Current Issues - 1999

November 1999

Patten Panned

This Federation has never been more united than when faced with the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland. The headlines have, of course, concentrated on the hurt caused by the proposal that the name of the RUC and the associated symbols should be simply abandoned.

The damage caused by this recommendation alone has caused tremendous emotional upset to serving officers and especially to the widows and bereaved of the wider police family. While it is true that our officers were killed and injured trying to uphold the rule of law, the significance of the name has been its importance in providing a sense of identity. This comradeship and esprit de corps has enabled officers to endure and survive over 30 years of the worst civil terrorism that any western country has had to face. Little wonder the name had come to mean so much.

We will not give up the name and increasingly commentators as diverse as Monsignor Denis Faul and the Belfast Telegraph have expressed the view that the change of name was insensitive and unjustified.

But it is more than the name change which is at stake. We have told Government about other structural flaws in the Commission's Report. Far from separating policing and politics the Patten Report will put politicians right at the centre of the policing through the composition of the Police Board in a misconceived arrangement which will be replicated at divisional level through the inclusion of politicians according to the D'Hondt principle.

The core weakness of Patten's report is that it fails to take sufficient account of the reality of the security situation. although the Report borrows freely from our own 1994 Fundamental Review it ignores the very precise criteria which set out the three different scenarios which would determine the level of security and therefore the nature of policing required.

On the day of the launch of the Report the Federation identified the main flaws in the recommendations. We have seen nothing in the debate since to suggest that our first analysis was incorrect and much to confirm our suspicions that the Report is indeed shoddy because of its unrealistic view of the current and future state of Northern Ireland. In the absence of a utopian standard of peace we must rely on the scenarios identified by the Chief Constable. There is much to commend in the Patten Report - we should not forget how many of our own recommendations are embodied in it - but too many of the key recommendations can only be described as a dangerous nonsense.