By John Spain

It's been called historic (Tony Blair), ground-breaking (Bertie Ahern) and interesting (Ian Paisley Junior), but the truth is that Sinn Fein’s decision last weekend to back policing in the North is simply a grudging acceptance of reality that has come much too late.

The reality is that, unlike the trusting David Trimble, who even shared power with Sinn Fein while the IRA was armed and active, Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) would not share power with them while the IRA was still around, and they will not share power with them until Sinn Fein fully accept the police.

Sinn Fein knows that. So they have accepted the reality and grudgingly changed their position because they had no choice.

But they’re much too late because they should have done it nearly nine years ago when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, the same time the IRA should have called it a day.

Wasn’t it the SDLP’s Seamus Mallon who called the Agreement democracy for slow learners? Sinn Fein have been particularly slow in grasping the fact that you cannot be part of a democratic administration unless you support the rule of law and the police. Anything else is absurd.

Even so, we can all be thankful that the slow learners have come somewhat up to speed at last. I say somewhat because, as ever, the acceptance is convoluted and qualified.

The motion passed by Sinn Fein’s Ard Fheis (convention) last weekend in Dublin authorizes the party’s Ard Chomhairle (governing council) to give support to the police on whatever terms they think are needed, and whenever they think the time is right.

Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), is it? Is it any wonder Paisley is being cautious and says he wants more than words? He wants to see what this will mean on the ground when the PSNI officers go into Nationalist areas to do normal police work.

Nevertheless, it has to be recognized that this is a big step for the Republican brotherhood, steeped in the history of the Northern police as a sectarian, sometimes brutal force.

Who can forget those famous images of the RUC baton charging civil rights marchers nearly 40 years ago? Of course Nationalists had good reason to hate the RUC at the time, just as they had good reason to hate the northern state which kept them in their place as second class citizens.

But that was a long time ago, and even before the Patton Report and the setting up of the PSNI, the RUC had already changed radically by its last few years in existence. Sinn Fein never gave them any credit for those changes.

It’s easy now to forget the way hundreds of RUC men faced the vicious Loyalist mobs raging about the development of the peace process, the way some of them had to move home because their lives were under threat from Loyalist gunmen.

So even before Patton and the start of the PSNI, change was well underway. If the RUC was sectarian in its make-up by then it was mainly because the IRA made a point of shooting any Catholic who joined the force. Talk about Catch 22!

The new PSNI has received universal approval for its structure and its accountability to local cross-party police boards. Every other party in Ireland and in Britain had approved of it ... everyone except Sinn Fein, that is, who have clung to their old position because it suited them politically to drag it out.

Now, at last, they have come around, because they have no alternative if they want to share power and because they have wrung every concession they could out of the British government.

And one of those concessions, in particular, is deeply worrying. A couple of weeks ago the British government announced that the Assets Recovery Agency in the North is to be incorporated into a similar agency in London. Behind the waffle, this meant that the agency in the North was being disbanded and the officers who had been tracking down the millions that the IRA godfathers had made from criminal activity were being redeployed.

The agency, like the Criminal Assets Bureau in the south, was a thorn in the side of Slab Murphy and other IRA senior figures. Its emasculation shows how desperate Tony Blair was to get Sinn Fein to move on policing.

But it’s a very high price to pay, since it amounts to an acceptance that the millions made from smuggling, extortion and robbery are to be left in IRA coffers and Sinn Fein election war chests.

The effect will be a corruption of politics here, north and south, and the Irish government is angry because it was left out of the picture, and because this sends out all the wrong messages about rooting out criminality.

Apart from that issue, there is skepticism here about how far the Republicans will move in practice, ironically matching the caution being shown by Paisley and the DUP. As Paisley says, the words are easy but what happens on the ground is what matters.

What is involved here is a huge shift in Republican culture, in their traditional stance and how they see themselves. And that does not only apply in the north, but in the south as well.

At any Sinn Fein public meeting or event here in recent years the first thing you saw was their own security — the guys with the leather jackets and the tight haircuts, the visible crossover between the two sides of the Republican movement.

Outsiders — and that includes the Gardai (police) — were and still are kept at a distance or treated with an attitude that borders on contempt. It’s a different world, with a different sense of authority and its own set of rules, like a state within a state.

