REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE PSNI GRADUATION CEREMONY FRIDAY, 23RD JULY 2010
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE PSNI GRADUATION CEREMONY FRIDAY, 23RD JULY 2010
Chief Constable, members of the Faculty of the Police College and of the University of Ulster, members of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, today’s new Police College graduates, your families and friends and all other guests. This is a happy day for the most recent graduates of the Police College and it is a real pleasure for me to share it with all those who take pride in your graduation and all that it signifies. I am particularly grateful to Chief Constable Baggott for inviting me back to the College on such a very special day in your lives and careers.
Some colleges call this a “commencement ceremony.” It is particularly true for you as a group. In other colleges, graduation usually marks a scattering as students who have lived in each other’s pockets for the past few years take off into a kaleidoscope of careers, many never to encounter one another again. You are a very different cohort of graduates in many respects for you wear a common uniform, you have been trained to do the same job, a hugely important job - to be police officers, to behave in certain ways, to observe certain standards, to respect and honour the legal framework within which you work and to be aware always that when you encounter members of the public, they will see the uniform first. For in wearing it, you are an ambassador not for yourself but for the PSNI and for the laws it upholds. Your friends from student days here may scatter but not too far and life will bring you into and out of each other’s orbit over the coming years. In fact, you will continue to rely on each other in ways unknown to other graduating classes.
For those graduating today, and for your families and friends, this is a proud occasion. For all those reasons there is a weight of solemnity about this day that is unique. There is also the weight of history for the very successful transformation of policing since the implementation of the Patten recommendations has been utterly crucial to the wider transformation of Northern Ireland. Many thousands within the former RUC, and now the PSNI, worked courageously to facilitate the transition process, so much so that today Northern Ireland is rightly recognised internationally as a model for police reform.
The PSNI’s members, more than ever before, reflect the diversity of the community they serve and they enjoy overwhelming community support. You will be working in a context where the old embedded culture of paramilitarism, and the violence which hallmarked it, is fading but not yet fully extinguished. The peace that was endorsed by the Good Friday Agreement twelve years ago, when many of you were still youngsters, is growing and consolidating by steady and remarkable increments. A new culture is emerging of peaceful good neighbourliness, partnership, mutual respect and tolerance underpinned by laws and principles which conduce to the dignity of every individual in this jurisdiction and their equality of citizenship.
Your work will pitch you into the turmoil and chaos of everyday life from the hazards that face every modern jurisdiction like safety on the roads, racism, child abuse and domestic violence to the degrading predatory evil of drugs and highly organized entrepreneurial crime. You face a local context of ongoing sectarianism and inter-communal strife but against an encouraging backdrop where so many people at community level are trying hard to turn the tide of history in favour of this precious peace.
Today you join the journey into peace not as passive spectators but as active leaders. Already since you started your training things have changed dramatically with the devolution to Stormont of policing and justice powers, the final acts of weapons decommissioning by a range of paramilitary groups and the widespread mature, dignified and measured response to the Report of the Saville Inquiry on Bloody Sunday.
In this season of graduations many thousands of graduates are wondering what the future holds. They have still to make career choices. You on the other hand have long since made your choice and now you are about to live the lives you have been imagining and commence the profession for which this College has helped to prepare you. At the end of a tough process of professional formation, involving searching selection and testing, on this day the senior leadership of your profession asserts very publicly and proudly its trust in each one of you.
On this day we think with respect of all those who have honoured that trust, those who have paid with their lives and their health and the families that live today with loss and heartache. We think of you, today’s graduates, holders of that trust, commencing your careers, welcomed enthusiastically by the vast majority of citizens, still vulnerable to the tiny minority of wreckers who have set their faces like flint against the humanly decent dynamic of this peace.
In facing down the many challenges ahead you are not alone, the PSNI is not alone. You have the support of all the major political parties, North and South; you have the overwhelming backing of local communities; you have the solidarity and fluent cooperation of your colleagues in An Garda Síochána, with whom you now cooperate so closely and to such great effect. As the Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy put it, during a meeting with your Chief Constable earlier this year, ‘an attack on one member of one force is an attack on both forces.’
The oath you have taken today says you pledge to discharge the duties of Constable with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, affording equal respect to all individuals and upholding fundamental human rights. The words of that oath were carefully chosen and reflect what the people of Northern Ireland expect of their police officers not just today but every single day of your professional career. Now you are ready to live the life you have been imagining in your College days. You will be police officers in a jurisdiction and on an island that is reimagining itself with a positivity and optimism no other generation has known. You are sacred custodians of this time and of the future that, with your help, will fill what John Hewitt called so memorably “the centuries arrears.”
May you have long, happy and fulfilling careers. Congratulations to all of you and to all those who helped you to this day.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.