Could anything illustrate more starkly the urgent need for a policing solution in Northern Ireland than the planting by loyalist extremists of a car-bomb at the Auld Lammas Fair in Co Antrim on Tuesday? Not satisfied with the levels of terror created by their campaign of pipe-bombings and intimidation, they sought to inflict maximum damage in the midst of a summer festival, this time using the cover-name of the Red Hand Defenders. Had the device gone off, a fireball would have scorched across the crowded main street of the town, inflicting casualties possibly on a scale comparable with Omagh.
Catastrophe was averted by a police officer who spotted the device. The area was evacuated immediately. A telephone warning which might well have come too late, according to the local police superintendent, was subsequently received at a Belfast newsroom. This time the police succeeded in their primary task of protecting life. But against a background of diminishing operational capacity and dwindling numbers, there can be no certainty that the bombers will be stopped the next time or the time after that.
Under the arrangements which will see the transition from the Royal Ulster Constabulary to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), more than half the remaining RUC cohort will be replaced within two years. Almost the entire senior command structure will have to be renewed. The RUC, effectively, will be consigned to history as surely as the RIC was in 1922. But if sections of the community withhold their support for the new arrangements, there is thus a very real danger that a vacuum will develop. Effective policing will diminish and even disappear, even in areas which have heretofore been patrolled by the RUC. Without effective policing, answerable to the law and under the control of the civil power, the streets and the neighbourhoods will remain under the sway of the paramilitaries. Ordinary people will be obliged to rely on them to keep their brand of bloody, violent order.
When Sinn FΘin or the Ulster Unionists or indeed the GAA withhold their support or dither over the new policing plans, this is what is at stake. The final plan agreed by the two governments and supported by the SDLP, does not give anyone absolutely everything they want. But by any objective measure, it provides for a police service which can be operationally efficient while being accountable and answerable to the community to an extent which is without parallel anywhere in the world. Indeed the Garda S∅ochβna in this State will be light years behind the PSNI in regard to accountability. But if the PSNI is hobbled from the beginning, its ability to discharge the fundamental duty of any police organisation - to protect life and limb - will be compromised.
Who will seek out the thugs who drop pipe-bombs into unprotected homes or who place car bombs in crowded streets? Who will protect the children and the elderly? Who will pursue the racketeers and the drug barons with their hidden fortunes of dirty money? These are the questions which public representatives and others in positions of influence have to ask themselves when they ponder the acceptability or otherwise of Dr Reid's policing proposals. If it is not the PSNI, it will have to be the IRA and its counterpart organisations in the loyalist community. Nobody who is genuinely committed to the process of building peace in Northern Ireland can want that.