Simon Byrne, the head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), tendered his resignation to his board of directors, after a series of controversies on Monday, September 4. This crisis rocking the PSNI speaks volumes about the persisting divisions between the country's two main religious communities: the Catholics, who are for the most part nationalists in favor of Irish reunification, and the predominantly unionist Protestants, in favor of keeping the country within the United Kingdom.

At the end of August, a Northern Ireland High Court judge ruled that Byrne had unjustly punished two police officers for political reasons. In February 2021, these young officers had arrested participants in a commemoration in honor of the victims of a shooting in southern Belfast in 1992 – loyalist paramilitaries had fired on Catholic civilians, killing five – on the grounds that they were in breach of lockdown rules. The officers were partially relieved of their duties and then transferred, as their boss feared losing the confidence of Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's main pro-reunification party, whose elected representatives sit on the PSNI's board of directors.

"Losing Sinn Fein's support would have been catastrophic given that, during the troubles between Catholics and Protestants [from 1968 to 1998], this party was the political arm of the IRA [Irish Republican Army] paramilitaries, who shot dead over 300 Northern Irish policemen [policemen were then regarded as British army auxiliaries]," said Jonathan Tonge, professor at the University of Liverpool and a Northern Ireland specialist. But as soon as the High Court ruled and it became clear that Byrne, an Englishman from Surrey, had tried to forestall the anger of the nationalists, "his position became untenable as the unionists [also on the PSNI board] immediately lost their confidence in him," said the academic.

By sanctioning officers who were doing their duty, Byrne, former deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester police, lost the support of a large proportion of his troops and the unions. This distrust was also fueled by a giant data leak this summer. A database containing the contact details of 10,000 PSNI staff was mistakenly made available as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. Byrne admitted that the data had fallen into the hands of Republican (nationalist) dissidents who could use it "to intimidate or target officers and staff."

These paramilitaries are now estimated to number only a few hundred individuals, but the risk they pose is not taken lightly. "Police officers remain the number 1 target of Republican dissidents, and police officers continue to check the underside of their cars on a daily basis in case there is a bomb there," said Tonge. Earlier this year, the attempted murder of Officer John Caldwell reminded people in Northern Ireland of the reality of this threat.

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