A recent Freedom of Information request from the Irish News revealed that just over one in five PSNI recruits in the past five years come from a Catholic background. Between 2020 and March 2025 1,377 people joined, with more than three-quarters from a Protestant background.
Now, as far as we are concerned, it wouldn’t matter if 100% of the PSNI recruits were from a Catholic background. The religion of the person firing plastic bullets at children, harassing Republicans and upholding by force the continued occupation of our country, is completely irrelevant. However, this situation is yet more evidence, if it were needed, that twenty-four years on from the rebranding of the RUC, people from a Catholic background have still to be convinced that the PSNI can ever be responsible for their safety or the safety of their communities, no matter how much effort politicians may put in to convincing us otherwise.
Despite social media campaigns, billboards, bus stops and box ticking PCSP meetings, Republicans, including Lasair Dhearg, have successfully continued to oppose the normalisation of sectarian, militarised ‘policing’, that exists solely to protect the interests of the British State in Ireland.
The actions of the PSNI over the last number of years have betrayed the reality behind the propaganda. Just recently, PSNI lobbyists, in an attempt to get yet more funding, have been telling the media that the force is at breaking point. Yet somehow they have found the time and money to arrest pensioners for protesting companies supporting Israeli genocide, harass Republican activists from multiple different groups, including Lasair Dhearg over Easter, and erect billboards across nationalist areas accusing them of being beholden to ‘paramilitaries’.
In stark contrast, violent attempts at racist pogroms in loyalist areas have been met with a response that at best could be called reluctant and at times appears to actively facilitate the destruction and burning out of peoples home, with the support of Unionist politicians, thinly veiled behind a cloak of public concern.
In another recent example, despite being caught in possession of weapons and ammunition, UVF commander Winston ‘Winkie’ Irvine, was jailed for just 30 months, with half to be served on license, after the so-called justice system decided that there was no link to terrorism, and described him as a ‘peacebuilder’.
While sectarian and racist attacks are on the rise, the PSNI are continuously late to the scene, making the same old promises afterwards. Whereas those who oppose the State are quickly criminalised.
The 1843 remarks of Karl Marx still ring true –
“The ‘police’, the ‘judiciary’, and the ‘administration’ are not the representatives of a civil society which administers its own universal interests in them and through them; they are the representatives of the state and their task is to administer the state against civil society.”
The PSNI are not there to represent the working class, whether Catholic, Protestant, or any other background. They are upholders and administrators of the ruling class and they will take whatever action they need to in order to maintain their grip on those who oppose them.
