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Files reveal '72 NI expulsion plan
LONDON, England -- Top-secret documents released on Wednesday show how the British government in 1972 considered forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of Catholics from Northern Ireland. The scheme, which was put before then-Prime Minister Edward Heath, would have created a Protestant-only Northern Ireland. According to files declassified after 30 years, up to 500,000 people would have been forced to leave their homes in the establishment of what officials described as an "avowedly sectarian statelet." The proposals, deemed a radical solution to the problems of Northern Ireland, would have effectively amounted to a form of ethnic cleansing. Officials warned that the proposals would face "great resistance" and could only have been put in place through the "completely ruthless" use of force, the documents show. The plan was presented to Heath on July 23, 1972, during a year of escalating violence in Northern Ireland in which 500 people died. On July 21 the notorious events known as "Bloody Friday" -- when 11 people died and 130 were injured in a series of bomb attacks in Belfast -- occurred. Six months earlier 13 people died during a civil rights march on what became known as "Bloody Sunday." In his preamble to the document -- marked "Top Secret: UK Eyes Only" -- then-Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend said it was "explicitly addressed to a situation in which we are on the point of losing control of events unless we take very severe action indeed." He added: "A great deal would depend on the extent to which we could continue to count on local co-operation as regards the maintenance of essential services and on the loyalty of the RUC (police)." Under the plan, 200,000 to 300,000 Catholics would be moved out of their homes into areas which would be ceded to the Republic of Ireland, and around 200,000 Protestants would be moved from the ceded areas into those areas to be retained in the UK. "About one third of the population of Northern Ireland would be on the move. Such a massive movement would not be peacefully accomplished; great resistance could be expected from many of those who should move," the plan said. "Unless the government were prepared to be completely ruthless in the use of force, the chances of imposing a settlement consisting of a new partition together with some compulsory transfers of population would be negligible."
Partition, however, was not the only solution to the problems of Northern Ireland being discussed by the British government during 1972. The files reveal that the then-foreign secretary and former prime minister Sir Alec Douglas Home emerged as a surprise advocate of a united Ireland. "I really dislike direct rule for Northern Ireland because I do not believe that they are like the Scots or the Welsh and doubt if they ever will be," he wrote in a note to Heath marked "secret and personal." "The real British interest would I think be served best by pushing them towards a United Ireland rather than tying them closer to the United Kingdom. "Our own parliamentary history is one long story of trouble with the Irish."
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