Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Don’t count the Catholics, count the Poles…
Someone at PSNI headquarters has clearly counted the Catholics and found their numbers wanting, now we are about half way through the ten year period of the 50/50 recruitment policy. Yet, when the Patten Report recommended, in clause 15.8, that the PSNI “should advertise imaginatively and persistently, particularly in places likely to reach groups who are underrepresented in the police” few forsaw just far “beyond Northern Ireland they would go”. 12% of the latest recruits are from the local Polish community, but Tony Connelly reported on RTE last night from Warsaw, where the PSNI are recruiting directly from Poland.
Our model envisages that 370 officer recruits will be taken each year on average (the maximum would be 440). 185 of these would be Catholic and 185 would be “Protestant or undetermined” (the present categories used by the RUC). This would, incidentally, be a slightly higher level of Protestant recruitment than at present (172) as well as a much higher level of Catholic recruitment.
Mick Fealty @ 09:50 AM
Clearly, the Poles who are coming are Unionists in that they believe in the European Union. Not only do they talk the talk, they walk the walk, all the way over to the west of the Union.
And clearly, everyone in NI who wants the economy to improve generally because of an influx of MIGRANTS from another part of the Union is also a Unionist.
ROI/NI/UK, it doesn’t really matter because these MIGRANTS are free to travel and work. It’s just another part of the Union to them.
The Polish Police Service, which is going mental at the amount of experienced cops that are moving west, may not be Unionist.
Posted by on Feb 14, 2007 @ 05:40 AM“How can it, Dubliner? Recruitment is carried out by Consensia Partnership (see earlier post) “ - Nevin
I confess to not reading all the posts; I was replying to the main article. I see that I virtually duplicated the points of your post. I wasn’t aware that the PSNI were not permitted to recruit from Poland; so as Mick said in his article that “the PSNI are recruiting directly from Poland”, I took his statement at face value. By circumvent, I meant they were attempting to get around the Patten requirement that the police service should be “representative of the society it polices” by recruiting Catholics who were not from the Irish nationalist tradition. Now, Poles should be in the police service in accordance with their numbers in the north so that the police service should be “representative of the society it polices” but they should not be used to gerrymander the numbers in order to reach the quota of Catholics in a way that is designed to do what by excluding nationalists. If that is what is occurring, then it clearly breaches the requirements of Patten and it should be exposed.
“It’s actually neither of those things. It’s called freedom. These immigrants are free to move wherever they will be accepted. They chose part of the UK, and seem to be happy enough. Happy to the point of being willing to joi the police in their new country, and even - horror - vote to keep NI in the UK.” - Harpo
Yawn. Who said immigrants were not free to live wherever they want? You seem to be under the strange delusion that I did. The issue is Catholics who are not nationalist being used to gerrymander the Patten report. Specifically, “14.4 It is the imbalance between the number of Catholics/Nationalists and Protestants/Unionists which is the most striking problem in the composition of the RUC.” Notice that Patten links catholic to nationalist and protestant to unionist?
I’m just waiting for another clown such as DK to display his immaculate reasoning abilities by calling me a “xenophobe using republicanism as a cover” so I can point out that I’m a Hungarian Jew. ;)
Posted by on Feb 14, 2007 @ 11:45 AMThe Dubliner: Now, Poles should be in the police service in accordance with their numbers in the north so that the police service should be “representative of the society it polices” but they should not be used to gerrymander the numbers in order to reach the quota of Catholics in a way that is designed to do what by excluding nationalists.
What’s the problem - isn’t everyone expecting a massive surge of nationalists and republicans to join now anyway? Maybe it should have happened a few years ago?
It’s funny how SF propaganda has changed - They used to refer to a bigoted and protestant police force. That ‘92% protestant’ figure was a big deal:
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/images/symbols/nationrepub.htm
These days, when two cops turn up on your doorstep for whatever reason, the odds are that one of them is a Catholic. And the odds are that neither is heavily politicised. So now, are they just the wrong sort of Catholic? But what’s the worst you can expect from them?
And why do you keep on blaming the PSNI for recruitment policies? - blame Patten and Consensia.
Posted by on Feb 14, 2007 @ 12:38 PMThese days, when two cops turn up on your doorstep for whatever reason, the odds are that one of them is a Catholic.
Considering Catholics only make up about 20% of the PSNI the odds are still that neither is a Catholic.
And the odds are that neither is heavily politicised.
Can you explain how you arrived at that conclusion?
Paul Goggins’ has shed some light on the actual number of Eastern European Catholic recruits.
Posted by on Feb 14, 2007 @ 01:46 PMDec: Considering Catholics only make up about 20% of the PSNI the odds are still that neither is a Catholic.
Considering that the cops on the doorstep are likely to be junior officers, and therefore recruited in the last 10 years, I think it’s fair to assume that there would be at least 30% RC, and therefore that the chances that neither of them is RC are less than 50%, even if there is no deliberate effort to make mixed pairs out of the pool. Also, I suspect I’m likely to get more than my fair share of Prods on the doorstep here in Bangor.
Posted by on Feb 14, 2007 @ 02:22 PMAre the PSNI also recruiting eastern european protestants from estonia and Latvia to make up the numbers of protestatnts in the police force, or is it only foreign catholics they’re seeking?
So let me get this right - after 10 years of negotiation and agreement nationalists have got what exactly? Prisoner releases and ...? Not much else it seems, constitutionally speaking. Apparently they didn’t even have the negotiating power to scrap the old police force and set up a new one which - immediately - reflected the make up of northern irish society, i.e. about 45% catholic and 51% protestant.
Rather they had to settle for a police force that would very gradually attempt to make up the numbers over a 10 year period, thus ensuring a strong unionist complexion to the police force for at least another decade (for no justifiable reason) and laying themselves open to the possibility that at any stage along the way other events or influences may intervene to slow this process down or manipulate it one way or another for political ends.
And so we arrive at a situation where now targetted foreigners are being recruited to blatently obstruct the spirit and the letter of the original agreement, all in the name of ‘multi-culturalism’, ‘maturity’ and any other disingenuous intellectual sleight of hand the pro-brit shysters can drum up.No doubt the precious middle-classes, snug on their ‘policing boards’ and with their tongue stuck firmly up the rear end of the nearest west-brit, will shriek with horror at the directness of my analysis. Or affect the world-wise disdain and ‘greater understanding’ of the well-travelled. Who knows maybe even Cretaegus will show up to regale us with more self-congratulation over his cosmopolitanism or to tell us all about his Indian granny.
The fact is these people aren’t made of sufficent stuff to even speak straightforwardly about these things let alone actually do anything. They can’t even think in a straight way about these things.
Posted by on Feb 14, 2007 @ 02:39 PM
