Politics: The title of this book is a misnomer. It is not a book about Catholics and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which could have provided a fascinating contribution by a knowledgeable reporter to our understanding of the collapse of the Northern Ireland statelet.
It is essentially a re-working and updating of the author's 1989 study, The RUC: A Force Under Fire, using new sources not available to him then.
Thus it has no insights into what it was like to be one of the few Catholic RUC officers before 1969 (23 per cent of the total force in 1924, falling to 10 per cent in 1966). Still less does it contain anything about what it was like to be one of the fewer than eight per cent of Catholic officers during the years of the "Troubles".
Similarly, it contains little about Catholic experience of being policed by the overwhelmingly Protestant and unionist RUC. Even more disappointingly, there is no attempt to gauge changes in attitudes in Catholic areas to the arrival of the new Police Service of Northern Ireland. Ryder makes a general statement about the growing acceptability of the PSNI in both communities, but cites no evidence for this. It would have been fascinating to have heard, even at this early stage, from non-Sinn Féin Catholic community leaders about their perceptions of the radical changes in policing on the ground since the implementation of the Patten Report.
So this book must be reviewed for what it is: a history of policing in Northern Ireland since the foundation of the Northern state, by the writer who is the acknowledged journalistic authority on the RUC. In this context, it makes for an uneven read. The early chapters, about the 1920s, tell a painful if familiar tale of bigotry, hatred and violence as the sectarian Protestant militias were incorporated into the statelet's new policing regime.
The author has little to say about the relatively peaceful period between the 1920s and the late 1960s. It is the central section, on the early and most violent years of the Troubles, that is the most compelling and contains the most new material, most of it clearly uncovered by the expiry of the 30-year rule on official British papers. Ryder graphically relates the confusion and panic of government ministers, senior officials and police chiefs taken totally by surprise by the ferocity of the communal clashes and the rapid breakdown of law and order in the summer of 1969.
The picture he paints is of a totally inadequate force, led by men like Inspector-General Anthony Peacock - hysterically demanding military assistance against a non-existent IRA invasion - with an ill-informed Special Branch and a frightened and overwhelmed rank and file. The other side of the picture is one of bravery in the face of what was essentially a communal uprising: by November 1970 a third of the force had been injured (and this was at a time when the Provisional IRA was only gearing up for war).
More than 30 years on - after more than 300 police deaths and 9,000 woundings - the first Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Hugh Orde, inherited a "gutted, demoralised and technically inadequate service", as neglected as the RUC had been in 1969. There was one huge difference, however. For the first time for over 80 years it was genuinely struggling to be representative of the whole community; by early 2003 the proportion of Catholic police officers had already risen to 13 per cent.
A brave new start has been made. The police are now well ahead of the politicians in the business of reconciling the warring communities in the North. Perhaps Ryder should revisit his subject in another 15 years to investigate progress in the Herculean task of policing the Catholic community in the disputed territory that is Northern Ireland.
• Andy Pollak is director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, in Armagh