Backing policing a high-risk move
Yesterday's decision by the SDLP to participate in Northern Ireland's Policing Board and urge young Catholics to join the new service is a historic step for Northern nationalism
by Jim Cusack
From The Irish Times - 21 st August 2001
In the opening of its New Beginning to Policing document yesterday, the SDLP leadership said policing has been at the heart of the "political fault line" in Northern society since 1920.
"No issue has been more difficult, more divisive and more controversial in the history of the North of Ireland," the statement said.
With the support of the Taoiseach and the Catholic hierarchy, the SDLP has taken a high risk political step - from a nationalist perspective - of supporting policing structures in Northern Ireland.
It was a historic departure set in the former unionist bastion of the Stormont Parliament building. It also showed that after years of turbulent, painstakingly slow progress, the Northern "peace process" is producing real evidence of the new "dispensation".
In the party's history it was as significant as its decision not to join the power-sharing assembly of 1982 despite pressure to do so from the Republic's government and hierarchy. That decision prevented the party from being sucked into a permanent minority status in a new Stormont.
There is now power-sharing; there are major human rights and equality structures in the North outlawing discrimination, and nationalists are patently enjoying better standards of living.
It has been a long road since John Hume set out on the path of change through civil rights agitation to constitutional politics in Derry in the late 1960s when decades of unionist discrimination had contributed to Catholic alienation, unemployment and poverty.
In recent years the SDLP has suffered isolation and suffered electoral setbacks, losing its position as the majority nationalist party.
Yesterday's decision is, primarily, a vital nationalist endorsement of the creation of an impartial police force to impose law and order in Northern Ireland.
So long as this does not exist republican and loyalist paramilitaries will fill the vacuum. Murder, punishment-beatings, possession and training in firearms and explosives is the permanent alternative to the creation and support of a new police force.
The SDLP was able to say yesterday that after 2 1/2 years of work it had managed to prise key concessions from the British government. It also said it had caused the retraction of the amendments to the Patten Report which had been inserted by the previous Secretary of State, Mr Peter Mandelson, to assuage unionists.
The acting Deputy First Minister, Seamus Mallon - in his usual pithy manner - pointed out that the SDLP had won the reversal of the pro-unionist amendments inserted into the Police Bill 2000 by Mr Mandelson. The legislation, Mr Mallon said, had been "Mandelised". That had now been fixed. It had been "deMandelised".
Mr Mallon pointed out that within a relatively short period of the appointment of the Policing Board - sans Sinn Féin - the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland will direct the changes to the name, flag and badge. The new Oversight Commissioner will recommend changes to the current policing legislation.The SDLP also stated that it had achieved agreement from the British government to amend the current policing legislation to deal with key SDLP concerns: the strengthening of the powers of inquiry of the Policing Board; an enhanced role for the Policing Board - which will enjoy powers formerly resting with the Chief Constable and the Secretary of State; new powers for the Police Ombudsman to access documents and investigate police policies and practices; commitment to the secondment of gardai to the new police service; strengthened commitment to human rights; greater focus on community policing; phasing out of the full-time reserve; and expansion of the part-time reserve ahead of Patten's schedule.
The SDLP also says that being on the Policing Board will allow them to campaign more effectively for a prohibition on plastic bullets. |
