Policing Board refuses to vet CRJ…
It seems the British Government intended members of the Policing Board to ‘vet’ applicants for work with Community Restorative Justice Ireland schemes. But, according to the Irish Times front page this morning, the Policing Board has “declined a government request to nominate representatives to serve on the proposed vetting panel”. The Board has told the NIO the proposed vetting procedures are “not sufficiently robust”.The NIO’s original proposals of December 2005 seemed to fall short even of its own expectations, as noted by Pete the month before the actual draft guidelines were announced.
The revised guidelines are due out tomorrow but, according to the Irish Times, “the SDLP has been making it known that it will effectively challenging ministers to break the Sinn Féin connection with restorative justice schemes and to deny state funding and approval to any scheme which does not support the PSNI”.
Interesting stats today:
37% of applicants to PSNI are catholic.
20% of PSNI officers are catholic-a historic watershed.
The make-up of the police are changing.
slug,
Many (most?) of the Catholic PSNI members are probably unionist, not nationalist. I’m not really arguing that this is a good or bad thing. But it’d be interesting for a survey to be done. Another question, probably the biggest one, is whether they think it’s the job of the police to ‘uphold the state’. The police, like the fire service and the health service, should do a good job regardless of whether they are run from Dublin, London, Brussels or wherever.