The sudden appearance of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1968 came as a complete surprise to the Dublin, London and Stormont governments, according to official papers released under the 30-year rule.
Cabinet papers released in Dublin show that Mr Jack Lynch's government, which was proceeding with a policy of functional co-operation between ministers North and South following the historic Lemass-O'Neill summit at Stormont in January 1965, was totally unprepared for this grassroots outbreak.
In London, the British Prime Minister, Mr Harold Wilson, was quietly pinning his hopes for reform on the "liberal" unionism of the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Capt Terence O'Neill, especially since Capt O'Neill had overcome the challenge mounted against him by his deputy, Mr Brian Faulkner, in 1967.
In Belfast, Capt O'Neill was personally convinced of need for reform. He knew that gerrymandering of votes in favour of Protestants, and discrimination against Catholics in housing allocations, could not continue. But he could not convince his hardline colleagues, Mr William Craig and Mr Faulkner, to take sufficient action, and the Stormont parliament was eventually suspended in 1972.
Today, The Irish Times devotes four pages to examining the hitherto confidential 1968 State Papers which throw valuable light on political thinking in Dublin, London and Belfast, as events began to unfold which would dominate the history of Ireland and Britain in the latter third of the 20th century.
After the disorder on the streets of Derry in 1968, Mr Wilson met Capt O'Neill, Mr Faulkner and Mr Craig in London. Capt O'Neill said he was "resolved to do everything he could to break down old animosities", but Mr Faulkner and Mr Craig gave him no support. Repeating their arguments against meaningful reform, they clearly astonished and exasperated Mr Wilson and his colleagues, the Home Secretary, Mr Jim Callaghan and junior Home Office minister, Ms Alice Bacon.
Mr Wilson threatened "a radical course involving the complete liquidation of all financial agreements with Northern Ireland". When Mr Craig said that there could be no reform without more money from London, Mr Wilson was obviously incandescent, snapping at the end of his riposte: "And money for Short and Harland is now again under consideration".
Reviewing the papers for The Irish Times today, historian Mr Jonathan Bardon writes that 1968 was the year when the initiative passed from official files and cabinet sub-committees to the street, fuelled by images of student revolt in Paris, Mr Dubcek's challenge to Soviet might in Prague, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and action for black civil rights in the USA.
The British 1947 Education Act had created a group of articulate and questioning Catholic graduates who saw what was happening in the rest of the world and wanted to know why Northern Ireland must be different. By 1988 they were old enough to do something about it, and educated enough to be effective about it. The first direct action in June 1968 occurred when nationalist MP Mr Austin Currie - now a Fine Gael TD for Dublin West - was ejected by the RUC from a Co Tyrone council house allocated to Ms Emily Beattie (19), a single Protestant.
The first civil rights march followed on August 24th from Coalisland to Dungannon. But it was the next one, in Derry on October 5th, which changed the course of Northern Ireland's history, Mr Bardon writes.
Also writing in The Irish Times today, historian and broadcaster Mr John Bowman, says that in Dublin, the Taoiseach, Mr Lynch, was on a fast learning curve.
As events developed on the streets of Derry and Co Tyrone, he came under enormous pressure to revert to Fianna Fail orthodoxy and blame Partition as the root of all evil.