Lanigan’s Ball recruitment undermines policing progress

BY PEADAR WHELAN

And I stepped out,
and I stepped in again

Learning to dance
for Lanigan’s Ball

THE PSNI is now employing hundreds of former RUC members who resigned from the force and benefited from the Patton redundancy plan. But the PSNI claims it cannot provide details of how many former RUC members it now employs. Nor can it say how many it has employed in the past ten years since its formation, which is curious given its access to police and employment records.
The PSNI has, though, been able to say it uses the services of 399 staff recruited through an employment agency. Of these, 163 are working in highly sensitive areas, including the Crime Operations Department, which investigates serious crime and handles intelligence material.                                       Most of these employees are thought to be former RUC members from the more than 4,000 retired during the past 10 years with enhanced lump sum payments and pensions.
Sinn Féin members on the Policing Board raised the issue at a private meeting of the board on Thursday 1st December in Belfast.                                                                                      Speaking to An Phoblacht, the party’s spokesperson on Justice and Policing, Gerry Kelly, went as far as to say that the practice of re-employing former RUC members was undermining the progress in policing that had been made up to now, particularly in the area of 50/50 recruitment policy to redress unionist dominance and increase the number of nationalists recruited into the police.
Robert McClenaghan, whose grandfather was killed in the 1971 McGurk’s Bar bombing in which 15 people died, sees it as “a deliberate subversion of the process of change within the PSNI and an example of the old guard not having gone away”.
According to Gerry Kelly, the jobs filled by the former RUC members are described as temporary positions and not therefore subject to the 50/50 recruitment rule.
Kelly also expressed the party’s concerns with the accountability of these former officers.
“There is a concern about accountability. If people are being brought in, what status are they being brought in under?
“They don’t seem to be civilians. If they are working for an agency, does that mean to say that they are still accountable, first of all to the Chief Constable but, most importantly, to the Policing Board and also the Police Ombudsman?”
It has also emerged that one of the most senior former RUC members to take advantage of the Patten redundancy package, which cost £500million in total, has been re-employed and is working on legacy cases dealing with the past, including requests from investigators working for the Police Ombudsman’s office, an office he has been accused of attacking!
Former acting Assistant Chief Constable Mark McDowell retired earlier this year with a possible lump sum figure of around £500,000.                                                           One campaigner on legacy issues told An Phoblacht:
“The ink was hardly dry on his redundancy cheque before Mark McDowell was back working in his old job.
“This is serious enough but if you find out that a lot of former RUC members are working on legacy cases, cases that they may have worked on in the past, then questions about independence, contamination and accountability are raised.
“How can anyone trust the quality of investigations in these circumstances?”
McDowell also made headlines last year after he wrote a letter to Police Ombudsman Al Hutchinson and called on him not to use the word ‘collusion’ in his report into the 1972 Claudy bombings. He protested about the proposed use of the term collusion. Nine people were killed in the attack in the County Derry village when three car-bombs exploded without warning. The report said the police had colluded with the Catholic Church to cover up the suspected role of a priest in the attacks. McDowell told the Ombudsman the PSNI took great issue with the use of the term collusion and criticised the way in which it had been used by the previous Police Ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan – something, he claimed, had undermined the credibility of RUC Special Branch.
The former Chief Executive of the Ombudsman’s office, Sam Pollock, described McDowell’s letter as “a very significant letter and I would have described it as outrageous. It was an attack on the independence of the office as well as a very inappropriate attack on the previous ombudsman.”
Gerry Kelly has called on the Audit Office to respond with the utmost urgency.
“What we already know is very worrying. Unfortunately, the reality may well be worse but it is important that we deal with issue as quickly as possible.”