Which of course is exactly what it was, since the Republican movement did not fully accept the legitimacy of the state the rest of us live in, did not recognize the courts (they used to say this in court!) and barely tolerated the Gardai.

Even the current Sinn Fein spokesman on justice in the Dail (Parliament) had recent links with criminality and what appeared to be subversive activity. So where does that leave us?

Out of this detached attitude to the Irish state came a sense of superiority and even disdain among Republicans. When necessary they would make their own rules, they would ignore the law, defy the Gardai and undermine the courts.

You think I am exaggerating ? Look at the case of Detective Jerry McCabe. That cold-blooded deliberate killing of a detective was followed by denial, misinformation and such gross intimidation of witnesses that the IRA |thugs involved could only be found guilty of manslaughter instead of the murder it clearly was.

Or look at the aftermath of the huge Northern Bank robbery and the way some of the cash was filtered through the south. What does that say about respect for the rule of law in the south, never mind the north, where Republicans cling to the justification that it’s not a legitimate state so anything goes.

Then there are all the other Republican scams for raising donations and making money, in the south as well as the north. Is all of that really over?

So in spite of the decision by Sinn Fein last weekend, it seems to me there’s a long way to go before we can say they are fully accepting of the police and the rule of law, either in the north or the south. As I said, we are talking about a complete change of mindset and culture, and that does not happen overnight.

All of this, of course, is happening against the background of Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan report on RUC collusion with Loyalist killers. The timing of this allowed the Sinn Fein leadership to argue that, while they are shocked and appalled, it is further evidence of the need to get in there and “put manners on the police,” to use Gerry Adams’ phrase a week ago.

You need a strong stomach in this business, and listening to the Republican leaders going on about the O’Loan report was truly nauseating. These are the guys, after all, who bombed, tortured and murdered, for 25 years.

Adams, lest we forget, was one of the commanders of the IRA in Belfast at the time when the IRA abducted and murdered Jean McConville, a poor widow with 10 young children.

These are the guys who invented the proxy (involuntary suicide) bomber years before the Palestinians, and who did ethnic cleansing along the border before anyone in Bosnia ever thought of it. These are the guys who murdered milkmen or postmen because they were isolated, easy targets and had some vague connection with the security forces.

These are the guys who assassinated ordinary RUC men over the years for doing the kind of work ordinary policemen everywhere do. These are the guys who left a long list of RUC widows and fatherless children across the north. Talking about collusion, these are the guys who gave guns to borderline psychos who then terrorized their own communities into bowing the head to Sinn Fein.

And if we want to talk about colluding in the cover-up of murder, what about the butchery of Robert McCartney?

So if we want to look back at collusion, killing and cover-ups over the 25 years of the Troubles in the North, we need to cast a wider net than the intelligence and dirty tricks side of the RUC.

We also need to keep in mind that we are talking about a police force dealing with terrorism in an urban war situation. In that situation, police and security forces everywhere use and protect informers. The higher placed the informer the better, although this inevitably means dealing with people involved in serious crime, perhaps even murder.

Given the situation the RUC were facing, were they any worse than security forces anywhere else? And did the end justify the means — it was intelligence that helped to contain and ultimately defeat the IRA, which itself was infiltrated.

The scale of the collusion also needs to be borne in mind. Listening to the Sinn Fein leaders last week you would think that every RUC man in the North was up to his neck in collusion every weekend, organizing the murder of Catholics across the North.

In fact the O’Loan report followed one complaint. It implicated a number of RUC Special Branch men and pointed to a control failure that appeared to reach high into the force.

It would be naive to think that there are not other cases of collusion. But we simply do not know how widespread it was across the North.

The impression given last week failed to recognize that in recent years the vast majority of RUC men behaved in an ethical manner. Some Special Branch members were colluding with Loyalist killers, and some senior RUC officers were turning a blind eye to this. But it’s not fair to tar them all with the same brush.

The Sinn Fein leaders deserve some credit for turning around the movement to achieve the weekend vote to accept the police in the North. But the suspicion remains that their motivation and timing may be self-serving rather than an indication of a genuine conversion. The upcoming elections in the south are clearly a factor, as Sinn Fein polishes its image in preparation.

As Paisley says, time will tell.