To create a force for good

The royal part of the equation looks even more doomed. In appointing Chris Patten to chair the Commission On Policing For Northern Ireland, the Government found a man who has the experience of presiding over the immediate stripping of the title and insignia of one of the few other police forces in the world to use the royal prefix in its title. After the Royal Hong Kong Police and the RUC, we will be left only with the Royal Thai Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and, of course, the Royal Botanic Garden Police (which does actually exist at Inverleith Row in Edinburgh). To Unionists, Patten is also the man who, as a Junior Minister in the Northern Ireland office in the early 1980s, took London out of Londonderry in the re-naming of the City of Derry. A change of name is the least the RUC can expect to face.

To go further and accede to the Sinn Fein demand for the complete disbandment of the force itself is unlikely to provide an answer. Inevitably, any future police service will inherit a legacy, good and bad, from the RUC. Peace and security underpins the #315m econ-omic investment announced yesterday by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, as precondition and as envisaged product. Rarely in its relatively brief history has the RUC, set up, drilled, and equipped as a paramilitary force, enjoyed the luxury of policing a peace. After the sacrifice of the lives of 300 of its officers, the compelling argument is that it deserves its chance.

But under what name? The title problem will not go away. To revert to Royal Irish Constabulary, which existed before 1922, would provide an anachronism that would satisfy nobody, even if the RUC still maintains some continuity with its predecessor, inheriting the rifle green of its uniforms, and the harp and entwined shamrock of its insignia. Few have any alternative suggestions to offer. The RUC has used a sub-title slogan in recent years, the Policing Service of Northern Ireland, but it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but prob-ably neither did Garda Siochana

(literally: guardians of the peace) when it was first mooted in the Dail to replace the RIC.

Less of a name, more of a complex legacy of conflicting associations, to reform the RUC as a community-responsive police service may be to demand a restructuring to which it is inherently incapable of lending itself. RUC chief constable Ronnie Flanagan has argued since the publication of the agreement that this concept itself may be over-simplistic. Pat armstrong, chairman of the Police Authority for Northern Ireland, warns that the issue has been manufactured for ''political expediency''.

The document talks about a ''new beginning'' to policing in Northern Ireland with a police service capable of attracting and sustaining support ''from the community as a whole''. What community as a whole? Even a ''yes'' vote is unlikely to forge one.

Mr Flanagan, an intelligent and articulate man with BA and MA degrees, one of the youngest chief

constables in police history on his appointment in 1996 at the age of 47, lectures formally about the realities of policing a divided society, one composed of separate Nationalist/

Republican and Loyalist/Unionist

communities. Yet the document consistently refers to ''community'' in the

singular sense, as though a new-look police force could create one where no cohesive one has existed before.

When the same document presents a vision of a police service ''representative in terms of the make-up of the community as a whole'' it is clear that the target is recruitment of more Catholic officers. The present level of 8% is unacceptably low, just as the reality of reprisals in the form of direct attack, intimidation, and ostracism of potential Catholic recruits is unhealthy. The job itself, with an #18,000 salary for an 18-year-old recruit, would have to represent more than mere moral or political disapproval to explain its continuing unattractiveness to the minority community.

''The Catholic officers we have are not from the working-class ghettoes,'' says an officer of 26 years' standing, emphasising rather than disputing the point. Yet vigilante groups like Direct Action Against Drugs and rough justice meted out by kangaroo courts of both loyalist and republican para-militaries have only underlined that there are worse options than the RUC itself. There have been 41 beatings,

25 by loyalists and 16 by republicans, in addition to 34 shootings, 21 by republicans and 13 by loyalists, this year. A 79-year-old man was shot through both knees and ankles last month when the IRA, seeking a child molester, went to the wrong address and got the wrong man.

Within the RUC the mood is restless. One detective chief inspector I spoke to had 30 years' service. During his career he had been shot at, had a car bomb drop unexploded from his vehicle, and had colleagues die in his arms from bullet wounds. Too much had been sacrificed willingly to surrender the name of the RUC to any political initiatives, but his personal focus was on the prospects of a fat lump sum if he decides to go in the scaling-down of the force. At 50, he calculated that he should receive #100,000. Junior colleagues were making it clear that they, too, were waiting to see what deals might be available. The Police Fed-

eration is highly sceptical of the

inflated figures that are being bandied about, and warn that there may be

considerable disappointment. The

federation is also apprehensive about the potential conflict between affirmative action in attracting Catholic recruits to replace officers who want to leave, and the police's legal obligations to recruit on merit.

But the need for changes is universally accepted. Alan Burnside, for the federation, says: ''I am bullish about the future of the RUC. I think there will be changes in the culture of the RUC. Officers will be able to walk down the street without being shot at. Children of officers will no longer face abuse at school because their father is in the RUC. There will be increasing social contact, which in itself will help to make the job more effective. But to talk about 'reform' implies some moral high ground from which the RUC would be disowned. It should be remembered that the RUC was the cement that held the fabric of North-ern Ireland society together over the past 30 years.''

The Police Bill (Northern Ireland), currently going through Parliament, will introduce further changes on April 1 next year, four months ahead of

Mr Patten's report from the commission. A police ombudsman will be created to deal in future with complaints against police which have risen by 33.5% in the past three years, a reflection of either declining policing standards or growing confidence in the complaints system.

Another change will be the dropping of the formal oath of allegiance, sworn by RUC officers, to the Queen. It will be replaced by a new oath, based on the Scottish model, of swearing allegiance to the duties of the office of constable.

Mr Flanagan, who has stated that he can envisage a reduction of the force from its current 13,400 to 6000 if a lasting peace is secured, has also set up a fundamental review of size, structure, and style. The proposal that has been floated elsewhere of a new two-tier police organisation, effectively setting up a string of community forces, is difficult to envisage within Mr Flanagan's revised scale. Ironically, Scotland, which has almost three times the population of Northern Ireland, is now examining centralisation of police forces.

Whatever the fresh proposals from the commission, due to report in the summer of 1999, there ought to be a place for the RUC to share in the new spirit of reconciliation and recovery.