The Ireland of 1976 revealed by hitherto secret State Papers is both familiar and strange. For those alive 30 years ago, reading them is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Some familiar faces and events are to be seen, some long-forgotten memories surface.
There is much which was already in the public domain. We knew already what the main players did and said. Here we learn what sort of background information and intelligence were available to them and we see more clearly the role of civil servants and advisers in shaping events.
The widespread feeling of revulsion at the murder of the British ambassador Christopher Ewart-Biggs and Stormont official Judith Cook in Dublin is recalled. The firm reaction of Liam Cosgrave's government in bringing forward anti-terrorist legislation tends to be overlooked, though it indirectly led to the resignation of a president.
These were difficult times. Terrorism stalked the land. Unemployment was high. The incoming Northern secretary Roy Mason meant well in 1976 when he said that he intended to concentrate on trying to get the economy going, rather than resolve the conflict between the two communities. He was to discover that there was more than one group prepared to veto economic progress. Harold Wilson, whose summit talks with Liam Cosgrave took place on the day in March when the pound sterling hit its lowest point against the dollar, had retired, wearied by the incessant battles on the economic front which dogged his three terms as prime minister. We read of his frustration and anger with Northern Ireland and its problems in his "note for the record" written in his last months in office in January 1976. In this document, he considers the possibility of the North becoming an independent state. How seriously this implied threat was to be taken is for historians to debate.
The failure of the Sunningdale powersharing executive emerges in even starker relief as a very great missed opportunity. A quarter of a century of bloodshed, destruction and wasted lives would pass before the Belfast Agreement. It is to the credit of the officials in the Taoiseach's Department and the Department of Foreign Affairs that from the earliest stages, they pushed forward policies to continue the aims of restoring devolution and power-sharing. Historian John Bowman's verdict, published last Friday, that " the Irish policy-makers impress by their knowledge, analysis and prescription; and by their prescience" reminds us that we had in our administration people who knew a way forward. In them, we see a link which joins the Ireland of today with that of 30 years ago.