ANALYSIS:AS WAS shown in yesterday's review of Anglo-Irish relations, 1978 was a barren year in which the limited ambition of the Callaghan government was, as John Hume put it, "to keep the Northern Ireland situation sweet", writes John Bowman
This did not mean that the challenges facing the Northern Ireland experts in the Irish public service were any easier. Their approach was patient, nuanced and, above all, constructive: they monitored all political factions in the North; were attentive to SDLP needs and were indefatigable in reminding the British that, while it was their responsibility, it was not their's alone. Dublin and Washington also had significant roles.
And all the while they were laying the foundations for the bespoke political architecture which was eventually to find expression in the Belfast Agreement.
John Campbell of the Irish Embassy in London reported to Iveagh House in September a revealing conversation which he had had with Bernard Donoughue, Callaghan's senior policy adviser. Donoughue reckoned that the re-emergence of the debate favouring a British withdrawal was "an interesting development which could have longer term consequences".
While there would be no change of policy before an election, he considered it possible that the Sunday Times and the Guardian might adopt "a somewhat similar" line to the withdrawal policy advocated by the Daily Mirror.
He also believed that if the debate were "to pick up steam", then it was "not at all improbable" that there might be up to 60 Labour MPs who would oppose any increase in Northern Ireland's seats at Westminster.
He also expected that new Labour MPs following the next election might well have "a more open and radical attitude to Northern Ireland than many present members".
Campbell emphasised that in previous conversations Donoughue had "made no secret of the fact that in the long term he sees British disengagement from Ireland to be the right and inevitable course".
He was also fond of emphasising that this opinion was shared by all others in Callaghan's inner circle at Number 10: Tom McNally, his political adviser; Tom McCaffrey, his press secretary and Roger Carroll, recently seconded from the Sun.
"Donoughue was clearly interested by the way in which the recent re-emergence of public debate on withdrawal contains seeds of developments consistent with his own thinking, although he cautioned against any dramatic inference from this for the immediate future."
Campbell's interpretation of Donoughue's advice was that Dublin would be advised to be ready to react to possible developments in the withdrawal debate "in a constructive way".
It was suggested that "in order to maintain public discussion in positive channels" it would be important for the Irish government "to clarify at appropriate moments in greater detail the ingredients we see as desirable and necessary in the process towards unity".
Unless Dublin did this, the discussion "could settle into sterile and even negative lines", with the juxtaposition of, on the one hand, "an uninformed and irresponsible withdrawal lobby" and, on the other, "an inflexible status quo direct rule position".
Fine Gael's new leader Garret FitzGerald accompanied by Paddy Harte visited London and spoke, among others, to Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher.
Harte wrote up his account of the visit and in a spirit of bipartisanship shared it with the taoiseach's department.
In Harte's opinion Thatcher "had a closed mind. She was not listening to our point of view". And he feared that were she to become prime minister, the cost in terms of life and property of changing her attitudes "could be immense".
He thought it vital "to get her to accept the realities of Northern Ireland" and doubted if even ordinary working-class Protestants would identify with her approach, which he found "quite disturbing", with implications which "could be frightening".
But elsewhere in the same file the Fianna Fáil government could take solace from a brief meeting which Lynch had with Thatcher's predecessor, Edward Heath, who had flown to Dublin to conduct the EC Youth Orchestra. When Lynch commented that Dublin was "rather concerned by recent Conservative statements on the North", Heath "very quickly" understood what Lynch meant and hastened to reassure him that Whitelaw, Carrington, Prior and himself "would ensure that the approach of a Conservative government to the Northern Ireland problem would not go off the rails".
Also in the Foreign Affairs archives relating to Northern Ireland there is evidence of diligent work in switching North American opinion towards constructive channels.
Although the term is not used, Irish diplomats spent considerable efforts attempting to marginalise those Irish-Americans whom they clearly regarded as "fellow-travellers" of the Provisional IRA.
Many of these activists were becoming more circumspect in their public utterances but the department's records show chapter and verse of their support for violence.
One department memorandum expressed alarm at how the Irish National Caucus had opportunistically identified themselves as supporters of the Irish government. They attempted this coup by the spin they put on Lynch's RTÉ interview in January when his call for a British declaration of interest in Irish unity was translated by them as support for their Troops Out position. The department believed that this move had left Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill in a rather isolated position and they concluded that "a major plank" in their American campaign since 1972 to isolate the fellow-travellers had been "badly shaken".
