Lord Kilclooney, better known as Mr John Taylor, the former Ulster Unionist deputy leader, said yesterday he was not surprised at British plans to repartition the North and move hundreds of thousands of people. He was reacting to revelations in the 1972 State papers released yesterday.
"None of this comes as a surprise to me," he said. "You must remember that we had good friends within the Conservative Party and so we were well aware that within the Conservative Party there was consideration being given to changing the boundaries.
"There will be no reaction to this, because unionists throughout Northern Ireland generally had this understanding, that the Conservatives were considering redrawing the boundaries." Dismissing the plans, he said: "Of course it was an idiotic idea. It would have meant the movement of half a million people."
A former minister at the Northern Ireland Office also revealed that the British government did not consider the threat from loyalist paramilitaries to be as potent as that from the IRA.
The Ulster Defence Association was still legal at the time but according to Lord Howell, UDA brutality was not equated with that of the IRA until direct rule ministers had been in Belfast for a time.
He told a BBC Northern Ireland programme last night: "The sheer ferocity of the UDA and their methods of violence, which turned out to equal to the IRA, were something that dawned upon us as we were there."