The force was with him

There are many things that Richard Latham can be accused of, but lacking bottle isn’t one of them.

Having spent the first five years of his police career as a member of the Sussex Special Branch, he decided in 1991 that he wanted a transfer. To the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

“People assume that I had some sort of family connection with Northern Ireland – or a religious/ political axe to grind – but my motivation for joining the RUC was entirely professional,” Latham insists. “ One of my Special Branch jobs was to monitor passengers at Gatwick Airport for potential terrorist suspects. The work was interesting and demanding, and got me to thinking that, as a policeman, Northern Ireland presents you with a unique range of challenges. I look back now and think, ‘God, I didn’t know the half of it’, but I don’t regret any of the time I spent here.”

Finally deciding in 1999 that he’d had enough of being a target – “You go to work and you might be shot dead. You imagine being horribly maimed in a bomb blast. You come home and wonder if you’ll be shot at the door. You go to bed with a revolver on the bedside cabinet” – Latham set about writing his newly-published book, Deadly Beat: Inside The Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Eschewing the Rambo-isms that are normally associated with such tomes, Latham tells his story with an even-handedness that might surprise Republicans.

“There’s mention in the book of the time I helped search a village and felt like part of an occupying army,” he proffers. “The thing you strive not to do as a policeman is take sides, but, y’know, you’re only human. Whatever about some of the older members of the force, I very, very rarely heard officers of my own age making bigoted remarks. Or, indeed, political ones. Most of the RUC are from middle-class districts where you tend to mix with both sides of the community, and aren’t under the same pressure to take political or religious sides. Even on the way to an incident, you were far more likely to hear last night’s football being discussed than the wrongs and rights of a particular situation.”

Which isn’t to say that all RUC officers are liberal free-thinkers.

“I had a colleague say to me in an operational situation that, because I’m English, he hoped I was the first one shot dead. His hatred of me was equal to that of the terrorists, which was a bit of a shock to the system.

“The level of professionalism tended to vary, depending on where you were based. When I was down in Fermanagh on the Mobile Support Unit, for instance, I never saw anything that could be construed as excess force or brutality. Which may have been due to the fact that, being a rural community, you’d have been easily identified and bumped up to the top of the IRA’s hitlist.”

Was Latham ever aware of RUC collusion with Loyalist terror groups?

“No but there were rumours about the UDR, as they were,” he acknowledges. “Something that makes me think it was a problem is that, having previously been handed out at briefings, the photo montages of terrorist suspects were kept under lock and key. You could go and look at them, but you couldn’t take them out, which suggests previous collusion.”

A recurring theme in Deadly Beat is how its author grew to hate the marching season: “The violent, depraved behaviour of the Orangemen’s supporters was in marked contrast to that of the Republicans who absorbed the abuse and intimidation in peaceful protest.”

Just how sympathetic is Latham to the Republican cause?

“I can appreciate someone from a Republican background who wants to see a united Ireland – common sense says that one day it will be. As an outsider, I found the intimidation that came from certain sections of the Orange Order to be quite sickening. They claim it’s to do with religion and tradition, but to me, the sole purpose of those marches is to wind somebody up from a different culture.

“Did my colleagues agree with me? Put it this way, very few of them bought into the Orange Order, either politically or socially. Being young and relatively affluent, they had better things to be doing than sitting in a draughty hall!”

Indeed, Latham contends that earning a good deal more than the average Northern Irish wage leads to an extremely weird phenomenon – the RUC groupie!

“I made a few bad choices,” he confides. “One girl – who was a compulsive police groupie – only wanted sex if she was in a car completely naked in a farm track in the middle of the countryside. If it was in a hard republican area, all the better. It got a bit freaky the day she grabbed my revolver from the glove box and asked me to shag her while holding it to her head. ‘Fuck this for a night’s entertainment,’ I thought, as I pulled my socks on and drove her home!

“You used to get it back on the mainland when there were still police bars and social clubs. The fact that you were loaded was quite an aphrodisiac!”

Another scene that’s a cert to make it into the film-of-the-book is the one that occurred above Lough Erne.

“Oh yeah, my ‘Vietnam moment’,” he chuckles. “We were flying into Belleek in a helicopter when the loadmaster pulled out his trumpet and started playing the music from Apocalypse Now. To add to the effect, he had his legs dangling over the side as we skimmed over the water.”

Less amusing is the alcohol abuse, which Latham concedes is an accepted part of RUC life.

“Sometimes men would turn up to work drunk, in which case they were thrown in the back of an armoured car or land-rover until they sobered up. Drinking on duty was less common. It’s not something I witnessed until I later worked in Belfast. In Fermanagh, the inspectors were relatively tolerant of the men who had major drink problems. For some there was no hope of redemption. Others would slip between the two worlds of being a born-again Christian one month and a drinking, gambling, whoring monster the next.”

What about drugs?

“Most of my colleagues wouldn’t have recognised cannabis, let alone something more exotic like cocaine,” Latham maintains. “There was very little drug culture at all back then in Northern Ireland, which makes the heroin epidemic in Ballymena so hard to accept. You couldn’t invent a sleepier backwater.”

Having devoted a decade of his life to catching terrorists, it must be odd to see them being released from prison under the terms of the Good Friday agreement?

“It’s depressing and makes you wonder what the lads died for,” he says starkly. “ Some people – myself included – would think it’s happened too quickly. I’m no longer involved in the situation on a day-to-day basis, but if I was, I’d find it very hard to swallow. If you’d lost a loved one, would you want to see the terrorist in question walking the streets or, even more poignantly, the corridors of power? The only justification can be if the releases lead to a lasting peace. Otherwise, there’s going to be an incredible feeling of, ‘Was it all worth it?’”

Is there any distinction to be made between a convicted Republican and a convicted Loyalist terrorist?

“No, absolutely not.”

Does his dislike of paramilitaries extend to celebrating when one of them is killed?

“If I heard of a terrorist being blown up on the way to planting a bomb, I’d get some sort of moral satisfaction from it, yeah. If people die by the means they choose to live their lives, they probably deserve it.”

There’s been a lot of debate recently about what constitutes a “legitimate target”. Would he have more respect for the IRA if they’d confined their campaign to military personnel and installations?

“No. It goes back to the basics of why I was a policeman here, which was to safeguard all life. Wanting a united Ireland isn’t the problem, it’s the method you choose to get there. Another thing is that the ‘legitimate military targets’ are more often than not raw 18-year-old recruits who are scared shitless at being dumped in – what to them – is a foreign country.”

Time for the $64,000 question: can the Good Friday Peace Agreement be maintained?

“The $64,000 answer is ‘I don’t know’,” Latham rues. “You think things have got better and then something like Holy Cross happens. My hope is that having got used to a relatively peaceful life, normal people will say, ‘Enough’s enough’. One thing that’ll encourage them to do that is if they can look at the RUC and genuinely feel that it’s representative of them and their community.”

Richard Lotham’s Deadly Beat: Inside The Royal Ulster Constabulary is published by Mainstream, priced £7.99