Bullied, killed... the Catholics vilified by their own for protecting society
The horrifying reality of what is being done to nationalists in the North who want help their communities by joining the police force – and how two courageous men, bound by their mutual love of the GAA, may be starting to turn the tide…
EVER since he was a young child, Peadar Heffron was fanatical about Gaelic football and hurling. He played both games for his local team, Creggan Kickhams, becoming an established firstteam member for the senior footballers, and winning the Antrim intermediate championship on two occasions.
He was totally committed to the club and gave his all in every game. At the age of 25, he made a decision he hoped would give him a solid, pensionable job and a secure future – surely something any GAA club would wish for its members. But when Peadar told his teammates he’d decided to join the PSNI, there were no handshakes, no claps on the back, no congratulatory pints.
Instead he was met with silence, followed by two of the team leaders telling him he couldn’t go through with it. Unfortunately, that meeting wasn’t the worst of it, as he recently told sportswriter Joe Brolly – formerly a writer with our sister paper, the Irish Mail on Sunday, and now with the INM group.
Peadar’s boyhood friends, he told Brolly, people he had grown up beside, never spoke to him again. In training, he wasn’t picked for teams.
He joined in with one and played as a spare man – but nobody passed him the ball.
Posters were put up around his town, warning young people against joining what they called the PSNI/RUC – one was even put up outside his family home. Clubs with strong links to republicanism requested ‘challenge’ matches against Creggan, with only one target likely in their sights – and it wasn’t between the posts.
Worst of all, one weekend as he got ready in the changing room, four republican activists came in and pointedly handed him a leaflet warning against the dangers of joining the PSNI. This was the moment that broke him. He never went back to Creggan again.
‘I got into my car, drove home and never came back,’ he recounted in Brolly’s INM interview. ‘It had got too perripped sonal. Too serious. It was an awful wrench. I never recovered.’
HE did plough ahead with his plans to join the PSNI, however, and signed up in February 2002. Determined to help implement the plan to make the force as attractive a proposition to Catholics as it was to Protestants, he even helped form the PSNI Gaelic football team.
Their first game – against the Garda Síochána – had to be played behind closed doors, with the PSNI names not disclosed, while their first game against a club team was played amid heavy security.
Undeterred, Peadar continued to do all he could to ensure the force could effectively represent, equally, all members of the communities they served.
But just a few years later, Peadar’s career and life as he knew it came to a shuddering halt when, on January 8, 2010, he lost both legs after a bomb through his car, having been placed there by, it is assumed, members of his own community. He only survived because the snow and ice on the ground staunched the blood flow.
Even then, his former club couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge all he had given them. There was no condolence card, no letter. Two men visited his father while Peadar was in a coma, but insisted they only came in a ‘personal capacity’, given his father’s history with the club.
There have been several incidents similar to Peadar’s in the years since the establishment of the PSNI in 2001.
Ryan Crozier was 27 years old when he was on his way to begin his shift at the station in Enniskillen in May 2008. Close to Castlederg, a bomb exploded beneath his car.
He survived, but sustained serious leg injuries.
Stephen Carroll was not so lucky. The 48-year-old constable was the first member of the PSNI to be killed when he was ambushed and shot dead as he responded to a 999 call near Craigavon in March 2009.
In 2012, Constable Ronan Kerr, 25, was killed by a bomb placed under his car which was parked outside his home.
Most recently, there was a bomb found under the car of a PSNI officer who was living with his young family in a predominantly Catholic area of Derry. The device exploded as British army bomb disposal experts worked to defuse it.
Is it any wonder Catholics are so reluctant to join the PSNI? Even now, 16 years after the new police service was set up, becoming a police officer when you are a Catholic in Northern Ireland is a massive decision to make, and one that is likely to cause concern for your loved ones, if not outright distress.
BECAUSE even though there is now only a small minority in the North who still take it upon themselves to murder and maim in the name of a united Ireland, being a Catholic in the PSNI makes you a target.
The closing date for submissions for the PSNI’s latest employment drive has just passed. It’s a good job. The pay is relatively generous, even when training, with a chance of earning up to £38,000 (almost €43,000) while still at constable level. There’s a decent pension, 22 days of annual leave and, if you’re ambitious, there are prime opportunities of rising through the ranks to middle and top management.
