Catholic Police Guild calls for PSNI review after ‘disappointing’ recruitment

Supt Gerry Murray said policing has ‘never been inviting to people from the Catholic community’.

The chair of Northern Ireland’s Catholic Police Guild called for an independent review of the “culture and recruitment” of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), after it emerged that just a quarter of applicants in a recent recruitment drive came from a Catholic background.

Supt Gerry Murray said the statistics reported by Chief Constable Jon Boutcher on 11 February were “disappointing”. A recruitment campaign that ended last week received 3,500 applications, with 27 per cent from a Catholic background. In the 2021 census, 46 per cent of Northern Ireland’s population identified as Catholic and 43 per cent as Protestant or other Christian.

“Policing for the Catholic community has never been in their DNA,” said Supt Murray, adding that policing has “never been inviting to people from the Catholic community”.

He said security concerns, such as a data breach in August 2023 – which revealed the names of almost 10,000 PSNI employees online for several hours – remained a “barrier of entry” to Catholics who can face difficulties within their community. The PSNI confirmed at the time that the list of names was accessed by dissident republican groups.

“The data breach was a sharp reminder to us all of issues of safety,” Murray said. “It might have gone off the headlines but it is still there.”

The chair of the Police Federation of Northern Ireland Liam Kelly said “major societal changes” were required to “get to the point where [Catholics] can seek a career in policing without suffering intimidation or threats”.

“Applicants should not feel they are going to lose their family networks or their friends but, sadly, too many feel that is exactly what would happen if they became police officers,” he said.

Murray called for a review on the model of Baroness Casey’s year-long review of the Metropolitan Police, which reported in March 2023 that the force was “failing women and children” and found “institutional racism, sexism and homophobia”.

Some commentators called for the reintroduction of the “50-50” recruitment policy adopted from the PSNI’s foundation in 2001 until 2011, which required that “an equal number of Protestant and Catholics would be drawn from the pool of qualified candidates”. 

This was one of the proposals of the Patten Report, whose recommendations led to the reform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, with its history of discrimination against Catholics, into the PSNI as part of the peace process. Recent PSNI data shows that 66 per cent of its officers are “perceived as Protestants”.

The leader of the Democratic Unionist Part Gavin Robinson rejected calls for the return of 50-50 recruitment, saying the PSNI should move beyond the “craze of woke quotas”. He said the policy undermined “meritocracy, deepened division and ignored real policing challenges”.

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