Mitchell Reiss, the head of policy planning in the State Department, hit back at a Friends of Sinn Fein $25,000 advertisement in the New York Times last week that spelled out the party’s opposition to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
PSNI was formed out of the RUC in 2001 as part of the reforms brought about by the Good Friday agreement. Catholic acceptance of policing is seen as crucial to the success of the peace settlement, and the force has introduced an affirmative action program to boost the number of Catholics in its ranks.
The reforms have won the support of the Catholic Church and the SDLP. But Sinn Fein, now the larger nationalist party in the North, has so far boycotted the new arrangements, refusing to take places on the Policing Board, the authority that supervises the force.
The party said it will refuse to join the board until further reforms are carried out, and detailed its objections in the Times ad last week.
The ad, which appeared on the paper’s op-ed page on Monday, March 15, and was paid for by the Manhattan-based Friends of Sinn Fein, said that the party “demand the policing service people are entitled to and will not settle simply for the one the British are prepared to give.”
Saying that the British “gutted key elements” of the Patten Commission’s recommendations for reforming the North’s police force, the ad said, among other things, that there are no goals or timetables to achieve community representation, that “key positions are held by human rights abusers,” that “collusion with loyalist death squads continues,” and that police officers with a political agenda continue to fabricate evidence to prevent the course of justice.”
The ad also criticized Hugh Orde, the PSNI chief, as being opposed to inquiries that would expose human-rights abusers in the department’s ranks and accused him of “refusing to cooperate with inquests into killings by state forces.”
Without citing specific example, Reiss said at the weekend that the ad was “at best . . . enormously misleading, at worst it was untruthful.”
“But the bottom line is there’s massive untruths there and they need to reconsider their position as soon as possible,” he said. “I’d be happy to go down point by point with a rebuttal to each of the allegations and justifications that Sinn Fein have for not joining the Policing Board.”
He said the best way for Sinn Fein to improve policing was by participating in the reforms.
The envoy also called on Sinn Fein’s president, Gerry Adams, to meet with Orde. He compared the party’s refusal to meet him with the Rev. Ian Paisley’s refusal to talk to Sinn Fein.
But Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, said he was “baffled” by the remarks.
“I spent an hour speaking with Ambassador Reiss in Washington on Tuesday [March 16],” McGuinness said. “I find it strange he did not raise his criticisms with me at that time.
“I intend to raise this matter directly with Ambassador Reiss,” he added.
McGuinness said the problem was that “British securocrats still control policing here” and that complete reform would not be possible until full control for policing had been passed from British officials to people in the North.