The Police Service of Northern Ireland might be striving, on paper, to become a new kind of department, but while the police had changed the name of the constabulary, they were still, in many instances, the same police. For decades, the men of the RUC had perceived Gerry Adams to be their chief antagonist, the figurehead of a paramilitary outfit that murdered nearly three hundred police officers over the course of the Troubles. Many old hands in the PSNI had lost loved ones – fellow cops, childhood friends, fathers – at the hands of the IRA. Now they had become aware that, across an ocean at
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