided society
TOWARDS the close of negotiations towards the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, all political parties accepted that there was one big problem they could not resolve together.
They had come up with a system of power sharing government, a list-based electoral system, cross border bodies, a schedule for the release of paramilitary prisoners and the decommissioning of weapons (theoretically) but there was one problem even harder than these. This was the reform of policing.
The service was 93 per cent Protestant in a society that was divided on sectarian lines, in practically every field of activity, from sport, religion, political party affiliation even residential areas. Only seven per cent of the force was made up of Catholics. And the shape of Northern Ireland at that time was such that there were few other communities large enough to affect the balance.
The job of reforming the police was handed over to a commission led by Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong.
The Patten Commission decided to change the name of the RUC to the PSNI, the Police Service of Northern Ireland and to enforce increased recruitment of Catholics through quotas. Until the force was 30 per cent Catholic, all intake would be 50 per cent Catholic.
And this worked until it didn’t work.
That is to say that Catholics joined up until more than 30 per cent of the force was Catholic. Then the quota system was dropped but recruitment started to fall off so that Catholic membership is now below 30 per cent again.
Of course, society has changed since the Patten reforms were introduced. The population isn’t just as starkly dichotomous as it was then, though it is still chronically divided. There are more people of foreign origin, or whose parents are of foreign origin.
And the violent context in which the RUC had become so Protestant and thereby daunting for Catholics to deal with has largely disappeared.
But two questions remain. Why do so few Catholics want to join? And does it matter if the percentage of the service which is Catholic falls further?
We also have to consider what Patten meant when he used the terms Catholic and Protestant. He was not talking about religious belief but of ethnicity and the national self-identification that tends to go with it.
People who were born into historically Catholic families tend to identify as Irish and those born in historically Protestant families tend to identify as British. Irish identifying Catholics may be - invariably are - good citizens but they don’t have the patriotic affiliation with British sovereignty that Protestant unionists have. When it comes to the slice of national identity that includes sentiment and a sense of history, theirs attaches to Ireland more than to Britain.
What their experience shows is that it is possible to be a good citizen, committed to obeying the law and paying fair taxes without being passionately concerned to identify with the State, its symbols and rituals, which are integral to policing culture.
Even through the Troubles period from 1969 to about 2009 - depending on how you define it - Catholics took jobs in the Northern Ireland civil service, in local government, in public services like hospitals and the post office. The one thing they were least inclined to do, except in very small numbers, was enter the police.
And it had seemed logical then to infer that the reason for this aversion to participating in policing was to do with the danger of being shot by the IRA, to which they would have felt more exposed since they lived in the areas from which the IRA operated.
But what if that wasn’t a full explanation of their disaffection? What if that disaffection continues and the blip in Catholic recruitment after the Patten report, was a periodic enthusiasm which can be expected to wane?
What if participating in policing requires that little extra love of the state over and above normal pragmatic citizenship, a devotion rather than a mere commitment?
And since Protestant and Catholic communities still tend to self segregate, there is a danger that Catholic disaffection with the police will increase as the proportion of Protestant membership increases.
The sectarianising of the service will be self generating.
Which is a problem for everyone; for a police service detached from a major community and for that community itself; for unionists who might be nostalgic for a Protestant state and therefore blinded to how a Protestant police service might itself constitute evidence that the shared state idea simply doesn’t work.
We already have a situation in which the majority of young people are from the Catholic community Catholic and the men and women policing them are mostly Protestant.
If I were a republican I would be content that Catholics don’t want to police Northern Ireland.
If I were a unionist I would fear that in a decade from now, facing a referendum on a united Ireland, one of the strongest arguments I might face against continued partition, is that, at its sharp end, a divided Northern Ireland is irretrievably, institutionally of one community.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
