It is not surprising that Flanagan has risen through the ranks in a 30-year career to take the top policing job in the province. If you could design your own ideal chief constable to help steer Northern Ireland through a time where peace hangs in the balance you would probably create another Ronnie Flanagan. Flanagan himself would shun the idea that he is a born leader, though I believe thats the case. The only time he seemed irritated was when I asked him whether there was any reason why he had been chosen for some of the toughest jobs in the force in previous years.
To take just one example Flanagan was selected in 1987 to run the tasking and co-ordinating group from Gough barracks in Armagh which directed police and soldiers involved in the undercover war along the border from South Down to West Fermanagh. This brings to mind Jacques Nasser who made his name at Ford by taking on the jobs no one else wanted, or Nick Scheele, also at Ford, who turned round Jaguar when no one believed it was salvageable. Flanagan assured me that he did not plan his career in this way and, if anything, would rather have had the easiest job in policing. He is and has always been driven by the desire to serve all the peoples of Northern Ireland and is loathe to take any special credit for the forces formidable record in maintaining law and order during the past three decades of sectarian violence.
If Flanagan is egotistical at all, it doesnt show. He says he never tried to choose particular postings: Whether you ended up in them or not was a matter for other people to decide. What I can say is that I have relished every single job including my current one. Besides, he adds, even his current job is not that difficult and is made easier by the calibre of people that I have the privilege to work with.
Flanagan says that growing up in a family that was loosely Northern Ireland Labour Party in a mixed Catholic and Protestant Belfast community instilled in him a respect for people and a healthy lack of bigotry. His comment that people were always on hand for each other without being intrusive was reminiscent of words used by the football manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, in his recent autobiography. In both cases, the communities were built around the local shipyards and both Flanagan and Ferguson seem to have gained personal strength from the place of their childhood.
Flanagan says that his father, who had a pretty disagreeable job in the shipyards, always put his children first. He was one of those who came home with the unopened pay packet, smoked an ounce of tobacco a week and didnt drink at all. He also sometimes walked to work so he could save the bus fare for his children. Flanagan was the youngest with one older sister and four older brothers. He remembers how he would help his brothers to get ready to go out with their girlfriends perhaps shining their shoes for threepence. And when the brothers were preening themselves they would ask their father how they looked. Flanagan recalls that he usually replied, Whod be looking at you anyway?
This sense of proportion has stayed with Flanagan ever since. In fact, he thinks it has made him better equipped to deal with some of the very tough media interviews today. He reflects, All you can do when asked a question is answer it and if people dont like the answer the world isnt actually going to come to an end. He believes that being able to say what you think without having to force your views on others is at the heart of Northern Irelands problems. What we need in Northern Ireland more than anything is confidence in our own background so that we can be proud of it without ever needing to push it down someones throat, without feeling the need to be ashamed of it, or feeling any need to submerge it. When we get to that point well be well on the way to solving all our troubles.
Understandably the fate of the RUC is intertwined with the peace process itself. Since the Anglo-Irish agreement created the two Irelands in 1922, the RUC has had to contend with the Republican view that the force exists to shore up the Protestant majority (now about 60% of the population). The recent Patten Report has made recommendations for wide-ranging changes which are meant to help shape a force that can be accepted by all communities in the province. At present about 90% of the force is Protestant and Patten recommends that the recruiting process is geared to change the Catholic/Protestant ratio to 50/50 within 10 years. At the time of going to press, the report was under attack from the SDLP and its recommendations in danger of being shelved.
Flanagan is the first to accept that the RUC is grossly imbalanced and welcomes any measure that would improve things. Patten recommends that recruitment is handled by a civilian agency for the first time and that the 50/50 ratio should be applied to all candidates who score above a set pass mark. He notes that this is quite a change from the past when the force would take in the people who had scored the highest of all candidates. He reckons that there might be some interesting legal challenges from candidates who might, for instance, have scored 98% but been passed over by those who scored 68%.
Catholics have been reluctant to join the RUC in part because of threats of violence and intimidation against them and their families. Flanagan agrees that has been an important factor but not the only one. More optimistically, he notes that since the IRAs original cease-fire in 1994 Catholic applicants have risen from about 12% to 22%. He thinks that if there is sufficient encouragement from nationalist opinion-formers, republican politicians and the Catholic Church, there will be young Catholic men and women coming forward in numbers that we have never seen before.
The most controversial of Pattens recommendations though has been the proposal that the force change its name to the Northern Ireland Police Service and drop its royal crest. This change provoked a storm of protest from many Unionists who feel that this would dishonour RUC officers who have been killed or maimed in the past. Flanagan says that the crest and title are as dear to me as any member of the organisation. But he adds, At the end of the day we are public servants so its for the public to decide.
