Anglo-Irish relations:When it came to Northern Ireland policy in 1976, the taoiseach Liam Cosgrave had no shortage of advice: one civil servant even warned him that "the problem of the North could well seem to be insoluble".
Following the collapse of Sunningdale, Harold Wilson's Labour government had little appetite for another British initiative. They had called on Northern Ireland politicians to come up with their own solution.
An elected Constitutional Convention with 78 members was invited to consider what "provision for the government of Northern Ireland is likely to command the most widespread acceptance throughout the community there?"
Although unionism was fragmented in terms of party allegiance, it was largely united in its opposition to any directive from London that powersharing with nationalists was a necessary precondition for devolved government.
Under the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) umbrella, three parties took this position: Ian Paisley's DUP who won 12 seats in the convention; William Craig's Vanguard Party with 14 seats; and Harry West's Official Unionists with a further 19. It is some measure of the mood of unionism that Brian Faulkner's UPNI which campaigned for powersharing had won a mere five seats.
With such a majority voice in the convention, the UUUC grouping had demanded a return to the old Stormont model of majority rule, with nationalist involvement confined to advisory departmental committees.
This was rejected by the Wilson government and after the convention failed to modify its opinions, it was eventually closed down in March 1976.
In the papers prepared for taoiseach Liam Cosgrave before his summit meeting with Harold Wilson at 10 Downing Street on March 5th, there are sure indicators of how Dublin's policy-makers then read the situation. They feared the loss of a cadre of pragmatic politicians who had displayed a willingness to share power along Sunningdale lines.
The advice to Cosgrave was to insist on a Sunningdale Mark II which indeed would be Dublin's policy for the next 30 years: the central tenet was that the price unionists must pay for devolution was the necessity to share executive power with nationalists.
"The firmer the British government demonstrates that this is the only form of devolved government Northern Ireland will be given, the more likely it is that the idea will be accepted sooner rather than later."
Dublin was also apprehensive that if there were to be no forum for political activity in Northern Ireland, "it may well be that the paramilitary organisations and other non-political forces in the North will try to stage a takeover, saying that the politicians have failed. Up to a point there is truth in this."
Dermot Nally - the adviser on Northern Ireland in the taoiseach's office - correctly anticipated that under "other business" Wilson would query how far Dublin intended to go with their complaint to Strasbourg concerning British ill-treatment of detainees.
Nally advised Cosgrave that he should "take whatever steps are possible to dispose of the case quickly and cleanly": he argued this on grounds of cost, the maintenance of discretionary goodwill from the British in many fields and also because "compensation had already been paid to the victims of ill-treatment and no further benefit could accrue to them from Dublin pursuing the issue".
But his main reason was his fear that "prolonged bickering or argument over the Strasbourg report could well contribute to a very considerable worsening of Anglo-Irish relations, and possibly to the sort of feeling among the British that they should simply pull out of the place altogether and leave the Irish to do their own fighting and security work, whatever the consequences."
Nally underpinned this argument by reminding Cosgrave how Wilson had time and again emphasised the advantage to his government that the British public was bored with Northern Ireland: but Wilson had added that "if British opinion became interested . . . then his own reading of the situation would be that they would be inclined to press for a pull-out - leaving it to ourselves to fight it out, as best we could".
At the summit, Wilson duly asked the Irish ministers how far they were committed to pushing the Strasbourg issue. He said that he himself felt strongly about the matter because as the leader of the opposition he had condemned the "methods of barbarism" used against detainees at the time.
He also complained that this "had made him the subject of the dirtiest cartoon he had ever experienced in his life. It had shown a British soldier going by in a coffin with Mr Wilson going in the opposite direction - saying that he could not go to the funeral because he had to go to speak to the murderers".
The Irish ministers reckoned that the British had decided on a policy of "to hell" with the convention. "Their position now was that they intended to keep their heads down for a while. They would keep quiet and not trot out with new solutions immediately. Direct rule would continue."
Wilson said "the main demand" from British public opinion "was that a date should be set for withdrawal. This they had steadily refused to give, as had their predecessors."
Cosgrave emphasised that with elected representatives marginalised, it was all the more important not to talk to paramilitaries. Rees insisted that most rumours on this were "utter rubbish".
The British wanted to keep lines of communication with paramilitaries open but denied that negotiations were taking place. Cosgrave replied that outsiders "did not appreciate the difference between talks and negotiations".
