Dublin, Ireland - More than 20 percent of Northern Ireland's police officers are Roman Catholics, the civilian Policing Board for the British territory said Monday, confirming a rapid increase and an important milestone in wider peacemaking efforts.
Building Catholic support for the police force is a pivotal part of a 1998 U.S.-brokered peace accord, and Catholic recruitment into the overwhelmingly Protestant force has soared in the years since due to a British policy requiring at least 50 percent of recruits to be Catholic.
About 8 percent of officers were Catholic six years ago when the heavily militarized Royal Ulster Constabulary gave way to a new-look Police Service of Northern Ireland. Today, the force is 20 percent Catholic.
The goal remains to increase Catholic involvement to 33 percent by 2010. Reaching that target could be complicated both by widespread Protestant hostility to the policy favoring Catholic recruits and the reluctance of Sinn Fein, the major Catholic-backed party, to support the police at all.
The Social Democratic and Labour Party, which represents moderate Catholics, said the recruitment figures demonstrated Catholics want to be police, if only hard-liners on both sides would let them.
"The 20 percent figure is a milestone. What people should conclude is that the policy is clearly working," said Alex Attwood, a party member who sits on the Policing Board, a joint Catholic-Protestant panel overseeing the decade-long reform effort.
Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern said the Catholic recruitment would be even higher if Sinn Fein encouraged people to join from the province's hard-line neighborhoods.
"For people from those areas it's not been easy," Attwood said in a phone interview. "Sometimes they have had to move away, sometimes relationships have broken down with family and friends because of their decision to join."
Protestant leaders have complained that the law requiring half the recruits to be Catholic is discriminatory and are pressing Britain to drop it when the requirement faces a parliamentary review next year.