President Mary McAleese has told graduating PSNI officers that they enjoy overwhelming community support from all the people of Ireland even though there are still dissident paramilitary "wreckers" out to try to destroy the peace process.
Mrs McAleese was guest of honour at the invitation of PSNI chief constable Matt Baggott at the police training college in Belfast today where she addressed 41 new graduate officers, presented the best recruit prize, and reviewed the passing out parade.
She made her speech at a time when dissidents have been targeting police officers in gun and bomb attacks, and more than a year after the Continuity IRA murdered Constable Stephen Carroll in Craigavon, Co Armagh. She was also speaking in the wake of the serious rioting in her home parish of Ardoyne in north Belfast.
She told the graduates that regardless of the many challenges that faced them, including the dissident threat, they were "not alone". She quoted Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy who, after meeting Mr Baggott earlier this year, said, "An attack on one member of one force is an attack on both forces."
The President said "many thousands within the former RUC, and now the PSNI, worked courageously to facilitate the (policing) transition process, so much so that today Northern Ireland is rightly recognised internationally as a model for police reform".
"On this day we think with respect of all those who have honoured that trust, those who have paid with their lives and their health and the families that live today with loss and heartache," she said.
"We think of you, today's graduates, holders of that trust, commencing your careers, welcomed enthusiastically by the vast majority of citizens, still vulnerable to the tiny minority of wreckers who have set their faces like flint against the humanly decent dynamic of this peace," she added.
"In facing down the many challenges ahead you are not alone, the PSNI is not alone. You have the support of all the major political parties, North and South; you have the overwhelming backing of local communities; you have the solidarity and fluent co-operation of your colleagues in An Garda Síochána, with whom you now cooperate so closely and to such great effect."
Mrs McAleese said the graduates would be police officers "in a jurisdiction and on an island that is re-imagining itself with a positivity and optimism no other generation has known".
"You are sacred custodians of this time and of the future that, with your help, will fill what John Hewitt called so memorably 'the centuries arrears'."
She said the PSNI "more than ever" reflected the diversity of the community it served and enjoyed overwhelming community support. "You will be working in a context where the old embedded culture of paramilitarism, and the violence which hallmarked it, is fading but not yet fully extinguished," she added.
"The peace that was endorsed by the Good Friday Agreement 12 years ago, when many of you were still youngsters, is growing and consolidating by steady and remarkable increments," said Mrs McAleese.
"Your work will pitch you into the turmoil and chaos of everyday life from the hazards that face every modern jurisdiction like safety on the roads, racism, child abuse and domestic violence to the degrading predatory evil of drugs and highly organised entrepreneurial crime.
"You face a local context of ongoing sectarianism and inter-communal strife but against an encouraging backdrop where so many people at community level are trying hard to turn the tide of history in favour of this precious peace."
Mrs McAleese said they were embarking as police officers not as passive spectators but as active leaders. "Already since you started your training things have changed dramatically with the devolution to Stormont of policing and justice powers, the final acts of weapons decommissioning by a range of paramilitary groups and the widespread mature, dignified and measured response to the Report of the Saville Inquiry on Bloody Sunday," she said.