Orde to address SDLP seminar

Northern Ireland’s most senior policeman has agreed to address an SDLP seminar on policing, it was disclosed today.

Chief constable Hugh Orde has been lined up to take part in the SDLP seminar on policing on March 1 in Belfast.

Mr Orde will join Boston police chief Paul Evans and SDLP leader Mark Durkan at the conference, which will focus on the future of policing and community policing.

Representatives from Help the Aged, the NSPCC, the Rural Development Council and the Committee on the Administration of Justice are also due to take part on a panel dealing with community policing.

An SDLP spokeswoman said: “The presence of Mr Orde is welcome.

“This conference is taking place at a highly significant time in the peace process.”

In August 2001, the SDLP became the first predominantly nationalist party in the history of Northern Ireland to urge members of its community to join the police.

The party nominated three Assembly members to the 19-member policing board on the back of promises made to introduce further policing reforms.

Legislation is currently going through Westminster implementing those additional changes.

Sinn Fein, however, has refused to take its two seats on the board. They were allocated instead as additional places for David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists and the Reverend Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists.

Republicans have insisted the British government’s police reforms do not go far enough and are demanding greater accountability to the board.

They have also demanded an end to the use of plastic bullets, and for policing and criminal justice powers to be devolved from Westminster to Stormont.

Mr Orde was named as Ronnie Flanagan’s successor as chief constable last May.

He is a former deputy assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard and was a member of a team which investigated allegations of security force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries in the killing of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989.

He officially took charge of the PSNI last September and has had to deal with allegations that the IRA operated a spy ring at Stormont and a bitter feud within the loyalist Ulster Defence Association, which recently led to Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair being sent back to jail and the expulsion of his supporters from their lower Shankill Road power-base.

He has also courted controversy, telling the US National Committee on Foreign Policy in New York last month that some members of the PSNI wanted him to fail as chief constable.

This week he offered to meet representatives of the families of those killed and wounded on Bloody Sunday after he claimed in a newspaper interview that the Saville Inquiry was wasting millions of pounds.

The SDLP policing seminar will take place on March 1 as Ulster Unionists gather for their annual general meeting ahead of Mr Blair and Mr Ahern’s push for a deal to break the deadlock in the peace process.