NCJ Number
215692
Journal
International Criminal Justice Review Volume: 16 Issue: 2 Dated: September 2006 Pages: 77-98
Date Published
September 2006
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This article assesses the balance among police, prosecution, and court systems during three stages of Northern Ireland's history: from 1922 to the civil rights movement, from the civil rights movement to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), and from the GFA to the present.
Abstract
From 1922 to the civil rights movement in the 1960, the head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the police) in Northern Ireland took orders from the British Minister of Home Affairs, a member of the central government and consistently a Unionist politician. Thus, the leaders of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had a vested interest in maintaining the Protestant dominant majority in Northern Ireland under the colonial model of legitimacy, structure, and function that emphasized domination of a subservient population and continuation of the centralized power of the state. In the late 1960s, moderate Catholics and anti-Unionists united to protest political and economic discrimination under the colonial model. Conflict between Catholic civil rights protesters and Loyalist Protestant counter-demonstrators became so violent that the British army was sent to maintain order and the RUC was disarmed. Until the GFA, the legitimacy, structure, and function of the police and prosecution/court systems were balanced under the colonial model. The GFA marked the beginning of a political sharing that emphasized community policing, which emphasizes cooperation between police and community and police accountability to the community. The prosecution/courts, however, maintained much of the legitimacy, structure, and function of the colonial model. The elections of May 2005 showed marked gains for both the Protestant and Catholic hard-line political parties. The imbalance between the model for policing and that for prosecution/courts may lead to clashes between agencies, such that the police and prosecution/courts do not operate as a system. 2 tables and 75 references