When you hear that Simon Byrne, Chief Constable of the PSNI, has resigned, you may be moved to murmur “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one’. Forget it. Simon is walking away with three months’ salary – around £64,000 – and must have saved a bob or two during his time with the PSNI, on a salary of some £240,000 annually. It’s when you hear what contributed to his moving on that you begin to bite the lower lip and ponder.
It all goes back to the Ormeau Road two years ago, when the PSNI interrupted those gathered for a commemoration of the innocent people killed in Sean Graham’s betting shop in 1992. Showing remarkable stupidity, the PSNI officers intervened and arrested a man who’d been wounded in that barbarous 1992 attack. When the two PSNi men involved were disciplined, there were howls of outrage in a number of areas, not least we’re told in the ranks of the PSNI. So the case went to court and the judge, God bless him, ruled the two PSNI men shouldn’t have been disciplined (no, Virginia, I’m not making this up). When the recent leaks of information about thousands of PSNI people, not to mention the laptop with more information which was stolen from a PSNI man’s car – when that’s added to the grievous wrong done to the two arresting PSNI personnel, and the Chief Constable is judged to be surplus to requirements, you know things have turned pretty damn sour.
Leading the charge against Simon was Jeffrey Donaldson and the DUP, although admittedly there were others that weren’t mad about what had happened either. What strikes me is that we have a police force/service set up over 25 years ago with the sunny assurance of 50% of recruitment drawn from the Catholic/nationalist populationl and here we are today, floundering and stumbling with top secret data and how to approach nationalist victims of the Troubles.
To cap it all, the Catholics in the PSNI who belong to the Catholic Police Guild of North(east)ern Ireland have been asking their chairperson, Superintendent Gerry Murray, some questions. The headline question appears to have been “Should we take our ‘protection weapons’ to Mass?” That question makes me fearful as to how serious these Guild guys are. I mean, should I bring my gun to Mass – here’s a song in there somewhere. Would they leave it in their seat when they went up to receive Communion? Would the local priest be asking questions about that bulge in the cop’s pants? And if you were in a situation where you thought your life might be at risk, would you need to ask a Superintendent about whether you needed a weapon on Sunday mornings?
Truth to tell, I find the account of that Catholic Police Guild meeting a touch surreal. In my experience, most young men like them would need a machine gun trained on them before you’d get them out to Mass in the first place.
Very good jude
Thank you, James…
No odds about Simon, the RUC/PSNI is an absolute gravy train. Here’s a thought, what about a Catholic Chief Constable? Even better, one with no Special Branch or RUC past?
Or the Justice ministry being brought under d’Hondt. All reports of the arrest on the Ormeau Road that still fester were that the two policemen involved were fresh out of school with no senior monitor. They radioed to headquarters for advice and were told to wait until the commemoration was over before moving in. Seemingly neither they nor their headquarters knew a commemoration was taking place. One rookie was from the Free State. A nest of vipers.
Quite sinister overtones to this whole thing. I remember there was a lot of reaction to the police scuffling with family members of the victims of a massacre, particularly when there was RUC collusion with the murderers. Handcuffing and arresting a survivor of the massacre harked back to the days when the RUC routinely behaved like this when dealing with nationalists. Particularly relevant was the odious behaviour of the police standing back whilst loyalist paramilitaries took over the streets of some unfortunate town only a week before they got tough with the victims families.
Now the story has morphed into “young, inexperienced, badly led, unsupported, victimised, etc, etc,” cops who were sacrificed by the PSNI leadership because of Sinn Fein.
Every Tom, Dick and Trevor is on the radio talking about what a awful time these cops have had and it’s all themmuns fault. No mention of the awful time had by victims who were pushed, threatened, arrested and handcuffed. Not for strutting around in balaclavas, intimidating people, but for remembering a massacre of innocent civilians by sectarian killers aided and abetted by the police.
The one sided reporting of this ‘crisis’ and the willingness of certain politicians to jump on the bandwagon suggests that there may perhaps be coup underway to replace the Police leadership. Reaction has been focused almost entirely on the hurt experienced by two men, trusted with carrying guns and with the apparent right to arrest and handcuff members of the public but unable to recognise a memorial service, despite observing it and listening to a survivor recount his experience.
I would have thought, in my naivety, that the standard of policing on the ground should be the subject under consideration.
The BBC presented a list of possible replacements for the chief constable. Almost all of them have a long history in the RUC.
I feel safer already.