The Broken Blue Line

The PSNI seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, don’t they? With police numbers falling and budgets squeezed year on year, they are increasingly being called upon to do more with less and, more often than not, being perceived as doing fairly badly at it.

Compounding their problems, they are expected to police a post-conflict divided society wherein their support from one section of the community is reserved at best and often non-existent at worst, creating a fundamentally corrosive problem of representation. To put it bluntly, the fewer Catholic officers there are, the more alien the force seems to Nationalists and the less trustworthy and the more difficult the PSNI finds it to do things.

This is a major issue in our society, and one primed to get worse as the number of Catholic officers (which has plateaued around 30% of the service) seems primed to decline in coming years due to worsening Catholic recruitment with only 27% of this year’s intake being from a Catholic background.

One of the most obvious remedies to such an issue has already been tried, 50-50 recruitment, but such positive action schemes have an Achilles’ heel. To make something representative of the society it aspires to serve when it previously was not and thus achieving a communal good, the organisation would have to discriminate against individuals from the over-represented Protestant tradition in favour of members of the under-represented Catholic community.

A communal good can feel pretty abstract when you are the one who didn’t get an opportunity to pursue a career in the police service after all. Unionist politicians complained about the policy for the entire duration of its existence and campaigned to have it scrapped, a request facilitated by the Coalition government of 2011. The justification at the time was that the policy had always been intended to be temporary and, having reached a critical mass of 30%, it had achieved its goal. Then Secretary of State Owen Paterson said at the time

“We want to see this progress continue and for Catholic representation in the PSNI to grow further over time. We must all play a part. Patten recommended that the key to making the PSNI representative of the communities it serves was for community leaders to actively encourage their young people to join the service and to remove all discouragements from joining.”

I do find it curious that the rationale for weakening Catholic representation in the force was anticipated so clearly back in 2011. A passage which in hindsight contains a lofty aspiration but also the ready-made justification in case Catholic representation began to decline. This has been used by Unionist politicians in response to Nationalist calls to restore the 50-50 recruitment policy over the years. Current DUP leader Gavin Robinson expressed his opposition in 2025…

In his weekly message to DUP members, Mr Robinson said policing should be about “ability, not religion”…“no one should be denied an opportunity to be a police officer simply because of their religion, or lack thereof”.

“Rather than imposing artificial quotas, efforts should focus on addressing any remaining barriers to Catholic recruitment through leadership within nationalism, not discrimination against others. Let’s remember it took Sinn Féin 20 years to even attend a PSNI recruitment launch.”

Unionist politicians are incentivised to make such statements of course, their own base would expect nothing less. And admittedly there is probably a measure of truth in the complaint, nationalist support has been lukewarm and there is probably a case to be made that nationalist support will continue to be lukewarm until such time as the local police service is merely the northern arm of An Garda Síochána.

At the same time though you are trying to sway a community with a generational memory of institutionalised discrimination at the hands of the police service. Many families have such a story of a relative who had a bad experience at the hands of the old RUC. Mine does.

And it is not as if Nationalist attitudes to the police service, and thus the overall hesitant response from Nationalist politicians, emerged in a vacuum. There are multiple factors in play here, far more than the DUP and other Unionists acknowledge.

There is a knowledge that joining the police could make you a target for dissident groups eager to discourage Catholic participation in the police service in order to make the service illegitimate in Nationalist eyes as well as the possibility of suffering blowback from your local community who may not agree with such a choice.

There were the high-profile data breaches which saw incredibly sensitive information regarding serving officers disseminated into the public sphere, exposing serving Catholic officers to the aforementioned possibilities of social ostracism and dissident targeting.

And there is the perception that when it comes to holding the state to account for excesses taken during the Troubles, the State in my opinion will do what it can to slow-walk such investigations or stymie them, with the issues surrounding the murder of Pat Finucane being one of the foremost examples. The inquiry into his murder has only just begun, after years of delay, with the inquiry itself having taken years of campaigning to put into motion and whilst the police service itself no longer has any role in legacy issues, their previous involvement cast a long shadow. Those in the past who chose to engage as minimally as possible with such investigations may have felt they had very good reasons to not be as forthcoming as some felt they should have been, but they have to accept the price on that in terms of how Nationalists see the service.

From my perspective therefore, the onus was always going to be on the police service to stretch itself to entice Catholic recruits. After all, an effective police service needs to be legitimate in the eyes of the community and the way for the PSNI to achieve that is to prove to the Nationalist community that their fears and mistrust are not necessary in the modern era through repeated use of best practice. Some may think that is unfair, after all the PSNI cannot change the past. But it has to demonstrate it has learned from it.

But that doesn’t feel like the case. Unionist politicians resort to the stock excuse that Nationalist politicians aren’t promoting the police enough and that to me seems to suggest an inversion of what actually needs to happen. The thinking seems to be that people should be encouraged to join the PSNI, but it is they who must stretch to accommodate themselves to the status quo as it is. The result feeds into ever lower Catholic recruitment rates.

What brings this into focus though is how events are seen by those on the ground.

Last week we saw an excellent example as material for the construction of a Republican bonfire was seized and this prompted some disorder in Derry as a consequence. This article in the Irish News quotes local SDLP councillor John Boyle explaining why the material was seized…

The removal of bonfire materials from the Bogside earlier this week was due to a “major gas pipeline” that runs beneath the area, presenting a “very real threat”…SDLP councillor John Boyle said there was little choice but to act due to a gas pipeline that he said runs below the tarmac on the Lecky Road….(it) runs “literally the length of the Brandywell and the Lecky Road all the way down into Rossville Street and even along Meenan Square”.

I don’t think anyone can fault the decision to stop the bonfire. Plainly, lighting a pyre above a gas pipeline would be the height of lunacy. First Minister Michelle O’Neill expressed her support for the action…

Speaking in Derry on Wednesday, O’Neill said: “I commend those who have removed the pallets and everything else, all the material, because none of us wants to see these anti-social bonfires in our community.”

But the reason this is problematic is not that the dangerous bonfire was rightfully stopped, it was that another bonfire a year ago was not. Who can forget the controversy in 2025 over the bonfire in the Loyalist Village area of South Belfast that was built next to a massive pile of asbestos and which threatened an electricity substation powering local hospitals? That bonfire was also seen as an enormous risk to public health as a result. Belfast City Council even voted to remove it, but the PSNI declined to undertake the task.

It looks like double-standards. Because it is, but not necessarily an illogical one or one that is not impossible to understand.

Now, before anyone accuses me of naivety, I get it. Bonfire building culture is a much bigger aspect of Loyalist culture than it is of Republican culture, with Republican politicians actively trying to discourage the practice whereas Loyalism has doubled down on it as a replacement for the circumscribing of parading culture since the 1990s. Lacking institutional and widespread community support, it is therefore easier for the PSNI to do their job in respect to the bonfires in Derry and contain the aftermath than it would be to action a similarly controversial Loyalist bonfire. Serious disorder would have been the consequence of attempting to dismantle the Village bonfire in 2025, something the PSNI does not have to contend with in the case of the Republican bonfire.

The consequences of dealing with one were far more acceptable than the consequences of dealing with the other. Still, when coupled with PSNI inaction during the recent pogroms in Belfast, it creates a terrible look for the PSNI from within Nationalism because it feeds the impression the police will treat Loyalists with kid gloves compared to everyone else, whether that is because of the belief Loyalists are more willing to employ a violent response if challenged or because some think the Police simply favour Loyalists. The facts don’t matter here, the perception of what is seen is what matters. And the worse that look, the harder the PSNI has to work to overcome that wall of distrust that generations of nationalists carry with them.