The Primacy of the Police

Abstract

It is interesting to note that for a period from 1975 the annual reports of the Chief Constable do not contain much information about the role of the army in Northern Ireland. There are polite acknowledgements of the cooperation given by the military to the RUC, but not much detail. The Annual Report for 1976 is of interest because it gives several clues to a developing police strategy that heralded a transition from a situation where the police, of necessity, had an almost subordinate role to the army, to one where the police took over responsibility for the security of the Province, assisted by the army. This was a position that every senior police officer would have regarded as being correct, even from the outset of the troubles in 1969, but which the army had ignored, partly because of Callaghan’s statement on 19 August 1969, and pardy because the reality was that the RUC could not maintain the dominant role, for reasons that have been discussed earlier.