But when Bronx congressman, Mario Biaggi, the self-appointed convenor of the ad hoc Congressional Committee for Irish Affairs, joined in by congratulating Lynch on his "recent call for a declaration of intent from Great Britain to withdraw her troops from Ireland", he received a comprehensive rebuke from Lynch who published their exchange, earning the New York Daily News headline "Irish Chief Blasts Biaggi".
Manifestly Biaggi exaggerated his influence and counted as supporters as many as 104 members of Congress. But when he invited them all to a meeting in Washington to hear an address on Northern Ireland by the Ancient Order of Hibernians president, Jack Keane, only two other congressmen joined Biaggi. If Biaggi took solace from the fact that the numbers present were swollen by a further two congressional aides, he was not to know that one of them was there as a spy for the Irish Embassy.
That embassy was also the source of an insightful analysis of the Irish-American minority who preferred "a simplistic and emotional" analysis of the Northern Ireland issue and who identified only two protagonists: "Provisional IRA idealists and British army thugs". Attempts, "however rational or courteous", to debunk this myth are seen as attacks on Irish-American values, the myth being "prized for its emotional rather than intellectual value".
The conclusion reached was that in dealing with this community, results were easier to win than arguments. And to get a result the advice was to "take account of the community's sensitivities and prejudices", congratulate them on their success in America and emphasise the inspiration which that success might provide to those on all sides in Ireland "to solve their problems openly, democratically and rationally."
The indefatigable work of Ted Kennedy in backing up the Irish government's policy is also manifest. His detailed note of a confidential talk he had in April with the British ambassador in Washington, Peter Jay, was passed on to the Irish ambassador, Seán Donlon.
Jay told Kennedy that the previous summer Callaghan - his father-in-law - Lynch and Garret FitzGerald were at his summer house in west Cork. The dangers of a precipitate British withdrawal were discussed with fears of genocide in the Bogside within "a matter of hours".
FitzGerald said the South would have two options. "If we intervene, the unionists will beat us militarily, which will bring not just a fall of the government but a fall of democracy in the South." And were they not to intervene, "it would bring a fall of the government and probably the end of democracy in the South".
Donlon in forwarding this Kennedy note of the conversation underlined the importance of the strictest secrecy, although John Hume could be briefed. Donlon adds that it was "obviously important that we should give no indication, at any time, that we have this material".
Along with the insights into contemporary policy formation, these files also provide important evidence on the early thinking of some politicians who would subsequently become important players. Seán Ó hUiginn in February reported to Iveagh House on a meeting in Belfast with a lecturer in law at Queens who was "numbered among the rather limited number of young intellectual supporters of political unionism" and who, he thought, was destined for "a fairly active backroom role".
Named as David Trimble, he is reported as believing that many unionists would blame the "recrudescence of violence" on interviews by Lynch and Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich. "He accepted this might appear absurd but it was rationalised that the statements boosted IRA morale and gave them further encouragement for their campaign of violence."
Trimble reckoned that there was "a kind of logic in this attitude since the ultimate implication of refusing the principle of unity only by consent" was violence against the Northern Irish majority.
On the then current political scene Trimble was dismissive of any electoral threat from the DUP to the Official Unionists; he reckoned Ian Paisley had "a weight problem and showed signs of suffering from overwork". Among Official Unionists he believed that Harry West's leadership "seemed free from threat" although Martin Smyth could have had it for the asking; "but he was temperamentally incapable of the confrontations this would involve, in particular with Paisley".
Another politician - who was to prove important in the coming decades - was the sole dissenter from an agreed communique in December following a high- powered meeting between the Irish government and the SDLP. Séamus Mallon had "expected a much stronger" communique. At the meeting he had suggested that advocating powersharing was "a fairly easy option" for the South.
He complained that there was confusion in Northern Ireland. "People were looking at the SDLP as some kind of West British party. Even the taoiseach's speeches on Northern Ireland were regarded as something of a ritual." An exception was his RTÉ interview the previous January as he had said on that occasion "what the British government do not want to hear".
Mallon complained that the SDLP policy was being "whittled away over the years". At first they had powersharing with an Irish dimension; then only powersharing; now they had neither - "a state of political vacuum". He argued that the minority "felt they had been booted around".
To date he suggested British withdrawal had been "spoken of in fairly euphemistic terms" but henceforth they would have to be explicit.
All other Irish parties "could not allow a situation to develop where only the Provos were putting forward a policy of withdrawal". Mallon was clearly intent that the Provisional movement could not claim ownership of the republican aspiration to a united Ireland.
