The state papers now published will stir the memories of those old enough to recall the smouldering uncertainty of 1971 when internment was introduced, 210 people were killed on the streets of Northern Ireland and governments in Belfast, London and Dublin searched in vain for a political solution.
Only Brian Faulkner, the Unionist Prime Minister at Stormont, believed that internment offered any hope of success. The IRA, he claimed, as the death rate rose and demonstrations supporting the internees spread to the Republic, Britain and the United States, was running out of steam.
Faulkner's illusion was not shared by Edward Heath's Government - Heath summoned him to London to tell him so - or by Sir Harry Tuzo, then in command of British forces in Northern Ireland. Not only had they serious doubts about Faulkner's assessment of the impact of internment, they recognised the embarrassment suffered by colleagues in Brussels representing two applicants for membership of the EEC.
Predictably, Jack Lynch considered internment disastrous and, as implemented in Northern Ireland, manifestly one-sided and brutally applied. At a bitter meeting in Chequers, he told Heath that he was under pressure to refer the complaints of brutality to the Commission of Human Rights at Strasbourg. (The case was taken and eventually resulted in deep embarrasment for the United Kingdom.)
Far from imagining that the IRA was running out of steam, Lynch was convinced that internment served as its recruiting agent: shortly before internment he had had a report from the Chief of Staff, Maj Gen T. L. O'Carroll, telling him that "in the South, active republicans are now believed to number 1,900 with about 20/40,000 active supporters." Little more than a month earlier, O'Carroll's predecessor, Maj Gen P. J. Delaney, had given an equally stern warning of a possible attempt at an armed takeover by republican and left-wing elements in the Republic using methods that "would probably follow the pattern of events in Northern Ireland."
However alarming these reports, they are unlikely to cause a controversy to match that raised by the 1970 state papers which were read by some as endorsement of the Northern policies of Neil Blaney and Charles Haughey, the ministers dismissed by Lynch on suspicion of illegally importing arms, and by others as approving incursions into Northern Ireland.
A paper prepared by Maj Gen O'Carroll made it clear that the options considered were only contingency plans and an incursion into Northern Ireland would be an act of war. Such clarifications are, themselves, both valuable and welcome.