SIR JOHN (JACK) HERMON:Sir John Hermon who has died aged 79, was the longest-serving chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary during the Troubles. His nine years as head of the force, since reconstituted as the Police Service of Northern Ireland, was marked by the significant civil unrest surrounding the hunger strikes, the shoot-to-kill controversies and a series of high-profile paramilitary atrocities.
Sir John died in a Co Down nursing home following a long battle with Alzheimer's Disease.
He differed from his predecessor, Kenneth Newman, and his successor, Hugh Annesley, in that he was from Northern Ireland and had much closer personal connections to the conflict which had consumed his police force.
A native of the little townland of Castletown in Islandmagee, Co Antrim, Sir John was the youngest in a family of four. He described himself as a son of a "despotic and intemperate father and a religiously-inclined mother". He admitted to painful shyness as a boy, perhaps the product of his father's presence and character.
Though Sir John's memoirs reflect little warmth, he accepts his father's "unhappy disposition" was likely the product of hellish experiences during the first World War when he fought with the Ulster Division. The witnessing of many horrors and the loss of many friends and a brother in that war left his father with scars, Sir John recalled, the mental being more telling than the physical.
The young John Hermon joined the RUC in 1950 after answering a job advertisement. Policing allowed him to come alive, he recounts.
"From the outset, the RUC gave me the freedom to be myself - a freedom I had known neither as a child nor in my teenage years."
He was posted in various parts of Counties Derry and Tyrone before sitting his sergeant's examinations. He later attended the British police training college in Bramshill in England before returning to Northern Ireland and to promotion in Belfast.
Sir John became chief constable in 1980, after the establishment of what was called "police primacy". This entailed the RUC standing as the foremost security organisation and the British army adopting a supportive role.
Police primacy, also known as the "Ulsterisation" of the British security response to the then-raging conflict, had been established in the decade before Sir John took over leadership of the RUC. But, under him, the policy took on real meaning.
Many of his predecessors were in effect subordinate to the British army. But under Sir John, the RUC adopted a much more pre-eminent role in security, and his officers came progressively more to the fore.
The 1980s were particularly turbulent, with the RUC coming under attack, both verbal and physical, from both sides of the political divide during Sir John's time at RUC headquarters in east Belfast. Scores of officers were lost.
The hunger strikes of late 1980 and 1981, which claimed the lives of 10 republican prisoners and dozens of civilians on the streets of Northern Ireland, were marked by significant civic unrest and a police response which pitted nationalists even more firmly against the RUC.
This was compounded in 1982 by a series of so-called shoot-to-kill incidents in which six unarmed men were killed by the RUC. The effects of these incidents are felt to this day.
In the same year, a senior officer close to him was implicated in the so called Dowra affair - a conspiracy in which the RUC in effect kidnapped a man in Northern Ireland to help subvert the course of justice in the Republic. The action was taken at the instigation of the then justice minister in the Republic, Sean Doherty, and the subsequent unwillingness of the Northern authorities to explain their actions led to a stand-off between the Fine Gael-Labour government elected in late 1992 and Sir John.
The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement by Garret FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher in November 1985, partly in response to the rise of Sinn Féin and the political fallout from the hunger strikes, also put RUC officers in the line of loyalist fire.
This was a bitter era, with many rank-and-file RUC members forced from their communities by friends and neighbours for seemingly providing the policing muscle for a political development granting the Irish government a consultative role in Northern affairs, which unionists hated.
The Hermon years were also marked by a series of bloody paramilitary incidents including the Droppin' Well bombing in Co Derry in 1982, the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing and the killings of IRA members in an ambush at Loughgall in 1987.
Other notorious incidents - the killings of three IRA members by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988 and the shooting of solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989 - provoked effects which are still felt. The Gibraltar deaths led to the attack by loyalist Michael Stone in Milltown cemetery in west Belfast the following week and to the killings of two British corporals.
The Finucane shooting has come to epitomise collusion between security force members and elements within loyalist paramilitaries. It prompted a series of ongoing judicial inquiries.
Sir John saw his police force's role, and his time as its chief constable, as a holding of the line against political convulsion and paramilitary violence.
He was suspicious of the dealings between the two governments in London and Dublin, and particularly ill at ease with both the agreement of 1985 and the Downing Street Declaration of 1993.
"I believe the mantle of 'peace at any price' which has cloaked the agreement and the declaration has done those documents, and thereby the people of Northern Ireland, a grave injustice," he wrote.
Proper evaluation of the Hermon years remains particularly difficult due to the lack of disclosure of the facts during his years in office. Ongoing, incomplete inquiries and redaction of reports of official investigations mean that fully informed and balanced accounts of his leadership remain impossible at this time.
He is survived by his wife, Lady Sylvia Hermon, Ulster Unionist MP for North Down, and their two teenage sons.
• John Charles Hermon OBE, QPM (Queen's Police Medal): born November 23rd, 1928; died November 6th, 2008