Despite Landmark Changes in N. Ireland, Trust in Police Still Lags

BELFAST -- The two young men, in their teens or early 20s, one of them with fresh bruises on his face, walked up the Shankill Road on a busy Friday afternoon in January, carrying placards that read, "I'm a thief and a burglar."

For an hour, people poured out of shops and pubs to watch the young men, who had been caught breaking into an elderly woman's house. It had been a while since they had seen what is known here as a "walk of shame," the kind of rough justice doled out by illegal paramilitary groups during Northern Ireland's three decades of sectarian violence.

"I would love the paramilitaries to come back," said Julie Lester, 42, who described watching with delight as the housebreakers were publicly humiliated. "There's a rise in crime and drugs and we have nobody to turn to. I have really no faith in the police."

Nearly 10 years after the landmark April 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland is still struggling to create a police force fully trusted by the province's divided Catholic and Protestant communities.

In interviews this past week, officials and residents in both communities said erasing generations of mistrust of police and persuading people not to take justice into their own hands are the most critical remaining steps toward cementing peace in this conflict-weary province.

"Policing is the elephant in the room -- it needs to be sorted," said Alex Maskey, a senior member of Sinn Fein, the province's largest Catholic political party, which agreed last year to officially support a predominantly Protestant police force it had long accused of anti-Catholic bias.

Northern Ireland has rebounded from its war years with some stunning successes, including an economic renaissance.

The glittering new centerpiece of a transformed Belfast opened Thursday: Victoria Square, an $800 million shopping center with a huge glass dome rising over the downtown skyline.

Once a dreary conflict zone, Northern Ireland has been spruced up with more than $6 billion in foreign investment in recent years. Economic officials said the largest chunk has come from U.S. banks and technology and aerospace firms, which have pumped in more than $1 billion over the past five years, creating 5,000 jobs.

In the waterfront area where the Titanic was built, Belfast now has a 10,000-seat sports arena, a movie set favored by Hollywood filmmakers, and a professional hockey team, the Belfast Giants.

Last year, the province established a once-unthinkable power-sharing government. It is led by Ian Paisley, a bellicose Protestant clergyman who once referred to Pope John Paul II as "the Antichrist." Serving as his deputy is Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, a former Irish Republican Army volunteer whom Paisley had long called a terrorist.

When Paisley announced Tuesday that he would soon step down, amid a feeling among some in his party that he had become too cozy with Sinn Fein, political analysts predicted that the government was solid enough to withstand the transition to Paisley's successor -- most likely the longtime No. 2 in the party, Peter Robinson.