The almost total alienation by 1972 of the Catholic minority in the North from the unionist regime is highlighted in files released in Belfast.
The issue is the subject of a memo by Mr W. Slinger, of the Ministry of Community Relations at Stormont on January 19th, 1972, just days before Bloody Sunday.
The official wrote: "Despite all the efforts to improve the government's relationship with the minority, the situation appears to have deteriorated to an extent unparalleled in recent times. Widespread abstention and civil disobedience now figure alongside open violence.
"The SDLP, in whom some hope was once rested, has abandoned Stormont and now declares that they will neither return nor talk until internment is ended, and even then will enter discussions only on the basis of the complete abolition of the Stormont legislature and its replacement by something completely different."
This, Mr Slinger noted, showed how far relations with the minority had deteriorated from the SDLP's initial welcome for Brian Faulkner's proposals for a committee system in June 1971.
The memo states the SDLP's claim that they reflected the complete alienation of the Catholic population would gain support from Dr Maurice Hayes, the chairman of the Community Relations Commission, who had privately expressed the view that at least a significant proportion of the Catholic population was completely alienated and "it was doubtful if the present government could retrieve the situation".
On the other hand, he noted, Dr G B Newe, a leading Catholic and minister of state in Mr Faulkner's government, had said that he discerned a growing revulsion of feeling in the Catholic community against violence and an increased desire for a more stable society.
The official felt it was difficult to gauge Catholic opinion, though he thought that Mr Gerry Fitt, the SDLP leader, "felt compelled to adopt a more uncompromising attitude than he would really have liked".
"No one had doubted that a great many Catholics had always been distrustful of the Stormont system but in the past this had resulted in suggestions of reform as well as demands for abolition. The troubles of the past few years have had a dual effect in tilting the balance towards the abolitionists. In the first place reform has been tried but to no avail."
Many Catholics, he insisted, saw reform as merely "tinkering with the system which can never be made to work successfully".
"The heavy cost of the continued and intense terrorist campaign, the effect on British public opinion, the hope that unionist resolve may crumble, that Westminster would seek to disengage itself from a costly and apparently unending struggle, all these factors have given fresh credibility to the abstentionists' claim that any objective is attainable if only Catholics persist in their intransigence. This is not conducive to a spirit of compromise."
The official felt that any political advance was dependent on a security breakthrough.