Perhaps it is uncharitable to note that one of the few lasting monuments to Capt Terence O'Neill are the mean housing estates of Craigavon, now the heartland of the LVF. Examining the cabinet papers released for 1967, Brian Faulkner's words that year on the newly-emergent UVF summarise the general unionist reaction to recent killings: "The actions of so few can reflect ignominy on so many."
While the Stormont parliament is long gone, Paisleyism, then in its infancy, endures. In the 1967 elections to Belfast City Council, O'Neillism had received endorsement and Paisleyites were just a fragment. Today Paisleyism represents one in three Protestants in Northern Ireland. As minds turn to the 1798 commemorations, the boost given to hardliners by the manner in which the 50th anniversary of the 1916 rebellion was marked should not be forgotten.
Erskine Childers's memo to Lynch about his chance meeting with the Northern Ireland prime minister in Germany records O'Neill's view that "Paisley had created an undercurrent of suspicion, which would disappear in time", provided no "inflammatory speeches" emanated from Dublin.
As it happened, ill-judged statements by Frank Aiken and Brian Lenihan delayed the O'NeillLynch meeting for several months. Here is evidence of the damage which could have been done by David Andrews's "not unlike a government" remarks if they had not been swiftly retracted by the Taoiseach's office.
When Lynch did arrive at Stormont for plum pudding with O'Neill, Paisley greeted him with an avalanche of snowballs. As it is today, however, the greatest threat to the leadership of mainstream unionism came from within the party: Westminster MP Sir Knox Cunningham forcefully repudiated the summit. Those unionists who hanker after the certainties of the Brookeborough era might do well to note his approval of O'Neill's initiative: "I do not think either the constitution or Protestantism is threatened in any way".
While many unionists would not concur with such a sentiment in relation to the present process, Harold Wilson's statement in 1967 that "no one would be happier than Great Britain if this problem is solved by agreement within the Emerald Isle" demonstrates a remarkable consistency in British policy. O'Neill's wrong assumption that Lemass's description of him as "Prime Minister of Northern Ireland" was recognition for partition points up the need for the constitutional realities to be given written effect.
Too often, meetings between the unionist leadership and Dublin are given a historical significance they do not deserve. O'Neill and Lemass in 1965, O'Neill and Lynch in 1967, and David Trimble and Bertie Ahern today are simply following in a tradition begun by Sir James Craig and Michael Collins and formalised in the 1925 tripartite agreement.
Following his meeting with Lynch, O'Neill hoped such meetings would be treated as "wholly routine and unremarkable", and the unionist News Letter editorial remarked in 1967: "Comings and goings between Stormont and Iveagh House are now almost part of the run of politics and soon may cease to make front-page news. The sooner the better."
While O'Neill was moving forward with limited electoral reforms, the stunning naivety of some in the cabinet, principally Bill Craig at Home Affairs, that movement to bring the local government franchise into line with that in Britain could be avoided, stands out in the Stormont papers. They also give perspective to complaints today that nationalists are denied "equality".
The 1967 papers are perhaps most useful in proving the necessity of avoiding an ideological approach to cross-Border relations. In that year the electricity interconnector, subsequently destroyed by an IRA bomb, was commissioned, but joint customs control was rejected.
The willingness of Lemass to examine co-operation on a British Isles basis contrasts with the emphasis on an exclusively all-Ireland approach heard in some quarters today.
O'Neill concluded that he would be "sorry to see the position degenerate into the old state of ideological `cold war'." While the Irish Government will want to avoid Eddie McAteer's charge in 1967 that "nationalists feel that they are now nobody's children", surely the message must have got through, after the experience of O'Neill and Faulkner at Sunningdale, that good Dublinunionist relations have to be grounded in mutual recognition and respect?
At the same time the papers reveal the essential hollowness of O'Neill's project in relation to Northern nationalism. And while Austin Currie's description of him as a "political confidence trickster" overstates the case, Brian Faulkner at least recognised that "flamboyant gestures are no substitute for real action".
Stephen King is an adviser to John Taylor, the deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party