In 1922 the new Belfast administration appointed a 17-member committee to study police reorganisation. Its terms of reference ran to a single paragraph, the committee worked at speed, and its main report was produced in two months.

Forty-seven years on, after the turbulent events of August 1969, Lord Hunt and two others were given a similar one-paragraph brief to advise on the restructuring of the RUC. They took a mere five weeks to complete the task.

By contrast, the Patten Commission on the future of the RUC, which holds its first meeting at the Interpoint Centre in Belfast today, consists of eight people, only two of whom are local and with no one from the Republic. It will labour for over a year, deliberating comprehensive terms of reference that run to an entire page of the Belfast Agreement.

Over the next two days it will decide its working practices and hold preliminary meetings with the RUC and the Police Authority. In line with modern concepts of consultation and participation, the commission intends to conduct research and run focus groups to help shape its ultimate conclusions.

Nothing wrong with that, but the entire task could have been avoided, for the commission is nothing more than a fig leaf concealing what can only be described as the political and moral cowardice of a succession of public leaders and figures to get to grips with the policing problem in all its sensitive complexity. It is no denigration of Chris Patten and his fellow commissioners, or any devaluation of their eventual report, to say that they are being asked to take the tough decisions which should have been made long ago by the people responsible for developing and implementing policing policy in Northern Ireland.

The Police Authority for Northern Ireland has much to answer for. For years it was hidden away, conducting its overseeing role of policing as if it was a cosy, private business between itself and the commanders at RUC headquarters in Knock.

Until 1996 the members concealed their identities from public knowledge. Meeting behind closed doors, their deliberations remained secret. They ducked all the difficult issues, and even though their powers were heavily circumscribed by the legislation empowering them, they failed to use what authority they did have in effectively holding a succession of chief constables to account on controversial topics such as the use of plastic bullets.

A measure of its impact can be gleaned from the courteous contempt with which Sir Hugh Annesley, the former chief constable, treated the authority. He famously dismissed it as "a bunch of well-intentioned amateurs", and said he would give as much attention to its submissions as he would to a letter in the local newspapers.

The present authority struts its commitment to openness and accountability, but one has only to read its latest annual report, published last week, to see that it has lost the plot.

Like its predecessors, it prefers to resort to the creation of working parties or the convening of consultation meetings as an alibi for its unwillingness to take difficult decisions. This long-term ducking and diving has been aided and abetted by successive regimes at the Northern Ireland Office. From time to time they have been so appalled by the ineffectiveness of the authority that they have plotted to abolish it.

IN opposition, Mo Mowlam produced an intelligent and workable policy paper but when she moved into government in May last year she set about implementing it with supreme ham-fistedness. Last December, in a classic instance of putting the cart before the horse, she introduced legislation into Parliament which was riddled with holes and pre-empted a number of other important policing initiatives.

The most important was the consideration of future policing already under way at the Stormont multiparty talks. The Bill also undercut the Northern Ireland Select Committee, whose MP members had launched a wide-ranging study of the composition, recruitment and training of the RUC.

On top of that, Dr Mowlam then launched her own consultation, inviting ideas about the future composition and selection of the Police Authority. Further complication was inserted when the Belfast Agreement prompted the establishment of the Patten Commission. The subsequent North-South wrangling over its membership, as revealed in the leaked minute earlier this week, fully underlines the tangled web that Mowlam has cast over the entire process of police reform.

As a first step to unravelling it, she should withdraw the Police Bill from Parliament and put it on hold until the subsidiary work has been completed. Then a new Bill could reflect the combined wisdom of the Patten report and the other studies, laying the foundations for a new policing order in Northern Ireland.

It must be based on the consent of the entire community for the police, their co-operation with it and the participation of young men and women, from both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds, in providing the police service. There would then be sufficient cross-community consensus and the political and moral impetus to implement the details of the agenda for reform and the difficult remedies which have long been clear.

During the years of conflict the RUC has grown away from the people it polices to such an extent that it has become a third, prosperous and self-contained community in the fragmented tapestry of the divided North. There are only a handful of police families resident in the western part of Northern Ireland. Instead, the majority of police live in a crescent of well-heeled localities stretching from Bangor through Belfast to Moira and across to Carrickfergus. When they go to work, often commuting long distances to Border postings, they operate from fortified stations, patrol in armoured vehicles and walk the streets all too often protected by heavily armed soldiers. There is a growing gap between them and the Protestant community and a chasm dividing them from nationalists, not least because 93 per cent of the force comes from the majority community. It is not surprising, therefore, that the RUC's internal culture is, in the words of Ronnie Flanagan, the Chief Constable, "white, male and Protestant".

This is reflected in the symbols which surround the force. The Union flag flies constantly at the training centre, it frequently flies on every station, even in nationalist areas, to commemorate a raft of royal events. Until now every officer had to swear to "well and truly serve our sovereign lady, the Queen". That proviso is now on the way out, but much more remains to be done to establish beyond doubt that the RUC is even-handed and impartial and to create the neutral working environment required by law so that many more young Catholics and women - for misogyny is also rife - will feel comfortable in a police career.

There will have to be a new emphasis on and an investment in training to teach the officers how to serve and interact sensitively with everyone they encounter. The police will have to be encouraged to live among the community they regulate and protect and to reintegrate.

Risks will have to be taken in disarming and dismantling the fortifications of conflict. Maintaining public order will have to rely more on persuasion than coercion. The Patten Commission contains people with national and international expertise in conventional policing, the management of change in large organisations and the legal, academic and political skills to articulate a new policing order.

Above all, it is led by Patten, who is superbly qualified for the task by virtue of his experience in Northern Ireland. It is beyond doubt that he will confront the difficult issues, like the flying of the Union flag, take decisions and make radical and far-reaching proposals to reshape the RUC. It will be to his everlasting credit for doing so and to the eternal shame of those who betrayed the community, and the RUC, when they should have acted long ago and refused.

Chris Ryder, a former member of the Police Authority for Northern Ireland, is the author of The RUC: A Force Under Fire