Policing and Social Conflict in Northern Ireland
by Aogán Mulcahy and Graham Ellison
From: Policing and Society Vol.11, No.2, 2001. (Published by Oxford University Press)
The Royal Ulster Constabulary
In January 1922 the new Unionist Minister for Home Affairs in the Northern Ireland government appointed a fifteen-member committee to investigate the establishment of a new police force for Northern Ireland. The Commission proposed that this force be called the 'Ulster Constabulary' (King George V granted permission for the force to include 'Royal' in the title in April 1922). The embryonic RUC was organised upon lines similar to that of the RIC, and drew heavily on ex-RIC personnel. Like its predecessor it was to remain heavily centralised and under direct political control, while officers were given wide executive powers through specially enacted 'emergency' legislation. Similarly, it was devised primarily as a paramilitary force. All officers were 'barracked', routinely armed, and could avail of more powerful firearms and armoured cars if required. The RUC was to become a predominantly Protestant force, with the percentage of Catholic (there are no figures available for nationalist) recruits stabilising at less than 10 per cent of the total complement. Catholics have never joined the RUC in large numbers, while the number of nationalists in the force, then as now, could probably be counted in single figures.
The RUC, like the RIC - and arguably police institutions everywhere - was geared to the maintenance of a specific kind of social and political order. Two factors problematised this even further in Northern Ireland. First, the Northern Irish state was created in the absence of a social-democratic consensus, with one-third of the population (Nationalists) exhibiting little normative loyalty to either the state or its institutions. Second, the maintenance of Unionist hegemony depended upon a range of discriminatory and exclusionist measures being directed towards the Catholic/nationalist minority. These encompassed all aspects of social, cultural, political and economic life in Northern Ireland. The role of the RUC was twofold. First, at the behest of its political masters in Stormont it 'policed' nationalist political dissent: either real (as with the IRA campaigns in the 1920s and from 1956-62) or imagined (as with the constant surveillance of Catholics deemed to harbour 'political' - i.e. nationalist - views. Second, the RUC played a major role in policing the symbolic world of nationalism to deny expression to minority culture. Just as the fair days, wakes and the popular pastimes of the lower-orders were 'policed' in 19th century England and Ireland, in Northern Ireland St Patrick's Day parades, displays of the Irish Tricolour or other 'nationalist' symbols, were often enough to invoke RUC action of one form or another.
The Civil Rights Campaign
While Northern Ireland eventually settled into a kind of enforced stability,
this masked a simmering resentment from within the nationalist community
that was never far from the surface. This was to change in the late 1960s
with the emergence of what became the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement
(NICRM), comprised of students, left-wing radicals, liberals and nationalist
politicians. Post War expansion of the Welfare State, and in particular
access to higher education, had produced a new generation of young upwardly
mobile Catholics who, encouraged by the contemporary emphasis on social-democratic
ideals of equal citizenship, began to focus their attention on the Northern
Irish state and its institutions. Emulating the non-violent tactics of the
US civil rights activists, they began to agitate for equality and fair treatment
(including an end to electoral gerrymandering and the extension of the franchise).
However, for a range of reasons - including a lack of political will, and
a fear of alienating the Protestant working-class - the Unionist government
refused to countenance any reform whatsoever, preferring to see the NICRM
as a 'terrorist' conspiracy to undermine the state. It deployed the RUC
and Ulster Special Constabulary (USC or 'B Specials', an exclusively Protestant
militia) against the civil rights campaigners. |
