Critical engagement

Front matter

CRITICAL

Irish republicanism, memory politics and policing

KEVIN HEARTY

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Figures and Tables

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1

This chapter traces the historical development of the changing relationship between Irish republicans and the various police forces that have upheld the rule of law in the North of Ireland. Accepting that there is an inherent link between state legitimacy and police legitimacy, it traces how changing relations with policing mirrored changing relations with the state. Views of policing are, after all, shaped within broader ‘value systems’ that include perceptions of state institutions and the political system that decrees the rule of law that the police force enforces.' Building on that observation, this chapter will critically examine how the Irish republican position on the legitimacy of policing evolved in tandem with a changing political world view of the Northern Ireland state. Many of the issues later examined in greater detail are initially established herein; an understanding of that examination relies on grasping the trajectory of a wider changing relationship identified in this chapter. Rather than being an immediate or exhaustive exploration of those issues, this chapter sets out a framework that draws on the development of divided-society policing in Northern Ireland and the Sinn Féin process of buying into the post-GFA Northern Ireland state in order to contextualise the arguments made later in this book.

‘Planters and natives’

To truly comprehend the fraught historical relationship between Irish republicanism and policing, it is necessary to begin with the seventeenth-century British colonial policy of plantation: that of dispossessing and displacing the

1 Albrecht and Green, 1977.

hostile Irish Catholic native and redistributing their land to imported loyal Protestants of English and Scottish extraction. Ross notes that early narratives about plantation were constructed along obvious fault lines, notably a narrative of civilisation and advancement, and a competing narrative of displacement and dispossession.’ Consequently, competing ethno-nationalist narratives have across generations corresponded to diametrically opposed frameworks. For Unionist descendants of the ‘planter’ it is one of providential delivery from the repeated threat of Catholic rebellion, while for Nationalist descendants of the ‘native’ it has been a redemptive one to atone for centuries of heroic defeats.* These recurring motifs of repelled assaults while under siege and avenging historical defeats created narrative friction that persists today.* The privileging of the ‘planter’ over the ‘native’ heightened religious and political tension, giving subsequent conflict an unmistakeable ethno-nationalist flavour. Although often erroneously portrayed in simple sectarian terms, political violence in the six counties was ethno-nationalist in nature; religion is the most pointed to fault line of division (particularly by external observers subscribing to the British state narrative) even though competing claims to self-determination, competing national allegiances and competing narratives of persecution also underpinned disharmony. O’Leary and McGarry argue that plantation created a context whereby three different nationalities (Irish, Scottish and English), three different religions (Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican) and three different cultures collided in the ‘ethnic frontier’ of Ulster.° Within time this division manifested itself around competing national (Irish and British) and religious (Catholic and Protestant) identities, setting in motion a trend that would see conflict-era Northern Ireland become ‘a site of twin nationbuilding failures’ and a ‘site of two competing sovereignty claims, each of which is morally problematic and legally contestable’.° However, while they recognise the colonial origins of the conflict, they have also rejected the colonial framing of later conflict. This is premised on a ‘moral statute of limitations’ that prevents later generations being held responsible for the conquests of their ancestors.’ Of course, while the descendants of the original ‘planters’ cannot be charged with creating the systems of inequality they inherited, it is not irrational either to argue that they did little to address the inequality inherent in these systems when they were gifted control of the Northern Ireland state.

* McDonagh, 1983.

$ O’Leary and McGarry, 1993, 83. é McGarry and O'Leary, 1995, 348. 7 McGarry and O’Leary, 1996.

If anything, they moved to entrench their inherited dominance more deeply. O’Leary and McGarry argue further that the doctrines of Irish Nationalism and Ulster Unionism that defined later political disagreement and shaped competing national identities, were not even conceived at the time of the Ulster plantation.* In rejecting a colonial framing of later conflict, they have offered some thoughtful insights into other interpretations, including one that sees the conflict as one of competing nationalities fought between Ireland and Britain in the Northern ‘ethnic frontier’ that ended in failed state-building projects for both the British and Irish.” Notwithstanding this, insider researchers like Mac Ionnrachtaigh, and critical leftists like Scraton, have sympathy with neo-colonial interpretations of the conflict." This is, of course, an entirely legitimate academic position to adopt and it is not one that this author seeks to challenge.

