Very often in politics people construct an elaborate verbal edifice to conceal what they're really up to. People then start arguing about the edifice itself rather than what it was built to conceal. Good trick, eh?
You can watch the trick working with the dispute about the full-time police reserve. Unionists and the unionist print media are putting up all kinds of spurious arguments for keeping the full-time reserve intact. On the other side, nationalist politicians are putting up equally bogus arguments for getting rid of it. Let's be clear at the outset. The full-time reserve has to go. It has to go because Patten said so. If you read the Patten report you will see why and you will also see immediately why unionists are so coy about presenting their real reasons for wanting to retain the reservists.
Quoting the Good Friday Agreement, the Patten report said it was "essential that the police service should be 'representative of the society it polices'. The RUC is not representative."
One of Patten's remedies was that a new police service should be recruited on a 50:50 basis.
Another was to abolish the full-time reserve because it was and still is overwhelmingly Protestant, even more so than the RUC which was 92% Protestant when Patten consigned it to history.
Now if the reserve is more than 92% Protestant, that means Catholics in it are as rare as hen's teeth. It also follows as night follows day that it is not representative of the society which it polices and therefore has to go. What is astonishing is that nationalist politicians cannot say openly that the reserve has to go because it's full of Prods. Not PC you see. Instead there's a lot of mealy-mouthed talk about efficiency and over-manning. If, as we are told, 150 out of the 420 police in west Belfast are full-time reservists, and in several other areas a quarter of police are reservists, then that is unacceptable.
It means that five years after the agreement unionists are still policing nationalists.
Can't get rid of them say unionists. Too few police already. Rubbish. The real reason for their objection is that the reservists are 'their' police, in the age-old tradition of a Protestant militia. Besides, it's a nice little earner for unionist males, and one which requires no educational qualifications at all. You don't even have to wear out your own clothes or shoe leather and you get a pension. The economic multiplier effect in unionist communities is substantial. Unionists cling to the straw that Patten said there had to be an improved security situation or sustained peace or anything, the vaguer the better, to justify keeping the reserve.
He didn't. What he did point out (Para 12.17) was that "the RUC's own Fundamental Review in 1996, proposed that, in the event of a sustained improvement in the security situation, the Full Time Reserve should be disbanded." There has been such an improvement. What Patten recommended was that if "the security situation does not deteriorate significantly from the situation pertaining at present (September 1999)" the police service should be 7,500 in 2009, or one officer per 220 people, more than anywhere else in these islands but slightly less than New York at 1:200. Enough?
Well folks, the security situation is better now than in 1999. There's only sporadic loyalist trouble instead of a sustained campaign of anti-Catholic pipe-bombing and regular Orange rioting.
They've gotta go. Ah but, ah but, there's not enough police to go around unionists say. Not true, there are more than anywhere else. First, as Patten pointed out, the RUC had the worst record for civilianisation of any UK force, 20% compared to 35%. So there's plenty of scope for having more police out policing. Secondly, there are too many echoing barracks across the north which have to be manned. About 20 of them should have been closed since 1998. Instead, closure became part of the NIO's game of chicken with the IRA: 'we'll demilitarise if you decommission'. Let's face it, if they can close Andersonstown barracks at night, they can close it altogether.
Finally there's another compelling reason for abolishing the full-time reserve which again for some reason nationalist politicians never say. It's so that they can be replaced with 1,000 fenian part-time reservists from districts which never before supplied any police. The snag of course is that because of the damage Mandelson did in trying to undermine Patten's proposals to appease unionists, there won't be an inrush of fenian part-time reservists until Sinn Féin sign up to policing.
As a result there's a shortfall because if the full-time reserve goes and the PSNI can't recruit enough part-timers from nationalist districts, then we're back to where we started with an exclusively Protestant reserve, which of course is exactly what unionists want to retain but can't admit.
