Northern Ireland must not be saddled with the world's largest "re-investigation industry" when dealing with the past, the chairman of the North's Police Federation has told its annual conference.
Mr Terry Spence said yesterday that a South African-style truth commission must be ruled out as a means of addressing the legacy of the Troubles. He said that the federation, which represents PSNI members up to the rank of chief inspector, believed that a method of facing up to the past was required that "allows the individuality of grief to find expression and, through time, eventual comfort".
The Consultative Group on the Past led by former Church of Ireland primate Lord Eames and former policing board vice-chairman Denis Bradley, must have the widest possible remit, he told the conference at the La Mon Hotel on the outskirts of east Belfast.
"There can be no truth commission included in their recommendations, especially when one of the leading proponents of a truth commission cannot even admit that he was in the IRA," said Mr Spence, in an obvious reference to Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams.
"All of us would be better thinking about the shared future of Northern Ireland and of our opportunity to provide a very different legacy than endlessly trampling the still raw battlefields of the past," he added.
"The focus of the peace must be moved from how we deal with the past to how we deal with the future."
Mr Spence emphatically rejected recommendations from some politicians for the PSNI to become an unarmed police force. He said that in the last six months there were "over two dozen terrorist-related incidents specifically directed at the police, ranging from an officer being shot, to several moving house and to aborted mortar attacks on our stations".
"Without personal weapons officers would be sitting ducks for terrorists or would be vulnerable to street attacks by mobs. Too many people, in both communities, harbour a hatred of the police - a disaffection fostered by years of paramilitary and malign political influence." He said creating a normalised police force would be greatly advanced if there were matching moves in the nationalist and loyalist communities.
"Sinn Féin should call time on the IRA army council and the UDA and their equally murderous co-travellers, the UVF and LVF, should vanish out of existence," he said.
"There is no place for paramilitary structures in a normal society. There was no place for them during the Troubles and if the people are to become genuinely free of the past, then these parasitic criminal organisations must go," he added.
"The irony is not lost on my members that the willingness to embrace the rule of law, while it is not universal and is a little forced in some respects, is at times more evident among nationalists and republicans than among hardline loyalists," said Mr Spence.
Northern Secretary Shaun Woodward told the conference that Northern Ireland's policing arrangements were now a model used around the world.
"Your dedicated service to policing during a period of great change in Northern Ireland has helped to create a police service that is supported by all sections of the community and is respected by other police forces across the world," he said.