On one level, the plantation policy was reflective of the macro-level infighting among contenders to British imperial power. On another level, it had particular strategic relevance in Ulster because it was the last centre of Irish resistance to English rule.” Deliberately privileging the ‘planter’ created the context whereby:

A relation of mutual dependence developed between Britain, who needed Protestant support to secure its own control, and Protestants, who needed British support to maintain their position. To hold Ireland for the Crown, Protestants had to be accorded power in Ireland; thus British dominance over Ireland was further reflected in Protestant dominance within Ireland.”

The heavy concentration of the plantation policy in Ulster meant that, by 1705, 93 per cent of land in eight of the nine Ulster counties was in ‘planter’ hands.” The fact that the dominant ‘planter’ was instructed to remain detached from the disloyal ‘native’ population inculcated a siege mentality that set the two peoples and their respective world-views on a collision course. This siege mentality, along with the rhetorical myth of the dangerous ‘native’, became the basis on which the ‘planter’ would arm themselves to protect, at all cost, the preponderance of their interests over those of the dispossessed ‘native’.

8 O'Leary and McGarry, 1993, 55. ? McGarry and O'Leary, 1995, 352. 10 Mac Ionnrachtaigh, 2013.

This arming of the ‘planter’ was accompanied by the systematic use of the rule of law to formally privilege the settler over the indigenous. It was within this environment that the ‘planter’, and subsequent generations of their descendants, would find affinity with and maintain ownership over militias and police forces tasked with upholding laws that enshrined their privilege over the ‘native’ into the established order.

In addition to enforcing ‘planter’ privilege, these early-style militias also became the bulwark of a drastic state response to even the merest stirrings of rebellion in Ireland. Dermot Walsh observes that police forces in Ireland were ‘always armed and always ready to respond to any hint of rebellion’ by the disaffected ‘native’ population.'* Differentiating the early development of policing in Ireland from that in Britain, Jessie Blackbourn further notes:

Policing in Ireland was used to crack down on political dissent, principally to prevent any attempt by nationalists in Ireland to secede from the Union. Policing was therefore used to retain Ireland’s status as a colony of Britain. In contrast, there was no such violent threat in Britain; the police were engaged to investigate and prevent ordinary crime.’*

By the nineteenth century, the British government would invoke what would later transpire to be their principal modus operandi of using the guise of ‘special disturbances’ to saturate certain areas with military and police.” In consequence, sporadic episodes of Fenian and Young Irelander violence were followed by expansive emergency provisions that effectively penalised the ‘native’ population in its entirety.

The Act of Union 1800 statutorily entrenched Britain’s colonial domain over Ireland, and, with this, further sustained ‘planter’ privilege. The political lexicon in Ireland duly altered as the terms ‘Unionist’ and ‘Nationalist’ came to supplant ‘planter’ and ‘native’. When the Union came under threat, so too did Protestant interests. Unionist dominance in the North East of the country was sustained by holding political and economic clout in this highly industrialised region — a region decidedly more advanced than the rest of the country."* Unionists in Ulster also had an affinity with one another that they did not have with those of ‘planter’ stock elsewhere.” Thus it was in Ulster that Unionists exhibited the greatest willingness to arm themselves in defence of the Union.

