British viewpoint:The British had given up trying to find a constitutional solution to the Northern Ireland question by 1976, reveal state papers recently released in the National Archives in Kew, southwest London.
Having abandoned the attempt to establish "powersharing" institutions in the immediate future, the priority was to get through the year "without the kind of drama on which extremists feed".
The year was characterised by the "Ulsterisation" of security measures, the end to "special category" status for terrorist prisoners and the beginning of an indefinite period of direct rule from London.
"Apathy is in itself an important factor", concluded one policy briefing, written in May. The background to this pessimistic assessment was the breakdown of the flimsy IRA ceasefire of 1975 and the impending collapse of the Constitutional Convention at the turn of the year, during which the unionists and the SDLP once again displayed an unwillingness to work together.
Despite the fact that they expected little progress to be made at the convention, the government was unwilling to bring it down "without a demonstrably good reason". As it petered out with a whimper in March, the main concern was that such arbitrary action might "create the expectation of a new initiative".
"Powersharing cannot be imposed," concluded one cabinet briefing in anticipation of the Taoiseach's visit to Number 10 on March 5th, and "the history of Northern Ireland has shown that any party representing a sizeable group within the community has the power to bring ordered government to an end".
As 1975 had drawn to a close, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, had already warned his colleagues that the British government was in the province for the long haul.
In a memorandum written on December 12th, 1975, Rees argued that the British "cannot afford to ignore the events leading up to 1969, let alone what has happened since".
"It is my firmly held belief," he wrote to cabinet colleagues, "that the deep-rooted nature of the Irish question prevents any possibility of a solution at a stroke."
According to Sir Frank Cooper, the head of the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), speaking to the Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland on February 13th, it was increasingly "unlikely that the government of Northern Ireland could be assumed effectively by the present generation of Northern Ireland politicians".
These men "were bound by too many past promises, and their fund of administrative experience was diminishing fast". A period of direct rule from Westminster was "accordingly inevitable".
At the next meeting of the committee, on February 20th, one suggestion that was made was for a set period of five years of direct rule, followed by elections. But this option was discounted on the grounds that "experience had shown that at elections sectarian loyalties almost invariably assert themselves". Moreover, a "genuine change of heart", within a period of five years, was something that "could in no sense be guaranteed".
Since 1972, successive governments had worked around "the theme that partnership of the two communities" in local institutions "was an essential prerequisite of a devolved government". It was "plainly now not in the Government's gift" to provide this.
With another set of failed negotiations behind them, there was a realisation that "the choices are getting starker" and that there were "no short-term cosmetic measures likely to bring about a major change in the situation".
In the "vacuum" caused by the end of local political negotiations, the NIO recommended to the cabinet that "a firm hand will need to be seen but an appearance of crisis must be avoided".
The firm hand came in the form of a shift in emphasis from constitutional negotiations to new security measures. Having held out the "mirage" of British withdrawal during negotiations with Provisional Sinn Féin during the previous year, the government withdrew to a more entrenched position.
This included ceding an increased responsibility for law and order to the RUC, recently reconstituted and under new leadership from May, when Kenneth Newman replaced James Flanagan as chief constable. More controversially, it was also to involve an increased role for the Ulster Defence Regiment, about whose impartiality the Irish Government had a number of concerns.
This recalibration of security measures has often been associated with the tenure of Roy Mason, a tough-minded former coalminer from Yorkshire, who replaced Merlyn Rees in September. In reality, cabinet papers reveal that much of the new arrangements were in place before Mason assumed office.
On March 12th, 1976, the Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland had recommended "ministers should be encouraged to maintain a low profile while emphasising their resolve to deal with violence by strengthening the police".
More importantly, it was noted that the new RUC chief constable had been made aware of the need for army support "to be thinned progressively in urban areas". In turning their attention to matters of security, the British government was also sensitive not to "prejudice the objective of keeping the temperature down".
