THE UNIVERSITY in Galway has been given the private papers of Brendan Duddy, former secret intermediary between the British government and the Provisional IRA leadership during a 20-year period in the North.
NUI Galway (NUIG) president Dr Jim Browne said the university was “honoured to become custodians of Brendan Duddy’s valuable and unique collection”. The papers chart Mr Duddy’s involvement, from 1973 to 1993, in efforts to negotiate an end to the conflict.
NUIG plans to conduct research with the University of Ulster’s International Conflict Research Centre on the papers. Some 30 box files will be assessed and catalogues and documents will be recorded digitally and made available to historians and researchers.
Mr Duddy is due to speak at NUIG’s conference of Irish studies this Saturday, where several documents from the archive will be on display.
Mr Duddy sometimes used his house as the venue for secret meetings and acted as the contact between representatives of the IRA’s ruling army council and British intelligence officers from MI6 and MI5.
He was an intermediary in the negotiations aimed at resolving the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981, and played a central role in the efforts to negotiate the IRA ceasefire in 1994. His role was documented in the BBC television programme The Secret Peacemaker, broadcast in 2008.
Dr Niall O’Dochartaigh of NUIG’s school of political science and sociology described the collection yesterday as “extraordinary”.
