In March 1972, just weeks after Bloody Sunday when 13 unarmed civilians were shot by British Army paratroopers, a young Derry boy named Cormac Quigley wrote to taoiseach Jack Lynch expressing his unhappiness that he was not able to go outside to play.
During some of the darkest days of the Troubles, the letter touched Lynch, who told the boy he understood his “feelings of boredom at not being able to play freely in your own city”.
In the reply, drafted on his behalf by an official, Lynch said he “hopes and prays” Northern Ireland’s problems would soon be resolved, adding he “anxiously awaited” British ideas.
The letter is one of thousands of documents published in the latest volume of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy covering the years 1969 to 1973,, launched on Monday night by Minister of State for International Development and the Diaspora Neale Richmond.
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The files show how, from 1969, Dublin struggled to understand what was happening on the ground in Northern Ireland, responding “awkwardly, caught seemingly unaware by the violence and without a prepared strategy”, the book’s editors write.
By July 1969, Northern Ireland had begun to occupy minds in Iveagh House, though a major policy document then being worked on as Paddy Hillery took over as minister for external affairs was quickly overtaken by events.
Warnings about the future came daily. In late July 1969, Con Howard, based in the Irish Embassy in London, relayed John Hume’s fear that “Derry is a powder keg” and that Stormont “had lost control”.
Offering a prescient alarm, Hume said the August 12th Apprentice Boys march “was going to be particularly dangerous”, since the organisers planned on bringing 73 bands instead of the usual 17.
Northern Ireland’s prime minister James Chichester-Clark could not ban the Derry march, he accepted, because “the right wing of the Ulster Unionist Party would tear the organisation apart” if he tried.
Sending in British troops would “be dicey” but it might “be a lesser evil than the use of B Specials”, he said, though it would be extremely important that soldiers were “carefully briefed”.
In early August, Hillery, still settling into Iveagh House, warned the British foreign secretary Michael Stewart that preparations for the Apprentice Boys “had been deliberately stepped up”.
London then, and for several years more, however, refused to accept Dublin’s right to involve itself or to even offer opinions, saying responsibility rested with London and Stormont “and not with your government”, the files show.
Noting Hillery’s concern, Stewart declared: “I must say to you that there is a limit to the extent to which we can discuss with outsiders – even our nearest neighbours - this internal matter.”
Taking a determined line, Hillery warned his counterpart that serious disorder in Derry “might well spill over into his country” and, then, it would have to be raised before the United Nations.
Even with the deep apprehension held about the loyalist march, Lynch’s cabinet was still unprepared for what unfolded in Derry, “so much so that several ministers, including Hillery, were on holiday”, the book’s editors write.
The volume carries many of the memos written by Irish official Eamonn Gallagher, who went to Derry without the approval of his superiors in August 1969 to learn what was happening on the ground.
There, he formed a lasting friendship with Hume, even later sharing family holidays. Soon he became a trusted adviser to both Lynch and Hillery, until he fell out of favour with Lynch in 1972 after he boasted of how he dominated the Corkman.
In March 1971, just weeks after the death of gunner Robert Curtis, the first British soldier to die in the Troubles, and rioting had scarred Belfast and Derry, Gallagher sat down to pen a note to his superiors.
“In dealing with the North, one must constantly be on guard against both depression and euphoria,” said the Glasgow-born official, who argued for peaceful Irish unity, along with close co-operation with Hume.
Reflecting the fevered atmosphere, Gallagher warned “it is difficult to avoid infection” from contacts because “even the most stable of them swing from one mood to the other.
“Depending on the controlling mood of the moment everything said and done ... is interpreted more or less inaccurately and what doesn’t fit the momentary state of mind tends to be ignored,” he wrote.
Early on, the government realised that it had few links with influential British journalists and politicians and a major lobbying effort was put in hand, quickly paying dividends and becoming jocularly known as “dining for Ireland”.
By early February 1972, Gallagher cautioned against an idea of leaving the London lobbying to a Geneva-based public relations firm Markpress that had been hired for some work the year before.
The diplomats had been “very effective” with the Sunday Times and others, though the Guardian’s Northern Irish and unionist deputy editor John Cole had “managed to prevent” it from “coming as far with us as its liberal reputation might have suggested”.
Throughout the research, which has led to a volume running to more than 1,000 pages, Dr Kate O’Malley of the Royal Irish Academy had the sense of the fears, even near panic, felt by officials and politicians that everything could fall apart.
“There’s something not right about some of the material we looked [at]. There’s a lack of telegrams. There’s a lack of handwritten notes about phone calls or even typed notes about phone calls,” she said, all reflecting the rush of the time.
For some, Bloody Sunday was “the last straw”, she said.
In one file, an Irish Army intelligence officer present in Derry on the day reported the paratroopers’ undisciplined firing and witnessing the killing of one man who had lain injured for minutes on the road.
“I, then, saw the man’s coat jump twice in the air, saw two puffs of smoke at his back and also heard two shot reports. All of this happened in quick succession,” wrote the officer, whose name is redacted.
Irish embassy official Charles Whelan was warned, a day after the Derry killings by a senior foreign office official Kelvin White, that he would end a meeting if he continued to accuse the British Army of “telling lies”.
Insisting that the paratroopers were disciplined troops, White deplored the Irish government’s call for a convention to discuss “a final settlement of the Irish question”, as he called it.
In the end, the two diplomats sought a way of parting on reasonable terms, with White telling his Irish counterpart: “We have both lost and the only people to have gained are the IRA.”