According to top secret documents passed from Merlyn Rees to the prime minister at the end of 1975, there were reports that the leaders of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) were "getting desperate", stuck awkwardly between a "lack of support in urban Catholic areas of Northern Ireland for a return to all-out violence" and "rumblings of discontent" among more extreme rank-and-file members in Belfast and Derry.
On the one hand, it was feared that PIRA strategy was "turning increasingly to extreme violence in Great Britain". On the other, it was felt that the mood in the North meant that a return to large-scale violence might do them "more harm than good, unless they succeed in provoking us into security policies which would rebuild their support".
Thus, in settling for direct rule, the British government was particularly anxious to avoid traps set by the PIRA, attempting to provoke the army to react in a way that would "alienate the Catholic community".
"Pre-emptive action" against a renewed campaign was ruled out on the grounds that it "would involve a very high level of home searches and personal checks in the Catholic areas" and, most controversially, a return to "detention" (internment).
"This solved nothing in the past", argued Rees, and "will solve nothing now". Removing the "special category" status for terrorist prisoners - a move which was to lead to the hunger strikes - the new approach could be labelled "criminalisation": in other words, "proceeding against terrorists through the due processes of law and the courts".
By October 1976, the Irish Ambassador in London expressed some concern that, as a result of their recent return to direct rule, the British had become "too passive" in maintaining their long-term commitment to "powersharing".
The British response was that "there was nothing weak about deliberate inactivity". The ambassador was reminded of the words of Cardinal Conway: "For God's sake do not set us further examination papers that we cannot pass".
The issue of security co-operation also continued to cause friction between London and Dublin. In response to a particularly brutal series of murders in the first week of the new year, Harold Wilson wrote to the Taoiseach on January 6th to tell him that the army's "Spearhead" battalion was to be sent into south Armagh, to be followed shortly by the first official deployment of SAS troops in the North.
While it was believed that the Irish Government could reconcile themselves to a prolonged period of direct rule, the cabinet committee warned that a repeat of an incident in May - when a number of SAS men were arrested by Irish authorities on the southern side of the Border - would "seriously damage" the relationship between Dublin and London.
The British ambassador in Dublin had to sit through "remarkable nitpicking sessions" with Irish Foreign Minister Garret FitzGerald about the precise role assigned to the troops.
In the context of the cold war, the British were particularly anxious to counter any comparison of the SAS with the "nefarious influence of the CIA".
Indeed, the British government was eager to emphasise that the special counter-insurgency measures taken in the "bandit country" of south Armagh did not reflect the general direction of policy. By May 7th, after Jim Callaghan had replaced Harold Wilson as the prime minister, an appraisal of Government policy reasserted the "primary of the police, the reduction of the army to garrison status and its withdrawal to barracks".
According to the GOC of the army in Northern Ireland, speaking in late March to Airey Neave, Mrs Thatcher's shadow secretary of state for the province, "it was important to realise that the job of dealing with terrorists in the Border areas was very much a long haul one".
Ultimately, long-term success still depended on the "reduction of support for the terrorists in both communities". Despite the fact that the level of inter-sectarian murder remained brutally high in 1976, officials often expressed a cautious optimism about the "Peace People" movement. This sprang up in August following the death of three children in Andersonstown, killed by a gunman's getaway car after the British army had shot the driver.
In some urban areas, it "had provided a turning point and undoubtedly put the Provisional IRA under pressure". Nevertheless, "there was a long way to go before there was a general readiness in 'Green' areas to betray Provisional IRA gunmen to the security services".
In response to the hope that a "younger and more enlightened generation" of political leaders might soon emerge, one NIO official reflected that "the older generation of politicians were habituated to looking outside the province for the solution to problems which they themselves had created".
Notably, Ian Paisley was identified by a number of members of the British government as an obstacle to any prospect of a devolved, power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland. That being said, according to a brief prepared by Merlyn Rees, he was "quite capable of doing a tactical turnabout if it would strengthen his position, as his ultimate aim is to lead a larger party at Westminster".