The British ambassador to Ireland, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, was a prolific letter-writer who enjoyed dissecting Irish life and turning it on its head in his many messages to his superiors in London in 1969.
Confidential Foreign Office papers reveal that he sent a coded cypher to London on August 14th headlined "Mr Lynch's Intervention", describing the Taoiseach's limited and somewhat insincere hopes "to get away with a further round of shadow boxing" over the North. But Lynch was "on a slippery slope", Sir Andrew observed. London's rejection of Mr Lynch's demand for Irish unity would be used by extremists in the South to turn opinion against Britain, instead of the Stormont administration.
In that event, he said, Irish opinion "already much inflamed by one-sided reporting of Northern events would be hard to restrain when the moment comes for restraining it". Southern extremists would consider themselves entitled to use violence, Sir Andrew suggested, without incurring any moral disapproval in Dublin "than is accorded to the throwers of what are now in effect napalm bombs in Derry . . . All in all we are in for a fairly difficult time from the Irish. Someone said to me that I would soon have as many friends in Ireland as I had in Indonesia. I doubt if it will be quite so bad as that, but if I were a fire insurance company I would not like to have the British embassy on my books. [Fortunately, though highly flammable, it isn't ours]."
The following day, demonstrating against the deployment of troops on the streets of Derry and Belfast, a mob set fire to the Union flag outside the British embassy in Dublin.
On August 14th, Sir Andrew also reported to the Foreign Office his impression on meeting several Irishmen who had spoken about solving the Irish question. They had told him it might be desirable to create an international threat to peace by seizing a small town in the North, populated mainly by Catholics, in a bloodless coup de main and defy British attempts to recapture it.
"Television cameras would be assembled, of course," Gilchrist wrote, "and urgent appeals made to the UN. I doubt very much if the Irish government would take part in any such operation in present circumstances, but the IRA quite certainly has the capability of carrying it out on its own."