Northern Ireland police cleared of bias over Republican funeral

Northern Ireland’s police force made mistakes in their handling of a massive republican funeral that breached Covid-19 guidelines but showed “no bias” in neither stopping the event nor charging any of the hundreds that attended, an official watchdog said on Monday.

Sinn Féin’s deputy first minister Michelle O’Neill and her party leader Mary Lou McDonald were among the crowd that escaped sanction for thronging the streets at the funeral of Bobby Storey, a prominent IRA member, last June, a display that incensed unionists and fuelled claims of two-tier policing.

First minister and outgoing Democratic Unionist party leader Arlene Foster called on police chief Simon Byrne to quit over failing to prosecute O’Neill and hundreds of others who breached Covid-19 restrictions by attending the funeral.

A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services found that the PSNI should have done more to encourage compliance with Covid regulations before the event, and kept better records of conversations with the funeral’s organisers.

“The PSNI faced the complex challenge of policing a politically sensitive funeral while also trying to interpret the confusing Covid-19 regulations,” Matt Parr, of the inspectorate, said on Monday, as his office published an 81-page report into the affair.

“The service took a sensitive approach, and ultimately achieved what it set out to do — prioritising public security over compliance with the regulations.”

Parr added that the “complex and frequently changing nature of the rules would have made it difficult to prove to a court that any of the attendees at Bobby Storey’s funeral had knowingly committed an offence — and we therefore agree with the decision not to prosecute”.

Mourners for Storey included 24 elected representatives from Sinn Féin, the largest republican party, some of whom posed for photos with no masks or social distancing.

Unionists have argued that the 20-year-old PSNI takes a lighter touch approach to policing republican communities, an overcorrection from its forerunner the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was an overwhelmingly protestant force.

Parr said the PSNI “would have taken the same approach if the funeral was held in a different community” but that the service did have “lessons to learn” from its handling of the funeral.

These include taking a more proactive role ahead of events likely to breach Covid regulations, keeping records of conversations with event organisers and carrying out a “formal debrief” after any policing operations.

“You have to take that on the chin, listen to the criticism and move on,” Byrne, the police chief, said in reaction, adding that the service needed “to work hard to convince, particularly the protestant/unionist/loyalist communities that we are here to police them just the same as anyone else”.

The DUP, the biggest party in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, said Monday’s report into events surrounding the funeral of Bobby Storey showed the PSNI had “seriously undermined public confidence in policing”.

“The unionist community, as well as every family who made huge personal sacrifices to abide by the restrictions on funerals during the pandemic, will rightly view this report with scepticism,” said Mervyn Storey, a member of the regional assembly from North Antrim. The DUP wants Northern Ireland’s policing board to look at the “impact of police failings on support for the police and rule of law” in the context of the Storey funeral and “in relation to allegations of two-tier policing”.

Northern Ireland’s justice minister, Naomi Long, of the centrist Alliance party, said the report concluded that the failings on how PSNI engaged with the funeral’s organisers were “not especially serious” and “did not justify individual officers being censured or called upon to resign”.

“The report also highlights that all politicians and community leaders have a part to play in working with the police to build and maintain public confidence in policing, and that they should be mindful of the consequences, intended or otherwise, of their comments,” she added.