Wilson's final complaint, as noted in the Irish minute of this summit, was his general comment that in Northern Ireland "it seemed that those who played to the gallery and debased politics always seemed to get to the top . . ."
He must have forgotten - he can scarcely not have known - that this was exactly the Irish verdict on Wilson himself when he had done so little to save the Sunningdale agreement in which they had invested so much.
At one point in the exchanges in Downing Street, Wilson had told the Irish ministers that Enoch Powell - at that time Unionist MP for South Down - had confided to him that "the level of political acumen" in Northern Ireland was "not high".
Dublin's own intelligence was that during the course of the convention talks there had been a "gradual and by now almost total dominance" by Paisley of the UUUC. Harry West of the Official Unionists "had proved to be both ineffectual and uninspiring".
And Ernest Baird - leader of the UUUC - was dismissed as untrustworthy, intransigent, volatile and sinister. Dublin's information was that he was "a complete bigot" who would not tolerate Catholics "near any administration".
Meanwhile, William Craig had managed to split his own party and the coalition with his compromise proposal for a temporary and voluntary powersharing government akin to Churchill's national government during the war.
The cabinet papers reveal that Craig even advised Dublin that if such a power-sharing administration was in prospect, the parties supporting it would, in a new election, "sweep the country". He could envisage Paisley's support "dwindling - to perhaps three or four hardliners".
Dublin could scarcely have taken this prediction seriously, but would have agreed with Craig's assessment that Faulkner's position was "weak and would probably decline". In fact Faulkner retired from politics that summer.
There was not much change when James Callaghan replaced Wilson as Labour Party leader and prime minister. The Irish ambassador in London, Donal O'Sullivan, correctly predicted that Roy Mason would be the next Northern secretary: he was "very ambitious and is keen on a post which would get him into the headlines".
In September foreign minister Garret FitzGerald brought his analysis to the cabinet.
He reported that a very despondent SDLP was convinced that British policy was being driven by "cynical party advantage" and that a growing faction within the SDLP now believed that the British must "govern or go".
FitzGerald believed there was now a real possibility that the SDLP would despair of any return to a Sunningdale-style solution and call for the British to declare their intention to withdraw.
FitzGerald's memorandum for the cabinet argued strongly in favour of a powersharing solution but allowed for the possibility that this policy could be "completely undermined, either by the SDLP's switching their line or the British government's continuing a policy of complete drift and inertia".
In that event "the least undesirable of the undesirable options would still appear to be to help bring about a negotiated independence with the best possible internal and external guarantees for stability and power-sharing".
While FitzGerald was not optimistic that the unionists would be any more likely to share power in independence, he did alert his colleagues that "in pursuing current policy, the possibility of the necessity to shift from it at some point would need to be constantly borne in mind".
Later in September, Mason assured FitzGerald that he was firmly opposed to any form of "instant reaction" or "gesture" politics.
But although he accepted the force of FitzGerald's lecture on doing everything possible to shore up SDLP morale, this was not reflected in the initial British draft reply to a parliamentary question a month later.
This draft set off alarm bells in Dublin. They must have thought it was a kite to test the parameters of Irish nationalist opinion.
The question was by then an old chestnut and concerned the preconditions Britain would set before devolving powers back to Stormont. The British intention was to merely insist on "widespread support throughout the community": Dublin was also concerned that they intended using a phrase "acquiesce in that system".
Cosgrave told Callaghan that such wording suggested that the British would be content with a "watered-down alternative" to what had been agreed policy by London and Dublin for some years past: "no devolution without participation by both sections in self-government".
Cosgrave could not countenance "any slippage of this kind" as it would seriously damage Anglo-Irish relations: "to stop this rot" required a clear restatement of the necessity for executive power-sharing.
These efforts were successful and by early November, Seán Donlon was reassuring some pessimistic SDLP members that "it was our efforts which led to the satisfactory nature of the reply" to the parliamentary question.
Reading through these files, the Irish policy makers impress by their knowledge, analysis and prescription; and by their prescience.
Thirty years later one can appreciate how throughout a turbulent year such as 1976, they nurture all the strands of what eventually emerged as the Belfast Agreement.
But on one point they may be forgiven for a lack of prescience: in 1976 the Iveagh House view was that there was "nothing to suggest that Paisley will ever accept any form of power-sharing and the evolution on the unionist side will therefore have to be one where Paisley and his supporters are isolated from what will hopefully be the more moderate unionist mainstream".
