Compromise in Northern Ireland Angers Both Sides

One of the few points on which Northern Ireland’s Protestants and Roman Catholics agree is that a police force by any other name is not the same.

On both sides of the sectarian divide, the name Royal Ulster Constabulary is a symbol of Northern Ireland’s ties to Britain. That is why pro-British Protestants say it is sacred and Catholics seeking a united Ireland want it changed.

Trying to satisfy these seemingly irreconcilable positions, British Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson on Tuesday introduced long-awaited legislation to reform the overwhelmingly Protestant RUC but delayed a decision on the name change.

Now both sides are furious with the compromise, and the conflict over the name--along with a similar battle over the British flag--threatens to torpedo a deal to restore the province’s power-sharing government next week.

Leaders of the largely Protestant Ulster Unionist Party, or UUP, say they need concessions from the British government on these symbolic issues if they are to secure enough votes at a meeting of their party council Saturday to restart the government with the Irish Republican Army’s political wing, Sinn Fein.

“I don’t mind a smaller, more unarmed, more balanced police force,” said Dermot Nesbitt, a Unionist Party member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. “But there is a symbol in the name and in their wish to change it, which is because it’s British. The ‘royal’ signifies British.”

Sinn Fein leaders accused the British government of pandering to unionists, who they said were putting up new obstacles to shared government, known in local jargon as “devolution,” now that the IRA has responded to their previous concerns about “decommissioning” weapons, or disarming.

“The Ulster Unionist Party’s demand for concessions in the run-up to Saturday’s meeting proved the decommissioning issue was not the reason why devolution had been held up in the province for so long,” said Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness.

“These are people who effectively don’t want a Catholic about the place, who don’t want a republican or a nationalist in a power-sharing executive,” McGuinness said.

Northern Ireland’s 2-year-old Good Friday peace process has been in limbo since February, when a short-lived Protestant-Catholic government was suspended over unionist demands that the IRA begin to disarm.

After weeks of negotiations with the Northern Ireland parties, the British and Irish governments announced earlier this month that power would be transferred back to the provincial administration in exchange for a definitive statement from the IRA renouncing violence.

The following day, the IRA vowed to put its weapons “completely and verifiably” out of commission and to allow regular independent inspections of its arms depots by two foreign diplomats, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and Cyril Ramaphosa, a former secretary-general of the African National Congress.

The decision to open its caches for inspection was unprecedented for the secretive IRA and offered renewed hope for the beleaguered peace process.

But many unionist hard-liners remain skeptical. Unionist Party leader David Trimble, who is first minister in the suspended Northern Ireland government, needs a majority of votes from the estimated 860 members of his party’s council to go back into the government. He is believed to have the support of about a third of the council and to be opposed by about a third, leaving the rest in the balance.

The proposed RUC reforms have been a bitter pill for unionists, many of whom view a name change as an insult to the more than 300 RUC officers killed during 30 years of sectarian violence. Many also see the legislation, which calls for setting up a police board, reducing the size of the police force and recruiting Catholics, as a sop to republicans.

But the Catholic community has long viewed the RUC as a British counterinsurgency force maintaining British rule in the province. Those who seek a united Ireland have agreed to forgo violence, but not their goal. Meanwhile, they want equal rights and a police force Catholics can trust. Nearly 90% of the RUC is Protestant.

In the legislation introduced Tuesday, Britain’s secretary for Northern Ireland retains the right to give the RUC a new name at a later date and to “regulate the flags and emblems of the police force.”

Mandelson was hoping to buy some time and get the power-sharing government back on its feet, but he acknowledged that beginning in September 2001, new police recruits will enter a force with a new name. He said he will decide the name after consulting with a newly created and bipartisan police board.

Unionists also want the British Union Jack to fly atop government buildings, while Sinn Fein insists that there should be no flag or that the British and Irish flags should fly together. That decision too will be postponed.

“In terms of the name of the RUC and particularly with the flying of the union flag, in this part of the United Kingdom many of us are at the end of our tether,” said Danny Kennedy, a Unionist Party member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. “The reality of that is that the flag of the nation is only the one flag, namely the union flag.”

Sinn Fein’s McGuinness said such was the talk of opponents of change.

“In my view, those people are going to lose the argument. In my view, there is too powerful an argument for change. . . . It’s really a question of when it’s going to happen, it’s not a question of will,” he said.