As early as the mid-nineteenth century, Unionists could muster 125,000 men in Ulster willing to defend their interests.” This would intensify during the ‘Home Rule crisis’ of the early twentieth century, when Unionist mobilisation reached its zenith with the signing of the Ulster Covenant and establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) militia. The ‘Home Rule crisis’ temporarily abetted when war broke out on the continent — that was until a group of rebels launched an attack against the British presence in Ireland during Easter 1916. Although a spectacular military failure, the event would spark a renewal of Nationalist fervour. Sinn Féin stormed to electoral success in the 1918 general election. Refusing to participate in a British parliament, they convened the revolutionary Dail Eireann as the legitimate government of Ireland in anticipation of an intensive guerrilla campaign by the IRA. The increase in such violence in the years immediately preceding partition witnessed renewed Unionist mobilisation. The UVF were resurrected in 1919, due partly to the fact that Unionists in Ulster believed the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and British Army were incapable of protecting Protestant Ulster from the levels of IRA violence seen elsewhere.” Acutely aware of the imperative to protect their self-interests, Unionists in Ulster sought to take as much security and political power away from Dublin Castle and silo it in the more favourable climes of Belfast, where it was better placed for such a purpose.” A somewhat paradoxical relationship existed between Unionists in Ulster and the RIC; although innately suspicious of the mainly Catholic force (and of Dublin Castle officials whom it was believed would have no qualms about selling out Ulster’s interests for political expediency), those members of the force based in Ulster tended to share Unionist sympathies.”? Shared sympathies meant there was no RIC intervention against, or opposition to, the reorganisation, training and arming of the UVF.” This was matched by a reluctance to use emergency provisions to intercede against the sectarian violence and intimidation increasingly exercised by Unionist mobs in Belfast.

Although far from an exhaustive account of the development of policing and the rule of law in pre-partition Ireland, this overview nonetheless points to the emergence of early trends: ownership of policing and the rule of law being concentrated in Unionist hands, a penchant for reflecting this through misapplication of emergency provisions against those deemed subversive by the state, and willingness to use legal and, if deemed necessary, extra-legal means to uphold self-interests. These trends would become more apparent following partition and the creation of ‘a Protestant state for a Protestant people’ in Northern Ireland.

The Protestant state

The Government of Ireland Act 1920 created two regional parliaments: one in Dublin and one in Belfast for the six North Eastern counties later to become the Northern Ireland state.** The Anglo-Irish treaty of December 1921, between the IRA and British, superseded the 1920 Act by creating an Irish Free State, but with a provision that allowed the predominantly Unionist Northern parliament to opt out. Partition was, as Ruane and Todd note, ‘an attempt to accommodate, rather than to transcend or resolve, the historic conflicts on the island’.*° Mac Ionnrachtaigh views partition as a colonial intervention that created ‘the northern settler-colonial statelet’ bordering a Free State that ‘continued neo-colonial administrative rule in indigenous form’.’’ The treaty was a source of division among Irish republicans, who split along the lines of pragmatic acceptance of the Free State on offer and ideological rejection due to the exclusion of the six Northern counties. A bitter civil war ensued, ending in victory for the pro-treaty Free State forces. The IRA’s capacity and organisational strength sharply declined as increasing numbers subsequently broke away to engage in constitutional politics and the political life of the Free State.**

Partition left Irish republicans in a political vortex. Two states now existed on the island of Ireland, neither of which they deemed legitimate; one presided over by traitorous former comrades, the other by Unionists. Viewing the Free State (which became a de facto republic following the 1937 constitution and was officially declared a republic under the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 but was (and is) pejoratively still referred to as the Free State by Irish republicans) as partitionist, and therefore illegitimate, Irish republicans withheld formal participation in the state. The Free State, for its part, showed little tolerance for this ‘internal subversion’. It enacted emergency legislation like the Offences against the State Act and the Unlawful Organisations Order to intern, jail and ultimately execute Irish republicans.” Subtle differences in rejection of

*7 Mac Ionnrachtaigh, 2013, 30. 28 Bowyer Bell, 1997.

the Free State and the Northern Ireland state are nonetheless detectible; IRA orders eventually prohibited the use of force against the Free State, Sinn Féin had their first meaningful tryst with constitutional politics here by dropping abstentionism in 1986, and they built an alliance with the Dublin Government in the pan-Nationalist front of the 1990s. By the time of the IRA’s ‘Border Campaign’ (1956-62), it was apparent that any military activity by the IRA would be directed at targets in the Northern state.”

