Liam Kelly, Chairman of the “Police Federation” in the Six Counties, recently admitted that plans to grow the force to 7,000 members by 2028 are effectively dead in the water.
Despite two recent recruitment campaigns by the PSNI, Kelly has said that they are actually below the 6,500 baseline which was set in April 2025. At the same time they are losing around 350 personnel a year.
The opposition of Lasair Dhearg, along with other Republican groups, to these recent campaigns played no small part in seeing 700 fewer people applying to join the PSNI. Their cynical attempts to use local schools and youth clubs for recruitment drives and their attempts to saturate our areas with propaganda have been opposed at every turn.
There is nothing normal about a force that arrests twice as many people from a Catholic background and recruits child informants, or which has forcibly stopped and searched hundreds of thousands of people over the last number of years.
There is nothing normal about the PSNI, and their continued failure to recruit new foot soldiers shows that the people of the Six Counties reject them for what they are – the frontline force of Britain’s occupation in Ireland.
