MacGill Summer School: Northern Secretary Peter Hain has appealed to Sinn Féin to help in building trust between the police and republican communities on the ground in the North and urged the party to engage in talks with the PSNI and British government.
"The PSNI wants to engage in this dialogue and I hope that increasingly Sinn Féin will promote that. The approach of senior Sinn Féin figures in dealing with the PSNI over recent parades, and their significant efforts to bring about a peaceful summer, has been encouraging."
No one, he said, expected the wounds of the past to be healed instantly.
"But it takes two sides to build trust. What everyone agrees is that these communities desperately need a police service to engage with: they need to be able to deal with serious crime, with rape, assault and burglary. Only the PSNI can deliver this service, and they can only deliver it in partnership with the community.
"The world has changed. The commitments made by the IRA in July 2005, and delivered over the past year, mean that a vacuum has opened up in communities which can only be filled by a policing service. Normalisation has brought with it the contemporary problems of normal societies: drunken yobbery on a Saturday night, anti-social behaviour, 'joy-riding', car crime and so on."
Mr Hain said the PSNI and the British government were ready to take part in "mature and sustained dialogue" with the Sinn Féin leadership in the autumn on any outstanding concerns. "There is no reason to delay this engagement on practical issues." But he recognised that republican reservations about policing went deeper than practicalities.
"The experience of republican communities, the history of physical force republicanism, and the basic constitutional aspirations of the republican movement, make support for the policing institutions of Northern Ireland genuinely problematic. I do not underestimate those difficulties and, yet again, the burden of history behind them. Nor do I underestimate the centrality for republicans of the transfer of powers on policing and criminal justice to the Assembly."
Equally, Mr Hain said, the government recognised, and thought republicans should appreciate, the sheer depth of hurt among the unionist community, and the police themselves, about the past, and the suspicions about republican involvement in policing that arose from that hurt.
"Given the violence and pain of the last 30 years, that should not come as a surprise, nor should it be lightly dismissed. That is why republicans need to help allay those concerns and dispel suspicions that they were somewhat ambivalent about the rule of law itself, as opposed to the political prism through which they have traditionally viewed rule of law 'by the Brits'."
He said that, while community-based restorative justice had a place, and had potential for the future, as the experience of other countries had shown, it could never be a substitute for the criminal justice system let alone for a police service. "And everyone must agree that where it operates, it must be within the rule of law and with full police co-operation."
Mr Hain, who was delivering the John Hume lecture, at the opening of the annual MacGill summer school in Glenties, Co Donegal, said he understood why policing had been such a source of division in Northern Ireland in the past. "But looking to the future, a society which cannot agree on its policing and criminal justice arrangements cannot meet the challenges of social cohesion, still less tackle serious and organised crime. If we are to succeed in putting the last pieces of the Good Friday agreement jigsaw in place, we need to extend support for policing right across the community, including in republican areas."
He wanted to take seriously the republican movement's reservations about policing and to deal with them directly.
Mr Hain concluded: "Quite simply - and as Northern Ireland business readily agrees - the economy as it is currently structured is not sustainable. A weak private sector and a huge, heavily subsidised - and until now unreformed - public sector, means two things: radical reform within Northern Ireland and much more extensive North-South co-operation."