Psoni: no, in the week of the great rapprochement between Athens and Ankara, not a Greek electronics company, but another step towards the creation of stability in Northern Ireland. And as the great serendipitous organiser of these things would have it, the announcement of the formation of the Police Service of Northern Ireland came on the very day that the remains of Tom Williams were given a decent burial in Belfast, and the Greek Foreign Minister, George Papandreou, visited Turkey.
Though the timing was a little coincidental, the proximity of these events to one another was not. Things are happening in this world which we have not seen the like of before. Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a decade after the simplicities of the bipolar approach to any problem were revealed as idiocies, change is occurring everywhere.
Fresh problems
But it doesn't mean that the outcome of that change will necessarily be good; and it certainly doesn't mean that the outcome will be as people wished it to be. It is not in the nature of human beings - or the institutions they create - to achieve the results they want. We can see that in Indonesia, where UN intervention, for good and laudable reasons, seems to have fatally impaired the ability of central government to exercise its will over the fissiparous peoples of that archipelago. The outcome of solutions to any problems, as we know to our cost, is normally a fresh set of problems.
But still. It was good that poor Tom Williams was given a decent resting place, though it remains a shame - and not an altogether surprising shame - that the man whose murder led to his execution, Constable Patrick Murphy, has been as thoroughly forgotten as Tom Williams has become celebrated and mythologised, the latter not least through a song which goes: "And we never will forget, Those who planned your cruel murder, We vow we'll make them all regret. . ."
Not surprisingly, Patrick Murphy's murder doesn't merit a mention in the ballad. Williams was sentenced to death for his part in the killing, but in truth the whole sad affair was more an affray involving hot-headed youngsters than an action by determined terrorists. And just as Patrick Murphy has been forgotten down the years, so too have the policemen murdered in revenge for the death of Tom Williams - James Laird and Samuel Hamilton in Tyrone, James Lyons and later Patrick McCarthy in Belfast. Five IRA men had, very properly, been reprieved because six executions were deemed too many in exchange for one dead RUC man. The exchange which actually occurred was five RUC dead men against one dead IRA man; and today, only the IRA man is remembered.
Horatio
That does seem to be the way of memory: as a hero, popular recollection prefers the outlaw to the constable, and who will raise a monument or write a ballad to the memory of Jerry McCabe in Limerick, or the 302 officers murdered doing their duty in Northern Ireland? But their monument is greater than a standing stone or a saloon song: it is that society in the North survived. They were Horatio on the bridge; and now that times have moved on, it is right that requirements above and beyond those of courage and obedience and semi-paramilitary functions be expected of the police.
Peter Mandelson is probably the most able politician in these islands. It's a pity he found himself unable to make any nomenclatural concession to unionists: would Northern Irish Constabulary not merely have provided a titular continuity as well as adding a certain acronymic piquancy? It might also have reassured those men and women who loved the RUC, who stayed steady at the oar of law and of duty, and who feel that everything they served for is collapsing all around them.
Firstly; it is not. Just as the best traditions of the RIC and DMP resurfaced inside the new Civic Guard, later called An Garda Siochana, the best of the RUC should resurface in Psoni. But secondly, change was inevitable. There is not an institution in the world which cannot be improved; and one which served through 30 years of war was anyway going to have to be overhauled, reformed and restructured to cope with the emerging realities of the new world ahead.
Question of time
The question is: have we time? It took over 15 years for the Garda Siochana to become an effective police force in Kerry and Leitrim. How long before Psoni opens up its police stations in Crossmaglen and Carrickmore, and its writ and rule pass unhindered over the unsubdued townlands of South Armagh and brooding, restless Tyrone?
Who can say? But when Greek and Turk meet in friendship on the east of Europe, the least we can do is to provide a mirror image of amity on the continent's western flank. The time for war is well and truly gone across the sweep of Europe. The transition from Peeler to Psoni is merely a symptom of that change, as is the complete disarmament and disbandment of illegal armies. Lawful institutions have behaved splendidly. Now it is time for the unlawful ones to behave likewise. We have given them Psoni. Where, please, is the Psemtex?