Father Sean Mc Manus,
President, Irish National Caucus
4 February 2006

Dr. Mitchel Reiss
Special Envoy for Northern Ireland

Saturday, February 4, 2006

Dear Mitchel,

Many of us wish your support for the PSNI were a little bit
more critical and cautious. It would be a pity if your good
work for Ireland became overshadowed by your exuberant and
uncritical support for a police service about which there
are still many profoundly disturbing questions. Remember
how the good work (however belated) of JFK and LBJ for
Civil Rights came to be overshadowed in the African-
American community by the nefarious work of the wretched J.
Edgar Hoover and his racist FBI?

If you have not already read it, I would strongly recommend
you read “Racial Matters: the FBI’s secret file on Black
America, 1960-1972″ by Kenneth O’Reilly (The Free Press.
New York. 1989). Permit me to give you a quote from this
very important study:

During the March on Washington, SNCC Chairman John Lewis
wanted to know which side the federal government was on. In
1979, fifteen years after Freedom Summer, a group of
movement veterans gathered in Jackson, Mississippi, to
reconsider those times and to try to answer Lewis’s
question. When one of them railed against “the subversion”
of the movement by “the self-styled ‘pragmatism’ of those
splendid scoundrels residing in the Camelot on the
Potomac,” he received ” a cheering, standing ovation”. One
of the persons in the audience, New York Times columnist
Anthony Lewis, said he came expecting a celebration of
amazing change but instead found bitterness directed not at
“the old segregationists of Mississippi but Northern
liberals and, especially, the Kennedy and Johnson
Administrations. (page 356).

No Catholic from Northern Ireland can read that quote
without profound resonance.

I feel it is very important that you avoid any appearance
of a double-standard. So I urge you to speak out on these
matters so that your good work for Ireland will not be
overshadowed by headlines like “PSNI the best in Europe”
(and, yes, I know you don’t write the headlines).

It would be a profound tragedy if the honest-broker title
of the Special Envoy for Northern Ireland came to be
replaced by that of “Recruiting-Sergeant for the PSNI”.

Thank you,