Britain’s Prime Minister Mr Edward Heath gave the go-ahead for the internment without trial in Northern Ireland in 1971 despite an army warning that it would damage security, it has emerged.
Papers released to Britain’s Public Record Office under the 30-year rule show that the senior Army officer in the North, Lieutenant General Sir Harry Tuzo, cautioned a week before internment was introduced that it would have a "harmful effect".
Mr Heath himself acknowledged that the measure was an explicitly "political act" intended to prop up the government of Northern Ireland's Ulster Unionist Prime Minister, Mr Brian Faulkner, in the face of the rising tide of IRA violence.
The introduction of internment in the summer of 1971 has been widely regarded as one of the biggest errors of British policy in the North. In the first six months of internment alone, 2,400 people - all Catholics - were detained without trial, leading to a massive upsurge of support for the IRA.
The position of Lt Gen Tuzo, the General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Northern Ireland, and Defence Secretary Lord Carrington, had been clearly set out in a letter to Mr Heath's private office from the Ministry of Defence on July 21th of that year.
"It would be primarily a political decision whether to bring in internment, but it would depend very much on military advice," it noted.
"The view of the GOC, with which the Defence Secretary entirely agrees, is that the arguments against resorting to internment remain very strong and that other possibilities for disrupting the IRA should certainly be tried first."
On August 9th, Operation Demetrius was launched with police and troops swooping to arrest more than 300 IRA suspects.
However, out of date police intelligence meant many of those arrested had not been active in the IRA for many years and it prompted a new burst of civil unrest with 21 deaths in three days.
PA