While the IRA is under pressure from Unionists to decommission its weapons, the RUC is also expected to change into a less militaristic police force. Flanagan doesnt oppose the idea that the police force should cease to be an armed force capable of fighting terrorism. However, he points to the fact that he has a duty of care to protect all citizens of Northern Ireland. He can only make changes in small, incremental steps as long as terrorist groups on both sides of the sectarian divide continue to exist and hold weapons. Indeed, the emergence of the splinter Republican terrorist group, the Real IRA, in the past few years demonstrates that the situation is far from safe. It was believed to be responsible for the shocking Omagh bombing of August 1998 in which 29 people died and 220 were injured representing the greatest loss of life in any single atrocity in Northern Ireland.
Flanagan says that people forget that only 30 years ago, when he joined the force, the RUC was unarmed. However, following outbreaks of lawlessness such as Bloody Friday in Belfast in 1972, it became necessary to redefine the forces role. After 1976 the RUC was given the task of maintaining law and order above all else, with the British armed forces there to assist them in that duty.
Flanagan vividly remembers Bloody Friday during which 26 bombs were set off in 90 minutes, killing 11 people and injuring 130. He was a young police officer then, assigned to the streets of Belfast. He says that to have seen the impact of people blown to pieces in a whole series of no-warning bombings had a huge impact. Personally, he came to the belief that everything must be done to bring that violence to an end. Now, 28 years later Flanagan is hopeful that peace can be brought about. He is careful to say that it will be a difficult process. But he believes that the dark days of 1972, for instance, when 500 people died, have gone forever.
He regrets that some people fail to recognise why the RUC armed itself in the first place: Thats one of the sadnesses people dont realise that we only gradually began to fortify ourselves when our buildings were attacked by explosive devices; that we only began to travel in armoured cars when our vehicles were being shot up by automatic weapons; and that we only had to wear flak jackets and be accompanied by soldiers when our officers were murdered.
For an outsider it is hard not to feel immense awe for the officers, both Protestant and Catholic, who have served in the RUC knowing that they and members of their families could be killed or maimed at any given time. Flanagan does not feel that there should be any particular kudos for officers they know the risks and have chosen to serve in the force. He says, however, that it was right that the George Cross, recently awarded to RUC officers, included their families. He says, In Northern Ireland police officers have been attacked on and off duty, they have been attacked in their homes, they have been attacked while out shopping with their families. They joined knowing that those were the dangers. What I expect from society is an understanding of the position they find themselves in.
Flanagan is clearly immensely proud of how the RUC has held the line in the Troubles. To emphasise the scale of the impact on the RUC, he compares the numbers of its casualties with Englands police force, bearing in mind the difference in their respective populations: Our 302 murdered police officers becomes something in the order of 10,000 murdered officers in England; our 8,000 officers seriously injured down through the years becomes something in the order of 250,000. I wonder what sort of policing arrangements would have been put in place in England [with such casualties]? I suggest there would have been much more Draconian measures than those in which we engaged. But, he stresses, actual peace will only happen once all communities have accepted it.
Flanagan recently debated the motion Peace cannot be delivered through the barrel of a gun at the Oxford Union. Those arguing against the motion used the former Yugoslavia as an example of peace being secured only through force. Flanagan had recently visited some of his officers who had been assigned to security duty in Kosovo. He spoke to a Serbian woman whose family has to have 24-hour protection and heard her gratitude for that protection. But, he says, is that peace? It may be an absence of violence, but it cannot be called peace. He thinks that the RUC, therefore, cannot deliver peace, they can only deliver an opportunity where the people of the province can bring peace.
The Patten Report made much of the fact that a police force should be able to serve and have good relations with every community. Flanagan couldnt agree more with this view. He says that he and the RUC are ready to embrace change but he does worry that some communities in the province are not. He says, We stand as an organisation ready to embrace change, we stand willing to embrace it enthusiastically. The question that has yet to be answered I feel is whether all those communities we exist to serve stand similarly ready to play their full part in partnership. Because if they dont, then of course the overall service will be debilitated and thats something very much to be guarded against.
The RUC has had to change many times in its relatively short life. Indeed, Flanagan remembers some of the older officers serving in the force in the 1970s when another official report called on the force to make huge changes. He recalls, When I joined I was young and supposedly part of the change there were all these people who were supposedly old hands who might have been expected to be resistant. But far from it: they were innovators in their own right and wanted to see change.
The biggest challenge facing Flanagan now is to ensure that he and the officers who choose to remain in the force do embrace change without the process undermining the forces ability to carry out its duties. Flanagan remembers Willie Junkin, who was inspector and then chief inspector when Flanagan was a sergeant at Castlereagh, Belfast. Junkin, he says, seemed to me so wise, so that everything that ever arose he seemed to have seen before. Flanagan recalls once filling out an internal questionnaire which asked what attributes he thought he was bringing to the job. Thinking of his early mentor, Junkin, he wrote, ability to see around corners. One can only hope that Flanagan, who heads the force that has to continue keeping the peace in a time of huge promise, can continue to see around corners.
Further reading
The RUC 1922-2000: A Force Under Fire by Chris Ryder, Arrow (2000)
The Force for Change by Gary Mitchell, Nick Hern (2000)
A New Beginning: Policing in Northern Ireland The Report of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland (The Patten Report)
