N. Ireland Police Live With Constant Fear

Some Northern Ireland policemen don’t tell their children what their job is.

On or off duty, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers are 24-hour-a-day targets for the Irish Republican Army in its guerrilla fight to oust Britain from Northern Ireland.

They avoid hanging their police uniform shirts up on the wash line in case prying neighbors spot them.

They check constantly under their cars for bombs and drive home by a different route every night.

The RUC has been nicknamed “The Royal Ulcer Constabulary,” with divorce, alcoholism and suicide persistent problems for police officers, male and female, under round-the-clock stress.

“You never get used to it in 100 years. It is a constant worry,” said one officer.

Another said: “It is amazing how suspicious you become. On your way home you’re always watching the car behind you. It could very well be that the car is following you. That’s how most guys get blown away.”

Each offered intriguing glimpses into their siege-mentality lives for “Inside the RUC,” a book by Belfast Queen’s University sociologist John D. Brewer and researcher Kathleen Magee.

Most officers agreed they would rather be killed outright than be disabled.

One officer, recalling a colleague who lost both his arms in an IRA attack, said: “He’s got kids like myself and see, when I went home, my wee boys came running over to me and I just thought to myself like, he’ll never be able to cuddle his kids like that. It makes you think.”

One police officer told the authors how the coffin of an RUC colleague had to be filled with sandbags because there was so little left to bury.

No official statistics exist for suicide among RUC officers but the force had about one suicide a month during the 1970s.

“The paramilitary threat and stress play their parts in suicides but other factors interact with these pressures such as debt, drink, family problems, hedonism and the accessibility of a very efficient means of self-destruction--guns,” the authors wrote.

Their statistics for the 8,500-strong force paint a grim picture. One of every 16 officers is injured in the Northern Ireland conflict. “Far fewer members of the South African police have died in civil unrest,” the authors said.

“While American and British police might be in some danger during their work . . . policemen and women in the RUC are under real threat on and off the job.”

On neighborhood community beats such as West Belfast, the Irish Republican ghetto that is a rich recruiting ground for the IRA, police patrols look more like armed convoys as each officer has to be accompanied by British soldiers.

One officer said: “There’s 16 soldiers to every two policemen and you work out the odds and that’s 8 to 1 against you being hit. It is awful but that is the way your mind works. Like I know guys who have lost arms and legs.

“I now deliberately sit when I’m out in a Land Rover with one arm up a bit higher than the other and the one leg a bit higher. I suppose that way if I was hit I might stand a chance of losing only one arm or leg.

“But if you get left behind (in the ghetto) by the army you’d be lucky to come back alive, and that’s no exaggeration.”

Police stations, with their turrets, barbed-wire fencing and giant gates, look more like Wild West forts. Some in Irish Republican areas get attacked up to five times a night.

In a police force that is 90% Protestant and male-dominated, impartiality is a message drummed home constantly by senior officers as vital to the RUC’s professional standing in both communities.

One officer said: “It can be very hard to be impartial in this job, especially when one of your colleagues is killed by the IRA or something.

“There are three religions in this country--Catholic, Protestant and the Royal Ulster Constabulary.”