The Past Drives the Present into the Future: Continuity, Change and Policing in Northern Ireland

Abstract

These are the words of a retired officer who served at senior levels within both the RUC and the PSNI. They seem to encapsulate three things: the recognition that the police had been engaged in a conflict and understood themselves as protagonists within that conflict; the sense that the change in name and in identity had felt at the time like a defeat and a betrayal; and lastly, an understanding that the process of change — harsh, painful, disruptive and still ongoing as it is, had been worthwhile. This chapter attempts to draw some conclusions about that process and what we have leant from it, and also to look to the contemporary reality of where the organisation sits now. What has been done, what has still to be achieved and importantly, where the pressure points still lie.

We honestly thought we could win this, and in the end we thought we’d lost it. But it was a victory for politics. (Interviewee 37)