Editorial: ​A fitting tribute to those excellent police forces, the RUC and PSNI

Morning View

​The Presbyterian moderator paid a welcome tribute to the RUC this weekend.

​Rev Dr Sam Mawhinney said it was a “great honour” to preach at the Royal Ulster Constabulary GC Day Service, which was held at the St Philip and St James Parish Church in Holywood.

Dr Mawhinney said it was “an opportunity to remember and demonstrate our deep appreciation and great respect for police officers past and present”.

Dr Mawhinney did not speak about the trashing of the reputation of the RUC, and it would not have been an ideal forum to do so, because it might appear to detract from the many ways, mostly in civic and peacetime duties, in which the force served this society well in its first 80 years, including the violent years after partition. But the distortion of the RUC’s history has been so rapid, subtly encouraged across nationalist Ireland including by influential politicians in Dublin, based on the idea that police gave systemic help to loyalists. that it must be challenged in other forums.

The facts of the Troubles are easily understood yet many people who should be defending the police’s record either don’t know those facts or are too anxious about nationalist sensibilities to cite them. But not only was there, patently, very little collusion, the opposite is obviously true: that the security forces knew well the identities of the IRA murderers who wreaked such havoc on the province, yet loyalists got almost no information. Of 1,100 loyalist murders only a few dozen were republican terrorists. Most of the killings were nakedly sectarian.

As the RUC is demonised, the PSNI is constrained. It is subject to so many disciplinary probes and findings that its confidence to act is undermined. The outrageous treatment of the Ormeau Road officers showed that. What was the ombudsman’s role in that scandal? Meanwhile, there is a push to bring back sectarian 50:50 recruitment.