But while the numbers they are attracting possible, if are not impressive, highly likely it’s they very will be left disappointed with the number of Catholics who have applied to join. It’s an ongoing issue for the PSNI and one they have struggled to deal with since their inception in 2001.
Despite efforts which have included a controversial 50:50 hiring policy and a specially commissioned study to look at why Catholics are reluctant to join their ranks, the force remains noticeably Protestant-heavy. that Protestant, from just over August 67% while of The this of 31.5% officers latest year show are figures are Catholic. It’s far from ideal, as the PSNI know only too well. To be fully effective, they need to be fully representative of the community they serve. But to many, if not most of the Catholic/nationalist society in the North, becoming a police officer is just not something they would ever contemplate.
It begs the question: despite public assurances that they are fully behind the police service, are organisations like Sinn Féin and the GAA doing enough to support their members to join up?
THE PSNI’s Chief Constable, George Hamilton, certainly doesn’t believe so. In fact, just recently he told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in Westminster that the two organisations were failing to encourage nationalists to become police officers. He said that although ‘huge progress’, had been made, he hoped political parties and civic groups would now ‘step up to the plate and advocate for a career in policing’.
While he didn’t question the GAA’s commitment to support policing reforms, accountability and crime reporting, he said it sometimes felt like ‘there is a reluctance and stopping short of actively advocating for a career in policing. Until we get that, it is going to be hard to be truly representative.’
The Ulster GAA insists it has been working closely with its youth membership and the PSNI since it was formed in 2001, and points out that programmes for a recent schools cup competition carried adverts for the force’s recruitment drive. They also say that they could not dictate to their members what career path to choose.
In political circles, you might think that it would be in Sinn Féin’s interest to make sure there was an equal representation of nationalists in the police force, which one day could lead to a Catholic/nationalist being made chief constable. After all, the last Catholic to head the Northern Ireland police was James Flanagan back in the mid-1970s.
Surely having a larger number of Catholics in the force would improve matters on the ground for their members? It would certainly make sense for them to set targets such as a 50:50 representation within ten years, or have a Catholic achieve the position of chief constable within 15 years.
At the very least, this is an opportunity to regularly and vociferously oppose the fact that good, decent, hard-working people who want to serve their communities are being horrifically targeted, maimed and even killed.
The Irish Daily Mail asked Sinn Féin, several times, if we could speak to one of their representatives about their stance on the PSNI. But none came forward. Gerry Kelly, the party’s Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for North Belfast, told local media that he rejected Mr Hamilton’s claims that the party was not doing enough.
He said he had offered people considering joining the PSNI ‘encouragement’ and ‘any help they need’.
‘I don’t know where the ambiguity is,’ he added. ‘They are Irish people in an Irish police service.’
On the ground, however, it’s perceived that Sinn Féin are, at best, ambivalent about the force.
It may be that they believe the PSNI is still just a British-run organisation that doesn’t merit their attention. It might also have something to do with the fact that they know their grass-roots membership is ultimately still deeply mistrustful when it comes to the police.
BUT Peter Sheridan, a former PSNI assistant chief constable and now CEO of the peace-building charity Co-operation Ireland, says evening up the numbers is essential for the future of the force.
‘It should be a concern, not just for the police, but for all of us in society,’ he told the Mail. ‘Policing needs to remain representative of the community that it polices. It’s at its best when it has close links with the community it serves. So if you are under-represented in certain communities, then that’s not good for the community or for policing.
‘If you want to create a safer society and promote lawfulness, then the policing agency has to have close links with the community it serves. I don’t think we have reached a place yet where that fulsome support is there for policing.
‘I think in some communities, in some organisations, among some people, there is an indifference and ambivalence. To be fair to the GAA, as an organisation it has done an enormous amount to build links with policing, and I think credit where credit is due, they have consistently stepped out.
‘I think it’s individuals who are in it, maybe the community they come from hasn’t moved on and therefore, they haven’t moved on in their thinking.’
One person who tried to help others move on, Peadar Heffron, admits he joined up to try and make a difference.
‘Deep down, naively, I thought this was the little bit I could do...’ he said. ‘To help this island become one again. I thought if policing here was normalised, we could, in due course, join with the gardaí and then further down the line, who knows...’
Perhaps now, thanks to Peadar’s openness and the support of Joe Brolly – not a man who could be accused of being soft on the national question – his vision of hope may yet one become a reality.