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9 September 1999 Edition

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Foreboding before Patten

As we prepare to digest the Patten Report into the RUC, there will, for many, be an eerie sense of foreboding. Nationalists have been here before.

Back in 1922, the Barrington Report into the massacre of Catholics in Cushendun, North Antrim and Desertmartin, County Derry, found the A and B Specials were out of control. But after consultation with James Craig, the British Prime Minister, in a statement to the House of Commons, completely exonerated the force.

In more recent memory, 30 years ago the Cameron Committee and the Hunt and Scarman reports into RUC actions proposed radical changes to the RUC, yet none came.

These investigations never led to real change because the policing and political objectives of the Orange State and the RUC were one and the same; it is a unionist police force for a unionist state.

We saw the B Specials go only to return as the Ulster Defence Regiment, which in turn was renamed the Royal Irish Regiment.

Perhaps the career of Ulster Unionist MP Ken Maginnis best demonstrates how the culture and politics of the unionist state and the RUC, a culture that is at the core of the systematic repression and political suppression of nationalism, go hand in hand.

A member of the B Specials, he went on to become a major in the UDR before joining the Ulster Unionist Party and is now that party's `security spokesperson'.

The Hunt Report, published in October 1969 following the collaboration of heavily armed B Specials with loyalists in the Belfast pogroms and in attacks on Catholics in Dungannon and Armagh city, called for the disbanding of the Specials and for the RUC to be routinely unarmed. It was ignored.

Subsequent inquiries - Stevens, Stalker and Sampson - all faltered under the weight of RUC self-preservation and the lack of political will for change on the part of unionism and successive British governments.

Thus the onus is on the British. Will we have a new policing service that is democratic and accountable, or will it just be more of the same?


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