The Conditions for Conflict and Change

Abstract

The literary critic and commentator Edna Longley has written about Northern Ireland as a ‘cultural corridor’, a space through which both Irishness and Britishness travel and intermingle (Longley 1993). Such a territory is by its nature home to colliding political identities, national aspirations and battles for power. In Northern Ireland the outcome was a long and violent political conflict, referred to colloquially as ‘the Troubles’. In such a complex, difficult and dangerous environment, policing has always been a critical (some would say, the critical) issue of engagement. For a long period of time, each community saw, reflected in their relationship with the police, their own national identity either protected, or rendered illegitimate by the state. In this way the culture, politics and organisational identity of the RUC were derived from, and intimately bound up with the structural dimensions of the conflict itself: institutions, equality, loyalty, representation, defence, justice.