For Unionists, partition brought long-term hegemony and political ascendancy in the new state. The inbuilt demographic Protestant majority was used simultaneously to uphold pre-existing Unionist privilege and to subjugate the ‘disloyal’ Catholic minority community. Commenting on the unassailable position partition afforded Unionists, Breathnach argues that ‘the new parliament gradually showed the tyrannical potential inherent in its peculiar two-against-one democracy. Through nepotism, jobbery, local representation, the civil service, education, housing, the trade unions and the cultural and economic spheres, the Catholic minority was gradually ghettoised’.** James Whyte is more measured on the matter, arguing that claims ranged from ‘the deepest black’ Nationalist assertions that discrimination was the bedrock of the state to the ‘purest white’ Unionist denials.’ Although Whyte refused to endorse Nationalist claims of systemic discrimination in every sphere of governance, he nonetheless accepted that discrimination did occur — the issue of contention for him was to what extent it could wholly or partly explain Catholic disadvantage. Institutional exclusion left Catholics — whether Irish republican or Nationalist (or neither) — in a precarious position. It is perhaps useful to draw out slightly the differences between Irish republicans and Nationalists at this point. Although both largely emanate from among the Catholic community, that constituency is not a homogenous political bloc. Dixon’s differentiation is that ‘the term “nationalist” is often used to describe someone who aspires to a united Ireland but is opposed to the use of violence to achieve it, while a “republican” often shares much of the analysis of the “nationalist” but is prepared to use violence’.** Although there is broad agreement on the ‘national question’, arcane differences developed due to Nationalists accepting tacitly the principle of majority consent, seeing Unionist objection to Irish unity as grounded in real fear and viewing British government policy towards Ireland as neutral, while Irish republicans held more purist views of self-determination, saw Unionists as the dupes of British colonialism and regarded British policy as strategic and imperialist.** These differences became more apparent with the emergence of various power-sharing and joint authority initiatives.

The Irish republican view of policing in Northern Ireland, at this point, is intrinsically shaped by their wider view of the Northern Ireland state. The state was regarded as a colonial product ‘brought about by the violence and brute force of the British Empire and its Orange-Unionist henchmen in “Northern Ireland” between 1920/22’.*° The IRA subsequently began to articulate its political rejection of this colonial entity through sporadic political violence, although even their most concerted effort, the ‘Border Campaign’, never remotely threatened the life of the Northern Ireland state.” While episodic and poorly organised, this violence nonetheless provided the Unionist regime with the opportunity to unleash draconian legislation and a formidable security apparatus on anyone dissenting from the Protestant supremacy that epitomised the state. The Stormont administration afforded itself more draconian legislation to face down this violence than the British had equipped themselves with when facing pre-partition IRA violence.” Even when violence waned, the Stormont administration froze emergency provisions into the normal legal structure rather than revoking them. Walsh observes that while IRA violence never posed ‘any real threat’, it ineluctably drew an ‘invariably severe and militarily orientated’ state response.” Emergency legislation was quickly used to curtail any semblance of political affinity with or support for Irish republicanism - violent or otherwise. Commemorative parades celebrating 1916 were outlawed by the Stormont regime under the Special Powers Act,*° a law reported to be the envy of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Any legitimate political activity of a republican hue fell foul of emergency legislation via the outlawing of seditious publications, the prohibition on the flying of the Irish national flag and the use of public order provisions to ban assemblies and gatherings.*!

