"The Irish Press today published what is apparently intended to be the first of a series of articles sympathetic to the IRA entitled 'The Men Who Control The Bogside'. Today's article draws unwelcome attention to the relatively low level of patrolling etc. which the security forces undertake in Catholic enclaves of Londonderry at present."
This was one of the items which the British prime minister, Ted Heath, read on January 18th, 1972 in the daily report he was given by the Ministry of Defence on the previous 24 hours in Northern Ireland. I came across it when going through the British Cabinet Papers for 1972 which have just been released. Then I remembered that I wrote the article allegedly "sympathetic to the IRA" 30 years ago.
On the morning the article appeared I was on a plane from Dublin to Brussels to report on the signing of the EEC Treaty by Ireland, Britain and Denmark in several days' time. An RTE colleague had just read the article and turned to me saying he was disgusted at such a piece of "Provo propaganda". I pointed out that it was the first article in a three-part series and he should wait to read the others before passing judgment.
Then Dr Patrick Hillery, Minister for Foreign Affairs, who was also on the plane to take part in the Brussels ceremony, came back from his front seat to say he had read the article with great interest and found it fascinating to get an insight into the IRA.
Young IRA officer
Going back to read the article recently, I found that it began describing an unnamed "young officer in the Provisional IRA", whom I can now say was Martin McGuiness, reacting to the information that I had been interviewing John McKeague, chairman of the ultra-loyalist Shankill Defence Association: "You know, I'd love to meet Protestants like McKeague and talk to them." (Ten years later, McKeague was shot dead by the INLA).
The article went on to say that the day after the meeting with McGuinness, I was discussing the IRA campaign with an unnamed Stormont minister, who I can now say was the late Roy Bradford, and he "leaned forward in his chair and said earnestly: 'What are these young fellows like? What are their background and their philosophy? What are their political ideas?'"
"No political ideas"
If Bradford had read the article about the IRA in the Bogside when it appeared, he would have learned that "beyond Irish unity and a place for the Provisional IRA at the negotiating table, they appear to have no political ideas to contribute". They were described as indignant at being portrayed as "cold-blooded killers" by the British media.
The remaining articles in the series, which tried to gauge Protestant feelings about a political settlement and eventual Irish unity, were not mentioned in the daily reports for Mr Heath, but they outlined ideas for power-sharing and unity by consent that eventually found form in the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement and the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
My irate colleague from RTÉ was not to know that, as the British papers now reveal, the Provisional IRA two months later would use RTÉ personnel in Dublin and London to pass on feelers about a ceasefire to Mr Heath. A few months later, the RTÉ reporter Kevin O'Kelly, was to serve some days in jail following his interview with the IRA Chief of Staff, Sean MacStíofáin.
Mr Heath and the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, used the occasion of the signing of the EEC Treaty (during which Heath had ink thrown at him by a deranged woman) to meet and discuss the situation in Northern Ireland.
The papers now released reveal that Lynch expressed his fears to Heath that with 80,000 unemployed in the Republic there could be "a drift to the IRA". He went on to say that there was "passive support for the IRA all over the Republic and this could easily become active if frustration with the rate of progress in Northern Ireland or with his own Government grew. This violence could spread to Great Britain."
Just one week later, what Lynch predicted erupted after Bloody Sunday in Derry and the shooting dead of 13 civilians on an anti-internment march.
The British account of the Heath-Lynch meeting began: "It was extraordinarily difficult to form a clear impression of what Mr Lynch was trying to get at, partly because he had a very heavy cold and partly because his ideas were hazy and far from fully developed."
Stormont "finished"
One of the "ideas" Lynch proposed was that Heath should "induce Brian Faulkner [the Stormont prime minister\] to accept that Stormont as it had been was finished and that some form of government with minority participation had to be devised."
Heath, according to the British report, "did not comment at all on Mr Lynch's rather nebulous proposal."
However, in a matter of weeks Heath was telling Faulkner in 10 Downing Street that Stormont as it existed was "finished" and that some form of Government with minority participation had to be devised.
So Jack Lynch, heavy cold and all, knew what he was talking about.