State Violence by Raymond Murray Read Free Book Online

break the law in the name of the law there is no law.’
    Catholics think that Sir Hugh Annesley and other senior RUC officers should attend meetings of Catholics and listen to what they have to say, not presume that they know why Catholics will not join the RUC.
    In justice the sheer weight of the Irish Catholic nationalist tradition demands a change in the structures of the RUC. The recent census shows a 43% Catholic population, a growing one. In numbers the Catholic religion is the principal religion. Catholics comprise half of all young people in the north and a majority in most of the physical area of Northern Ireland.
    It seems ridiculous that young RUC men from Larne, Coleraine, Comber, and Ballymena should police south Armagh and east Tyrone, west Belfast or Derry. In 1920 the number of Catholics and Protestants in the RIC in Belfast was almost equal. What a contrast to today’s inequality!
    Even from an economic point of view the combined forces of the RUC, Royal Irish Rangers, together with other security jobs and ancillary workers, entail very substantial employment, overwhelmingly for Protestants. This offends against social justice and the principle of power-sharing.
    The Anglo-Irish Conference should spearhead a radical change in the police force in the north. There should be serious study of the possibility of regional divisions, or perhaps a second line police force that would separate the ‘paramilitary’ division from an unarmed civilian police force – the latter comprising all religions, culturally tolerant and carrying out the routine business of police work outside of the military conflict.
    On 26 August 1969 an advisory committee was appointed by the then Minister of Home Affairs, R. W. Porter, ‘to examine the recruitment, structure and composition of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and their respective functions and to recommend as necessary what changes are required to provide for the efficient enforcement of law and order in Northern Ireland’. Lord Hunt who was chairman of the committee underlined the essential problem in his report: ‘Policing in a free society depends on a wide measure of public approval and consent. This has never been obtained in the long term by military or paramilitary means. We believe that any police force, military in appearance and equipment, is less acceptable to minority and moderate opinion than if it is clearly civilian in character, particularly now that better education and improved communication have spread awareness of the rights of civilians’ (paragraph 81).
    Over two decades later, this objective remains to be fulfilled.
    Some of the ideas in this paper were originally outlined by me in a plan for the restructuring of the RUC at a sociological conference in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, in 1991. This text was submitted to Initiative ’92 and the Opsahl Commission. It was subsequently published in Fortnight magazine and as a separate broadsheet.
The Repatriation of the Executed

Introduction
    On 2 September 1942, Tom Williams, a member of the IRA, aged 19 years, was executed and buried at Crumlin Road Prison, Belfast. He had accepted responsibility for the death of Constable Patrick Murphy of the RUC. It is now over fifty years since his burial and the National Graves Association, following consultation with surviving relatives, have deemed it an appropriate time to request the exhumation of his remains and their reburial with full religious rites in consecrated ground where relatives would have dignified access.
    There have been a number of precedents of similar nature:
    1. The celebrated repatriation from Pentonville Prison of the remains of Sir Roger Casement in 1965.
    2. The repatriation and reburial on 5 and 6 July 1967 of the remains of Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, executed at Wandsworth Prison on 10 August 1922.
    3. The repatriation and reburial on 8 July 1969 of the remains of two IRA members,