Remarking on the sheer breadth of the Special Powers Act, Guelke observes that it ‘contained Orwellian provisions that listed offences against the maintenance of law and order and then provided that any other acts that undermined law and order, but were not listed, were also offences under the legislation’.* For Whyte, the act was so naturally conducive to abuse and bias that one did

6 ‘Quislings Publicly Thanked’, Republican News, 27 June 1973. 7 Hanley and Miller, 2010.

not have to rely on Nationalist grievances to criticise it as profoundly undemocratic.” The thrust of the act extended beyond the political suppression of Irish republicanism to enable the cultural suppression of Irish Nationalism more generally. Rather than simply maintaining law and order, legislation was premised on maintaining Protestant supremacy through guaranteeing only overt assertions of Britishness within the state. The Flags and Emblems Act (1954), for example, outlawed any overt signs of Irishness.** Expressions of Irish identity or culture, much less any assertion of violent or non-violent political opposition to the state, drew the rigours of emergency legislation.** The minority community in its entirety became a ‘suspect community’ as the rule of law and policing in the North of Ireland predicated itself more towards keeping ‘order’ (i.e. the socio-political order of Protestant supremacy) than fighting ‘normal’ crime.** Unionists would defend this approach on the grounds of having an ‘enemy within’. The mistreatment of the minority community was no doubt further driven by a siege mentality arising from having an aggressively Catholic conservative Free State that bordered it (and laid claim to it) and by the need to prevent any class split within Unionism that might aid the ‘enemy within’. But, as Patterson notes, this only explains rather than excuses the actions of the Stormont administration.** In the face of this, Nationalists quickly withdrew from state life and found themselves resident in a state that regarded them not as model citizens but as the ‘enemy’.

If the Unionist regime had at its disposal discriminatory legislation to uphold Protestant supremacy, it could similarly rely on the RUC to enthusiastically enforce it. Mulcahy notes:

From the outset, the Northern Irish government conceived of the RUC as a paramilitary police force that would play a direct role in the maintenance of the state and its unionist character. In addition to the RUC, an auxiliary police force called the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC, or ‘B-Specials’) was set up.”

From the foundation of the state, then, policing in the six counties was markedly disparate from that seen in most liberal democracies. The RUC was

4 Hillyard, 1988.

not bound by traditions of minimum force, policing by consent or an arm’s length relationship with the Unionist government.*° McGarry highlights the reality of the RUC’s function thus:

It was armed and paramilitary in character, unlike police forces in Britain, or even the new police in the Irish Free State ... to assist it in its paramilitary role, it was equipped with some of the most draconian police powers ever passed in a liberal democracy ... the RUC contravened the standard norm in liberal democracies that the police exercise a semi-autonomous or arm’s length relationship with civil and political authorities. Its senior officers were subordinate in practice to the political direction of the Northern Ireland government ... this government was always Unionist, and with the exception of one cabinet minister appointed towards the end, always Protestant.”

Even prior to conflictin 1969, the RUC exhibited demonstrable signs of divided-society policing; it showed systematic bias in law enforcement, carried out a politicised policing function, enjoyed special powers, was monopolised by the dominant group and had a dual purpose of internal security and ‘ordinary’ law and order.** The implication this had for police ownership in Northern Ireland reflects a broader phenomenon highlighted by Brewer and Magee whereby ‘subordinate groups view the police as agents of oppression or occupation and show a minimal commitment to them, while the dominant community tend to look on the police as its own and the guarantor of its position’.** Compounding difficulties in relation to the function of the RUC was the massive imbalance in the force’s composition. Although it was initially envisaged that one-third of the force would be Catholic, recruitment figures never came close to this,**leaving it as Protestant and Unionist in personnel as it was in function and ethos. Beyond the mere religious imbalance, there was also the fact that the most ardent anti-Catholic elements in pre-partition Ulster had been subsumed into the security apparatus of the state. This security apparatus comprised ‘thousands of Protestants ... who had gained experience in the hard school of civil war from 1916 to 1922.55 Their absorption into the state security apparatus saw the underlying function of the previously paramilitary UVF

°° McGarry and O’Leary, 1999, 28. *! McGarry, 2000.

5 Weitzer, 1995, S.

5 Brewer and Magee, 1991, 260.

5+ Ellison and Smyth, 2000.

