Britain state papers/Overview: For the Heath government, dealing with the Irish Government in 1973 became a game of "Snakes and Ladders" - it believed security co-operation was the longest Irish snake of all, writes Richard Bourke
The British state papers for 1973 reveal the government under Edward Heath struggling to cope with the crisis in Northern Ireland. In Britain's estimate, the cunning ruthlessness of the Provisional IRA was the foremost obstacle to progress, but next came the paranoid secrecy of the government of the Republic.
The Heath government was desperate to move forward on two distinct, but related, fronts. It strove energetically to broker a constitutional settlement embracing the moderate Northern Ireland parties together with the Irish coalition Government under Liam Cosgrave.
At the same time, it battled to tidy up the chaotic security situation, both within Northern Ireland itself and across the Border.
The search for a constitutional settlement resulted in the establishment of a power-sharing executive in November, and then a Council of Ireland, agreed at Sunningdale in December. Both these arrangements collapsed under pressure from the Ulster Workers' Council strike of 1974.
But collapse was not a concern in 1973. Instead, the establishment of these institutions was the major preoccupation.
Towards that end, the Irish Government dropped its case then pending at Strasbourg under the European Convention on Human Rights alleging the torture and degrading treatment of detainees in Northern Ireland against the British government. It can now be seen that a significant irony attaches to this move on the part of the Irish Government.
The RUC was refusing to provide sufficient evidence for the British legal team to mount an effective defence. As a result, a secret Foreign Office document makes plain that "a likely outcome in these cases is a finding against H(er) M(ajesty's) G(overnment)".
But then, having dropped the case with a view to prioritising more important issues involving the national interest in the lead up to Sunningdale, the Irish Government was outmanoeuvred in each of its efforts to secure its own advantage in the talks.
The record of Anglo-Irish meetings at Prime Ministerial level in the months before Sunningdale show the Irish side pushing hard for an agreement on the proposed Council of Ireland to be settled in advance of the formation of a Northern Ireland executive. In this bid, however, the Irish side failed.
They also failed to get themselves accepted as co-chair for the Sunningdale conference. A flood of telegrams from the British ambassador in Dublin, Sir Arthur Galsworthy, to the Foreign Office in London present the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs of the day, Dr Garret FitzGerald, as a man completely obsessed with the chairmanship of the conference. This, commented Galsworthy, was "a bee buzzing in Dr FitzGerald's bonnet (very excitedly, as his always do)".
Should the British alone be charged with acting as conference chair and so with extending an invitation to the Southern government to take its place around the conference table, the Irish delegation would in effect become the recipients of an "imperial summons", FitzGerald is presented as insisting. The British, it is clear, were having none of this.
Neither were they prepared to run with Irish proposals for the establishment of a "Common Law Enforcement Area", encompassing North and South and set to fall under the remit of the Council of Ireland, as advanced by the Department of Foreign Affairs. It was in this context that the British ambassador declared himself struck by "the shallowness" of Irish thinking.
The Irish Government was seeking some "common form of policing" for the island of Ireland, together with trans-jurisdictional courts to try specified offences. Both these arrangements were to fall under the supervision of a Council of Ireland.
But the British found this last proposal unworkable and unacceptable, preferring to improve existing extradition arrangements between Britain and Ireland, and to establish "four square" co-operation between the RUC and the Garda on the one hand, and between the British and Irish armies on the other.
However, throughout 1973, progress on this score was fitful, particularly as a consequence of the fact that the Cosgrave administration was "pathologically" determined to keep any co-operation with their British counterparts secret. The Irish might play ball, but certainly not in the open.
Dealing with the Irish, as one British official at the Foreign Office commented, had developed into a game of "Snakes and Ladders". The Council of Ireland was a means of common assent. But the prospective case at Strasbourg had dragged the British down, and now security co-operation was proving the longest Irish snake of all.
By the end of 1973, with the Northern Ireland executive shakily established and Sunningdale narrowly agreed, but with the South offering little by way of tangible evidence to the unionist public that they meant business in dealing with the IRA, the British began to show signs of exasperation. From the perspective of Whitehall, Britain had laboured with dogged resolution, but then got little in return.
The Heath government had compiled a highly sensitive dossier on the leading members of the Provisional IRA in the border area, and passed it onto the Southern authorities.
It had a secret plan for the imposition of de facto martial law on Northern Ireland in preparation, under the working title "Operation Folklore".
But in the aftermath of these resolute exertions, with the Sunningdale conference having concluded in the absence of any serious Irish concessions ("the Republic had conceded hardly anything," noted Galsworthy), the diplomatic varnish began to peel from Britain's ambassadorial dispatches home.
Ministers in the Irish Government were now judged "timorous", although Conor Cruise O'Brien and Patrick Cooney were deemed the exceptions. For the rest, "they cannot lift their eyes above their own domestic politics", and the whole policy of the government was presumed petty and "narrow-minded".
Faced with an apparent diplomatic impasse, the British put a proposal to the Irish Minister for Justice. At the very least, could the Irish Government not endorse a resumption of the golf matches which had been staged periodically between the Garda and the RUC, before being discontinued by the Lynch government?
• The UK papers are available to the public for inspection at The National Archives in Kew, London.
• Dr Richard Bourke lectures in the History Department at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas (Random House, Pimlico: 2003).