By Jack Holland

The current demands from Sinn Fein that the Royal Ulster Constabulary be disbanded are unlikely ever to be met.

There is one obvious reason why. The RUC has the support and confidence of the majority of the Northern Ireland population. Recent surveys confirm this. One showed that 76 percent of those polled were of the opinion that the police were doing a good job, which means that even if you factor in an understandable reluctance to admit to being anti-RUC, a considerable number of Catholics must also support the force.

Another reason why Sinn Fein's demand will not be met is that the RUC has come out of the Troubles in a position of strength. It has not been defeated. In fact, if anything, the RUC is largely responsible for forcing the Provisional IRA to abandon violence as a means of achieving its aims.

A comparison with the case of the RUC's predecessor, the Royal Irish Constabulary, is instructive.

The RIC was the first organized constabulary in the British Isles. Sir Robert Peel, appointed as the chief secretary for Ireland in 1812, established the force two years later. His experiment would lay the foundations of modern policing for the rest of the United Kingdom. The new force had to deal with widespread lawlessness, with secret society's such as the Peep O' Day Boys, the Rightboys, the Levellers, the Thrashers, the Carders, and the Whiteboys, the most feared of all, waging violent campaigns against landlords and each other with sometimes horrific brutality. (The Carders were so called because they liked to maul and slash the backs of their victims with the wire brushes used to card wool.) Peel's experiment proved a success in Ireland, and by the time he left in 1818, the concept of a non-military constabulary was an accepted reality and the force was established throughout the country.

It became ôRoyalö in 1867, by which time it had some 1,600 barracks and 11,000 constables. The vast majority of RIC men were Catholics from the tenant-farmer class. It was said to be every farmer's ambition to have one son inherit the farm, one join the priesthood and one become an RIC man. However, 100 years after Peel left Ireland the the RIC's situation had changed drastically, thanks to the upsurge in support for Sinn Fein following the Easter Rising.

The rising tide of rebellion left the RIC barracks stranded in the midst of an increasingly hostile or at least unsympathetic population. The emergence of the IRA sounded the force's death knell. The first two RIC constables were shot dead in January 1919. By October 1920, 600 barracks had been abandoned and 70 completely destroyed. 117 constables had lost their lives. Some 600 men had resigned from the force. Demoralization had set in. By the time the IRA called a truce, in July 1921, another 300 had been killed.

As well, the IRA leader Michael Collins had thoroughly infiltrated his agents into the RIC's headquarters in Dublin Castle. By 1921, it was a beaten force.

In January 1922, after the signing of the Treaty, the British government, in concert with the new Irish authorities, agreed to disband the RIC. It had lasted slightly more than a century. Disbandment actually began on Feb. 8 at the same time as plans were put into operation to replace it with a new, unarmed constabulary, the Civic Guards, which would later become the Garda Siochana.

The situation in Ulster was different. When the new Northern Ireland government's proposals for forming a single police force were laid out, the intention was that it should be one-third Catholic, mainly recruited from the RIC. However, there were many in the Unionist government who distrusted the RIC as being pro-Sinn Fein - ironically enough, given what had happened to the force in the South. The policing arrangements for the North that were eventually worked out excluded many RIC men in favor of local Ulster Protestants and former members of Carson's Ulster Volunteer Force.

In spite of this, when the Royal Ulster Constabulary was finally formed, in June 1922, Catholics still represented more than 21 percent of the total membership of the new constabulary. This would be the highest it would ever reach. Sheer bigotry on the part of some leading Unionists ensured that Catholics were kept out and the target of making the force one-third Catholic was quickly abandoned. The RUC soon came to be seen as the military wing of Unionism.

It has gone through many transformations since, especially from the late 1970s, when it became effectively the spearhead of the security strategy against the paramilitaries. As such, it would prove highly successful - indeed, so successful that by 1994, around 80 percent of all Provisional IRA operations in Belfast were being intercepted or aborted, thanks to the RUC. Far from being isolated and fatally weakened as was the old RIC after the War of Independence, the RUC emerged from 30 years of political violence a more tightly knit and more highly effective counter-terrorist organization than when the Troubles started.

Of course, in the course of that battle the RUC overstepped the boundaries of what would be regarded as acceptable behavior for a civilian police force. It has been guilty of human rights violations. Under constant attack from republican groups, which claimed the lives of over 300 RUC men, it closed ranks and typically reacted with hostility to calls for reforms from human rights activists. But now that terrorism and political violence is, hopefully, on the wane in Northern Ireland, the RUC will be able to adapt to the new environment.

One suspects that Sinn Fein knows its calls for the RUC's disbandment are unrealistic, and is simply aiming high in the hope that though it will not see its demands granted, it will at least be able to impress upon the government the seriousness of Nationalist concerns about the need for a reform of the police. But the demonizing has to stop on both sides if Catholics and Protestants are to move beyond suspicion and fear to enable a reformed police force to operate for the benefit of all.