‘legitimised’.*° The crossover between the UVF and the security apparatus of the Northern Ireland state is best examined through the paramilitary police reserve the ‘B-Specials’. Even after the imposition of partition, the ‘B’ division of the USC were retained as a part-time reserve to help combat prospective IRA violence. The “B-Specials’ were to batten on ‘emergency situations’.*” That such emergencies seldom arose did not alter this one iota. The USC drew its membership from the ranks of the UVF and the Ulster Imperial Guards - both mired in intense anti-Catholic sentiment and violence.** This tactic of channelling potential Unionist discontent away from challenging the state by merging armed organisations into the state security apparatus became a ‘perennial security arrangement in Northern Ireland’? Founded by Unionist politicians to protect Unionist interests, the USC adopted a world view that Protestants were ‘loyal’ and Catholics were ‘disloyal’.®° As a consequence, the force became the natural home for Protestant extremists and a cold house for Catholics. Unionists attributed religious imbalance to the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) instructing their followers not to engage with the force. A much greater likelihood is, however, that the pro-Unionist outlook of the force and its tenuous origins meant the minority community, in the words of Nationalist MP Joe Devlin, ‘would not touch your special constabulary with a 40-foot pole’.

It is within this divided-society policing climate that not just Irish republican but more general minority community disconnect from policing must be viewed. Mirroring the relationship between state legitimacy and police legitimacy, those on the outside of the state found themselves on the outside of policing, having little input into, control over or affinity with either. They were given little reason to identify with or align themselves to the state or police. Rather, the minority community found itself at the mercy of laws formulated and administered by Unionist politicians who had been integral in the formation of the UVF and had spent years inculcating the mentality that Catholics were a ‘disloyal’ threat to Protestant interests. Moreover, the enforcement of this legislation was delegated to those who had previously shown no hesitation in foisting violence and intimidation on the minority community. The links between the state and the security apparatus, and the

5° Boyle, Hadden and Hillyard, 1980, 32. 5 Breathnach, 1974.

& Quoted in Farrell, 1983, 49.

sense of Protestant supremacy that underpinned this, meant that any change was not of function, but the fact that those indulgent in sectarian exclusion now had legislative power and loyal followers in state uniform to back it up. It is therefore unsurprising that from the very establishment of the RUC Catholics refused to get ‘involved’ with policing.”

Into the conflict

The outbreak of conflict in 1969 was preceded by two significant developments: increased leftist politicisation of the IRA and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) campaign of peaceful protest. The public-apathyinduced collapse of the Border Campaign demonstrated IRA failure to garner sympathy or strength from the populous. An internal IRA newssheet argued:

There are many lessons to be learned from the last campaign, the most notable being that it is not enough to have men with guns in their hands ... We must have men who are capable of teaching the people what is wrong in this country of ours. We must have men who are capable of working with and for the people.

As a result, the IRA began to align itself with those ‘fighting social injustice’ in order to broaden its sphere of influence.® Class-based political agitation, particularly in the Free State, would be the method of translating this broad front approach into practice. As Morrison notes, however, introducing a stronger political emphasis is a prelude to Irish republican splitting.*° Even prior to the 1970 Official—Provisional split, the Saor Eire breakaway faction derided the IRA leadership for degenerating from a ‘radical movement’ into ‘parliamentary reformists’. Underlying tension persisted to eventually manifest itself in the 1970 split. Although the reasons behind the split are manifold and complex, as exhaustively examined by others,® for the brevity of this overview they will be reduced to leadership attempts to politicise the republican strategy by dropping abstentionism and avoiding where possible military action in the North so class-based solidarity with the Protestant working class could

6&8 Walker, 2004, 57. ° ‘Editorial’, An tOgldch, 3 (December 1967). 6 ‘Tasks’, An tOglach, 1 (1967). 66 Morrison, 2013, 4.

