Policeman's Ulster funeral unites leaders in grief

[April 06, 2011]  BERAGH, Northern Ireland (AP) -- Government and church leaders from across Ireland joined several thousand mourners Wednesday for the funeral of a Catholic policeman slain by IRA dissidents -- a rare killing that has highlighted the dramatic social changes of Northern Ireland's peace process.

Constable Ronan Kerr, 25, was killed Saturday by a booby-trap bomb hidden under his car outside his home in the town of Omagh. A new recruit barely weeks into the job, Kerr was the first member of Northern Ireland's security forces to be slain since March 2009, when IRA dissidents shot to death a policeman and two off-duty British soldiers.

Kerr came from nearby Beragh, a predominantly Catholic village nestled in rolling County Tyrone hills where, until recent years, the Irish Republican Army enjoyed strong support and police were viewed with hostility as a Protestant occupation force.

But on Wednesday, a sea of ashen-faced humanity, Protestant and Catholic alike, packed the sidewalks to honor Kerr as a peacemaker. Police, family and friends took turns carrying his casket -- topped with his officer's cap and leather gloves -- down the main street as the village church bell tolled slowly.

Images of transformed times, of a society determined to leave behind four decades of conflict that killed 3,700 people, could be seen in every direction.

The guard of honor lining the roadway included, on one side, Police Service of Northern Ireland officers in their dark green uniforms -- police who once entered Beragh only if wearing flak jackets and accompanied by British troops. On the other side stood young athletes from Beragh's Gaelic Athletic Association, a lynchpin of Irish Catholic life that until only a decade ago banned police officers from membership.

Outside the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Beragh, Kerr's family demonstrated remarkable poise as they greeted a cavalcade of Ireland's leadership: the heads of the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist churches; the commanders of the police forces in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; the new prime minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny; and the leaders of Northern Ireland's surprisingly stable Catholic-Protestant government.

First Minister Peter Robinson, a Protestant, had never attended a Catholic church service before. And the Catholic leader, Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, had never attended a policeman's funeral before.

Robinson said he understood that many Ulster Protestants consider it a sin to attend any Catholic ceremony, a view he normally observes himself -- but as government leader he had a duty to defend the policeman's sacrifice and honor his family's law-and-order stance.

"I hope people will understand that when dissidents murder a young man, that it is right that the political establishment stands up and makes it very clear that they stand with this family," Robinson said.

Just as striking was the sight of Sinn Fein's McGuinness, accompanied by party leader Gerry Adams, who also was attending his first police funeral. They walked up to the church side by side with Robinson and Kenny, who rose to power last month in Dublin and was making his first official trip to Northern Ireland.

For decades McGuinness and Adams were commanders of the IRA, an underground group that killed nearly 300 police officers and maimed thousands more during a failed 1970-1997 campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and into the Irish Republic. But today, McGuinness describes the IRA dissidents as traitors and Catholic police officers like Kerr as heroes.

Several IRA splinter groups oppose the IRA's 1997 cease-fire and its 2005 decision to renounce violence and disarm. Today, as a top priority, they seek to intimidate members of Northern Ireland's Irish Catholic minority from joining the police.

Boosting Catholic involvement in the police ranks alongside the Catholic-Protestant government as the major success of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord. The force was just 8 percent Catholic a decade ago but is more than 30 percent Catholic today.

Catholic backing for law and order presents a fundamental threat to IRA diehards. The dissidents live in Catholic areas, run a wide range of criminal rackets from counterfeiting to fuel smuggling, and remain committed to the traditional IRA goal of overthrowing Northern Ireland, not reforming it.

[Associated Press; By SHAWN POGATCHNIK]

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