Getting Stopped

By AM Thursday, May 9, 2013

Share Tweet Share Share Email

I was in Belfast shortly before Christmas sorting out those last minute things with family before the great man began his earthward descent. I had deposited the kids with their aunt on the side of town I had grown up in and met up with friends, sampling the city’s Guinness in one of my old down town haunts. The following morning I got picked up by a close family friend who is also somebody I had been in the H Blocks with. He suggested we go out for breakfast before I headed off to pick up the kids and make the train journey home to Drogheda.

My friend has held onto his traditionalist republican beliefs long after the Provos went Stater and learned to love what they had for long professed to hate.  It hasn’t made him the friend of those who turned the Provos. He and I disagree on quite a bit but as he pointed out recently there are people who are not going to let something as disreputable as politics ruin friendships of many years standing.

When he picked me up I asked him was he still getting hassle from the cops. ‘Every day’ was his terse response while I hoped this day would be an exception. Like many things I have hoped for this too would elude me. On our way down the Andersonstown Road the blue light started flashing and the siren blared. I knew instinctively it was not an emergency seeking our vehicle to give way; that it was going to be one of those everyday events my friend experienced. We drifted down the road for a few hundred yards before pulling into the side. A cop came up from behind and opened my door. He asked my friend for his licence which was passed to him with a fair measure of contempt and returned in mutual fashion. That was the sum of the conversation between the British cop and the Irish republican which I was getting a ringside view of. The tension thickened the air. The cop then asked for my details. The Drogheda address seemed to surprise him as a frown descended over his features.

Being a British cop he would see Drogheda as being part of a foreign country. He walked off and came back a minute or two later with a few more questions, obviously verification ones, addresses where I had previously lived in the city. He also asked me to display a tattoo, before telling us we could go on our way.

It was all very formal and lacking in overt aggression but I sensed the situation was never more than a second away from being ugly. Nobody likes getting pulled to the side by the cops. That they did not search either of us or the vehicle confirmed they were on a fishing expedition. They knew who my friend was but wanted to find out who was in the car with him.

It was low level stuff for sure but if you are getting it day in day out it becomes intrusive and is bound to increase resentment. We have arrived at a situation where the cop views somebody challenging the Provo narrative as undermining the British state position and therefore in need of being dealt with. It is pretty clear that Gerry McGeough was the target of political policing. He was one of those unwanted members of the public that the law disposed of because he was proving too articulate in his critique of Sinn Fein and the roll of his electoral stone had to be halted before it began to gather voting moss. In more recent times we have witnessed the malevolent and vindictive PSNI handling of Alan Lundy’s dissent from the Stater position of the Provos.

Meanwhile, former republicans in Sinn Fein don’t get stopped or hassled They don’t have their homes raided - apart from the odd 12th of July incursion just to remind them who really is Mayor of Derry - or get set up like Stephen Murney or Alan Lundy. Once you go Stater the state will for the most part give you a bye ball, even look the other way when a bit of illegality is engaged in and on occasion allow you to stand in fine portly posture to be photographed alongside the chief constable as if you are auditioning for a prize pig competition. That you were convicted for killing two British soldiers, suggesting that the Casement killings were somehow okay in a way that the Masserene ones were not, seems just something in passing. I wonder what Pamela Brankin - the mother of Mark Quinsey - who Suzanne Breen wrote both poignantly and brilliantly about, made of all that prior to her untimely death.

While the Belfast experience was at the lower end of the scale, and for me little to complain about, for others it is part of an overall campaign of harassment visited on them daily, in their homes, on the streets, at work, shopping, driving, picking their kids up from school. I can return to Drogheda where I have to stop the Gardai if I want their attention rather than them stopping me.

Back in 1997 during a RUC search of my home the inspector in charge, being of the more polite variety, asked if he could sit on a chair. Once planted there he began a conversation about policing, asking me if I felt the police would ever be accepted. I told him that indifference was about as much as he could hope for which prompted the philosophical response that he could live with that. But where indifference or lack of enthusiasm may have kicked in for a few years after the name change, the traditional republican resentment towards the PSNI is being bulked out with serious resentment that seemed to have ebbed away when I lived in Belfast.

Nor can it be argued with any plausibility that the hostility towards the cops is the residue of a supposedly recalcitrant and diminishing band of implacable republicans unable to adjust to the post conflict world. Even Sinn Fein, so eager to suck the truncheon in 2007, now finds that it has been sold a pig in a poke; something Gerry Kelly seemed to confirm in his speech at the party's recent ard fheis.  

Some months back Matt Baggott indicated publicly that he wanted to attend a Sinn Féin ard fheis. He then followed that up by tasking the PSNI to facilitate illegal loyalist parades and by his action, left the Short Strand area open to continuous sectarian abuse and physical attack ... You might note his absence from our gathering here today. He has lost the confidence of the republican and nationalist people and if he is in any doubt about that, let him hear it from this ardfheis ... The old guard interfering with the ombudsman’s office; the refusal to give crucial evidence to inquests; the scandal of rehiring retired officers on huge financial severance packages; the different approaches to civilians and those with military backgrounds in HET investigations; the different approaches in policing between loyalist and republican demonstrations as witnessed in the so-called flag protests.

The state of affairs Sinn Fein complains about is one that Sinn Fein brought about in its lust for power without principle. Its decision to politically endorse an armed British police force with the same powers, even more, than it had when called the RUC has made possible what many gave their lives trying to make impossible.