Current Issues - 2005

July 2006

Not as Normal as it Seems - PoliceBeat Editorial

Since the early 70 ’s Police Officers in Northern Ireland have received an additional payment -the Northern Ireland Special Duty Allowance.It was awarded as recognition that policing the Province was not comparable to policing in the rest of the United Kingdom.The dangers to officers did not stop with the end of their daily duty.The nature of the crime and the scenes of murder and devastation caused by terrorism were harrowing and took their toll on officers physically and mentally.

The Northern Ireland Office is desperate to believe and to persuade this Federation that officers now work within a normal society,one which has shed its violent past.

This optimistic view is premature and has encouraged the NIO to argue that the case for the Northern Ireland Allowance has now gone.

The Federation freely accepts that the security situation has improved.There is no doubt that police officers have benefited from a reduction in the level of threat of murder and violence but it is disingenuous not to acknowledge that a potentially lethal threat still remains.For obvious reasons information on threats,if not quite suppressed,is not disseminated beyond the “need to know basis ”.

Policing in Northern Ireland remains different from the rest of the UK because officers remain at risk from personal murderous attack on or off duty,from mainstream Loyalists on one side to dissident Republicans on the other,who have made three serious attempts to murder police officers in Armagh,Lurgan and Belfast in the last seven months.

The arrest of ten alleged dissidents in June suggests that the threat is still very real and would be foolish to dismiss.Secondly,Sinn Fein, have yet to give their support to policing.Their hostile attitude prevents the police enjoying full community support and allows a poisoned atmosphere to prevail in which officers are regularly attacked by mobs.Not that Loyalist paramilitaries are blameless either,since they remain a distinct problem by being fully armed and,as was demonstrated last September, willing to attack police with gunfire and bombs in direct public confrontation.

The PSNI has also to depend upon its own resources.Mutual aid of the kind available to adjoining constabulary forces in Britain is not available so the burden of dealing with serious public disorder falls upon a finite number of officers and increasingly so,as army units head for Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is not the time to abolish or even salami- slice the Special Duty Allowance.Policing in Northern Ireland has still a long way to go before it can be safely judged to be the same as throughout the rest of the United Kingdom.