IRELAND
The Irish Times
Detaching seminarians from the mainstream student experience is a retrograde step, writes NOEL WHELAN
SOME YEARS ago, when discussing the issue of whether the newly reconfigured Police Service of Northern Ireland should have a new police college, the then senator Maurice Hayes, a former member of the Patten commission, voiced his own reservations about the concept of a free-standing police training institution. His argument was persuasive. He expressed a concern that creating separate educational institutions and, in particular, separate residential education institutions for police men and women, was unhealthy because it meant that in their key formative years they became detached from the mainstream student experience and potentially from the general community within which they would ultimately have to live and work.
Some argued that learning and living together, and separate from others, was essential to common formation, but Hayes argued it also gave rise to a sense of detachment from and, at times, a sense of superiority over other young workers and professionals.
At its worst, this separate formation could give rise to an overly intense camaraderie which could lead young recruits to confuse their sense of duty to the wider population. Others go so far as to suggest that it can engender an instinct to defend, even when indefensible, the actions of colleagues or of the force they were joining.
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