Policing Board under pressure to ratify training site

Members of Northern Ireland’s policing board were under pressure today to ratify moves to site a new £80m (€118.6m) officer training academy at a food science centre.

Police chiefs have endorsed plans to build the state-of-the-art complex beside the Loughry Agricultural College in Cookstown, Co Tyrone.

Authoritative sources confirmed today a plot of up to 90 acres has been chosen as the best possible option from a shortlist of three.

Business and civic leaders in the mid-Ulster town are stunned that the area has emerged as the favoured option for new world-class facilities to train chief constable Hugh Orde’s recruits.

As well as training hundreds of fledgling Police Service of Northern Ireland officers, siting the college there would also provide a massive economic boost for the area.

Representatives examined top police colleges in north America and Europe as part of the moves to achieve the highest possible standard of facilities.

But the proposal still has to be endorsed when Mr Orde’s deputy, Paul Leighton, puts it to a full meeting of Professor Desmond Rea’s policing board in Belfast tomorrow.

One source said today: “Cookstown’s the one we want, but still need to get this passed by the board.

“No one can predict what they will do.”

The other sites considered were private lands at Nutt’s Corner and neighbouring Crumlin, Co Antrim.

Mr Orde will want construction on the college to start as quickly as possible in an urgent attempt to shift the training facilities away from the cramped and dilapidated Garnerville buildings in east Belfast.

The project is almost certain to be put out to tender within the next few months, but it could be 2007 before the first recruits are accepted at the new complex.

Up to 26 possible locations were considered by a team of senior police officers, policing board members and Northern Ireland Office officials.

Cookstown was chosen, however, following one of the most sensitive processes of its kind in Northern Ireland in more than 30 years.

Businessmen and political representatives in Derry, who have never forgotten the decision not to site the University of Ulster at the city in the late 1960s, were again angered by original criteria for the training college, which stated that it must be built within 45 miles of Belfast.

But even though a powerful lobby group managed to get that rule overturned so bids could come in from across Northern Ireland, Derry was again overlooked.

Instead, policing representatives were drawn to a plot of between 80-90 acres of land close to Loughry, the British government’s main food science centre in Northern Ireland.

The site is also in the middle of the Mid Ulster Westminster constituency represented by Martin McGuinness, chief negotiator with Sinn Féin, which still refuses to back Northern Ireland’s new police service.

Members of the working group visited the Ontario Police College in Canada and the New York State Police Academy in Albany, NY last year.

Representatives also attended the Drug Enforcement Administration training academy at Quantico, Virginia, following an invitation from former Police Oversight Commissioner Tom Constantine.

Mr Constantine, the ex-New York police chief monitoring changes to the force in Northern Ireland, has been scathing about the poor quality of training facilities available.

Under the Patten blueprint for transforming policing in Ulster it was recommended that a new academy should be up and running by 2007.

Mr Orde has also made replacement of the Garnverville complex, which opened in February 1986, a top priority. For 50 years before that recruits were trained in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh.

Attention will now focus on tomorrow’s meeting of the policing board. With time running out for the academy to be built on schedule, members will be under pressure to back the favoured site.

But one source cautioned: “No one should make a judgment call on what the board will do about this.”