John Stalker and the Return of the Irish Question

“The Stalker Affair” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), reviewed in last Sunday’s Book Review by Kevin Gallagher, tells the true story of a British constable who was appointed in 1984 to investigate three incidents of alleged murder by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the British police in Northern Ireland. John Stalker conducted a strict police investigation, nothing more, and the book he wrote about it--a kind of “police procedural”--displays neither the tricks of a novelist nor the speculations of a political philosopher. And yet, a generation from now, if peace has come to that part of the world, Stalker and his book may prove to have had something to do with it.

Stalker’s investigation was opposed from the first, he says, by the RUC’s “Special Branch,” its anti-terrorism unit; and early in his assignment, Stalker considered, sympathetically, what the RUC was up against: “I reflected on whether it would even be fair to regard some of them as being policemen at all. Were not members of that special squad in truth soldiers in a police uniform? Was it not sensible to think of them as being at war? Honest questions, but the answers came easily enough. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom; its laws are our laws, and what happens there should concern us all because it happens in our name. The Royal Ulster Constabulary is a British police force, and its members are policing a democracy in the name of the Crown.”

Stalker’s position was tacitly the longstanding British one that the violence in Northern Ireland is not a civil war and that, therefore, the Irish Republican Army and other similar groups operating there are not political but “common” criminals. Stalker simply took this position a logical step further: If these are indeed common criminals, then the police force that deals with them is a common police force, and its procedures must reflect this.

When it became clear in May, 1986, that Stalker’s investigation would conclude that all three shootings had indeed been assassinations, charges of petty financial corruption were suddenly brought against him back in his home district. He was summarily removed from the investigation--only to be replaced by the very man who had been deputed to investigate him in Manchester. Stalker was acquitted of the corruption charges, but by then his interim report on the RUC had been set aside. Later, on the basis of his successor’s report, the Margaret Thatcher government would rule that no RUC prosecutions were called for.

So far, so grim, were it not for the fact that the Thatcher government and the British people seem to have differing views about the Manchester constable with the shy smile. During his investigation and, above all, during his trial, Stalker became something of an English folk hero. When mounting legal expenses threatened his family with the loss of their home, local contributions poured in. All Stalker’s bills were paid, and there was money left for charity.

The English support for Stalker seems to have arisen not just out of sympathy for an honest policeman in trouble but also out of identification with a fair-minded Englishman caught in the middle in Northern Ireland. Until the sudden suppression of his investigation, Stalker had received good cooperation from the Englishmen, Scots and Welshmen who worked with him or to whom he reported. He received genuine, if skeptical, cooperation even from Irish nationalists. Only some of the Unionists--and above all, the RUC leadership--regarded him as a foreigner and an enemy.

Though the uncomplaining Stalker would never put it this way, this was the thanks he got for doing his job. But then, as many Britons are reported to see it, this has long been the thanks that Britain has received for doing its job of keeping the peace and preserving the union in Northern Ireland.

Relief in England at finding a symbol for this national frustration seems to have been matched in Ireland by relief at finding an ordinary Englishman--not some kind of crusading socialist but just an honest cop--confirming the existence of entrenched police abuses in the Six Counties. Stalker’s book became a best seller in Ireland as well as in Britain because it was a relief for the Irish to hear this kind of talk from someone like him.

The Stalker affair has brought into evidence the perhaps intractably large fact that only a few on either side of the Irish Sea are willing to die for either religion or the border, while many on both sides care deeply about security and due process.

Religion is a particularly misleading issue, and indirectly, Stalker’s book shows as much. James Anderton, the chief constable of Manchester, converted to Catholicism during the course of Stalker’s investigation without thereby becoming anything like a partisan for his fellow Catholics in Northern Ireland. Far from it: Anderton had a hand in suppressing Stalker’s investigation. Many of the unionists of Northern Ireland are the descendants of Protestant Scots. But Stalker remarks, quite in passing, that several of his toughest, most indefatigable investigators were Scots.

The contending sides in Northern Ireland practice several different forms of Christianity, but their contention is not itself religious. If it were, if it were impossible on inherently religious grounds for Irish and British Protestants and Catholics to live peacefully together, then how explain that they do so in Britain and in the Republic of Ireland alike? No, the struggle continues because it is a struggle over an unequal distribution of secular power, over the survival of an “ascendancy,” and not over religious belief.

Writing in the May/June Columbia Journalism Review, Jo Thomas, who once covered Northern Ireland for the New York Times, writes that for many years, the government “set the terms in which the situation is discussed, which are usually those of law and order, terrorism and counterterrorism, or religious sectarian battles in which both sides are inaccurately portrayed as equally bigoted, equally powerful, and equally unreasonable. Until recently, the British government has tried to portray itself as the principal peacemaker, the sensible intermediary between the ‘hard men’ on both sides.” Thomas accepted those terms at first, she says, but later “began to realize that religious fanaticism was not the issue. Power was: Who had it? Who benefited--and who lost out?”

For observers like Thomas, John Stalker’s book has been a step in the secularization of the Northern Irish struggle and perhaps also in its “Britannicization,” for once ascendancy is taken to be essentially a police issue, it undergoes a profound shift. It ceases to be mainly an issue between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland and becomes one mainly between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. Stalker’s implied but constant question is: There are no ascendancies in Britain; am I, as a Briti s h police officer, to countenance one in Northern Ireland?

Ordinary Britons like the ones who are buying Stalker’s book may care less about technical British sovereignty than they do that other ordinary Britons like him should no longer be stuck in the middle. By the same token, many ordinary Irishmen object less to continued British sovereignty in Northern Ireland than they do to civil inequality and partiality in the enforcement of the law.

No front populaire of ordinary Britons and ordinary Irishmen calling for such a middle course seems imminent. Indeed, though the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 may have been a small step in that direction, official relations between the two countries are for various reasons particularly bitter just now. Nonetheless the warm response in both countries to this most unexpected book may carry within it the seed of a new consensus about unfinished political business, about--as we may well call it--the still unanswered Irish question.

After his acquittal, Stalker returned to the Manchester Police Force. His superiors made it clear to him, however, that, for practical purposes, his career was over. In March, 1987, some months after returning, he resigned and has made his living since as a writer and lecturer. That his first book should have been written under such difficult circumstances is nothing he would have chosen, and yet the book itself is remarkable--the extremely rare case of a “police procedural” that, precisely because it remained such, may yet have major political consequences.