How Sinn Fein captured Northern Ireland’s police force

Policing any part of the United Kingdom is a difficult enough task these days. Policing the part of it where the national security threat is highest and the personal details of all officers and staff are now likely in the hands of terrorists after an embarrassing data breach is a whole other story. 

We are talking about Northern Ireland, where this week the Chief Constable inexplicably flip-flopped over a court decision that said the PSNI unlawfully disciplined two junior officers. At first Simon Byrne said he would accept the court’s decision, only to later this week say he would launch an appeal. But his volte face is merely the culmination of a series of preventable calamities that in any other jurisdiction would see senior leaders picking up their P45s.  

The court case – in the form of a judicial review – over the discipling of two officers is notable. It seems to be an official corroboration of views long held by Unionists that the senior leadership of the PSNI is more concerned with appeasing Sinn Fein than standing up for the welfare of its own front line officers and effectively enforcing the law. 

The case began in 2021. When Covid restrictions were in place, two patrolling officers came across a commemoration by republicans in a nationalist area of Belfast, who had gathered to remember a massacre by Loyalist terrorists in February 1992 outside the Sean Graham bookmakers.  

The officers had apparently not been briefed that the event was taking place and the crowd reacted to their presence in a hostile manner. This resulted in one person being temporarily arrested for disorderly conduct. 

How the PSNI handled this incident has now been starkly revealed in court proceedings. After extraordinary and relentless pressure from Sinn Fein, the top brass agreed to suspend one of the officers while transferring the other to different duties. A high court judge, in a judicial review of the incident, found that senior police managers did this to appease Sinn Fein, who they feared would withdraw consent for policing. The judge ruled, therefore, that PSNI had unlawfully disciplined these two officers. 

If you’re wondering how on earth a public law enforcement agency could effectively be blackmailed by a political party, composed in part of former terrorists, you’ve not been paying attention to the bizarre and morally bankrupt trade offs and compromises that keep Northern Ireland’s semi-skimmed peace from curdling. There can’t be many places in the world where the political oversight body for policing has a subcommittee on police performance chaired by a convicted republican terrorist bomber who spent his formative years trying to violently overthrow the state.

The price exacted by Sinn Fein for participating in normal politics and endorsing the rule of law has been very high indeed. Public institutions, particularly those created after the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement with a law enforcement purpose have been shaped, and in some cases hollowed out, by a preoccupation with keeping republicans inside the tent and not outside trying to burn it down.   

That harvest is now delivering bitter fruit. The year before the PSNI threw two officers under the bus for the sake of the ‘peace process’ over 1,000 mourners turned out in Belfast for the funeral of Bobby Storey, one of the IRA’s senior members. Coronavirus restrictions were still in place. The cortege included the senior leadership of Sinn Fein north and south of the border and took place at a time when ordinary citizens could only be buried with a handful of mourners present. Indeed, eight other bereaved families were denied access to the cemetery Storey was buried in. Despite clear prior knowledge that a mass funeral would take place, there was no overt police presence. And despite overwhelming evidence that this spectacle contravened Covid regulations in place at the time, Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service declined to press charges, partly on the ludicrous basis that the rules were too complicated to understand.  

The chief constable in place at the time of the Sean Graham incident is the same person who was in charge during the Storey funeral. He is the same person accountable for the catastrophic data security breaches that have most likely put the personal data of the entirety of the PSNI workforce into the hands of dissident republican terrorists. He is Chief Constable Simon Byrne and if this was anywhere else in the British isles he’d not only be considering his position he’d have the door held wide open for him by ministers. 

So what is to be done? If Byrne won’t go, which would be the honourable course of action, then the Secretary of State should consider radical reform of the police governance structures which bake political interference into policing. The policing board which provides oversight is dominated by politicians. This has to be changed. While political representation is useful, the board needs a majority of carefully chosen lay professionals and a strong independent chair. This would change the dynamics away from pandering to sectarian bases and towards supporting impartial and effective law enforcement without fear or favour. 

Northern Ireland is still plagued by polycriminals who have moved from terrorism to drug dealing on both sides of its fractured society and operate in ghettos not much changed since the Troubles. Getting these people off the streets and into prison would do more to restore confidence in policing than the pious platitudes of the most human rights compliant police service in Europe. 

And what of the workforce? The Police Federation, which represents the most junior ranks in the PSNI, registered its disbelief and fury at the behaviour of Byrne, who said he fully respected the court’s decision that he acted unlawfully against officers on Monday – only to say an appeal was in play on Thursday. Would you pull on a uniform in the morning knowing your personal data might be in the hands of terrorists and then go to work (after checking your car for booby traps) for an organisation that sacrifices junior cops for political expediency?  

The PSNI was meant to be a new beginning for policing in Northern Ireland that had the trust of the whole community. It is hard to see how this contract can be maintained when constables have no confidence in their senior leadership.  

Yet the decent law-abiding citizens of the Province need and deserve an effective police service. That is not one that Simon Byrne or his political masters are equipped to deliver. He and they need to go.