‘Open Letter to Republicans’, Peoples Voice, December 1968. 6 Hanley and Miller, 2010; Rekawek, 2011; Sanders 2011; Morrison, 2013.

be built. Coincidentally, the NICRA campaign was seen as the appropriate vehicle for building a broad front approach capable of incorporating inter-communal class-based solidarity. Irish republicans were openly supportive of and active participants in the NICRA campaign.” It should, however, be cautioned against taking this tactical alliance as evidence of IRA control over the NICRA or NICRA sympathy for the IRA. The demands of the NICRA were not ostensibly Irish republican; they wanted reform of the Northern Ireland state not its complete destruction; they sought ‘British rights for British citizens’ not Irish reunification, and they had a number of Protestants among their membership. Henry Patterson argues that the earliest permutations of the civil rights movement did not seek a British withdrawal but rather a new form of British intervention to tackle discrimination.” He also points out that during the NICRA era the Dublin-based IRA leadership was more concerned with agitating against the Free State, and that the then IRA would not have had the capacity to mobilise on the scale that the civil rights movement did.”! The civil rights movement was therefore a ‘new way of conceptualising an old problem’ because Nationalist demands for an end to discrimination were being articulated outside the traditional framework of calling for resolution through settlement of the national question.” Paisleyite vilification would nonetheless condemn it as an IRA front, thus invoking a ferocious Unionist backlash. Bob Purdie has argued that the outbreak of this violence demonstrates the failure of the NICRA to successfully channel the tension created into compelling Stormont to concede demands rather than allowing this tension to be released through violence.” He further argues that the decision to turn to street demonstration tactics was a misguided one that allowed old fault lines about the national question to emerge and subsequently dominate the campaign.” This, he concludes, reduced the scope the Unionist government had for making concessions without upsetting the populism it relied on.”

Reactionary police violence towards peaceful NICRA marches dispelled any lingering pretence of police neutrality. There was official acknowledgement of this in the Scarman Report, which conceded that violent RUC misconduct left the impression that ‘the police would be used as a partisan force to suppress

© ‘Where Were the Republicans’, United Irishman, October 1969; “Whither Civil Rights?’, United Irishman, December 1969.

38 Critical Engagement ... those opposed to the Northern Ireland government’. More tellingly, it recognised ‘the fateful split between the Catholic community and the police’.”’ Accordingly, complaints about discrimination soon became complaints about policing.” This reflected the growing police tendency to participate in, rather than curtail, violence directed at NICRA marches.” As this violence escalated, the notion of police complicity became central to Irish republican depictions of the police as the violent guardians of a corrupt ‘Orange state’. The outbreak of violence in Derry in August 1969 following clashes between Catholics and Paisleyite mobs was narrated along the lines that ‘[the] RUC immediately attacked Nationalists with batons, wearing helmets and shields. The inevitable had happened and the fight was on. The rest is history’.*° Similarly, the Belfast pogroms were orchestrated by ‘the combined UVF, RUC and B-Specials forces’.*' Irish republicans drew on the sectarian origins of the ‘B-Specials’ to frame its current activity with reference to this past: ‘recent events in Derry, Belfast and elsewhere have shown they have not changed their colours one whit since 1920. They have not lost their addiction to violence nor their strictly sectarian character’.

In foregrounding the police role in violently marginalising the minority community, ‘boundary work’ establishing defined categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ continued to condition Irish republican attitudes to policing.** This drew on the historical origins of the ‘Orange state’ and the divided-society policing model it was sustained through, to communicate the message that the failed state that had privileged ‘them’ by disadvantaging ‘us’ was beyond reform. This countered the impact of the belated, yet tokenistic, concessions by the Stormont administration to NICRA demands, and the Hunt Report attempt to salvage the police reputation. An ‘injustice frame’ recognising violent police defence of the exclusionary “Orange state’ as a ‘political wrong’ soon gained traction.** Usefully, this gave meaningful articulation to traditional Irish republican opposition to the very existence of the Northern Ireland state. Peaceful demands for the reform of the ‘Orange state’ had only succeeded in incurring the wrath of the security apparatus of that very state. The argument