State papers 2024

A round-up of previously classified state papers selected for declassification this year.

A desperate David Trimble, under intense internal pressure as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party in 2002, sought a referendum on Irish reunification in order to unite his party - before he was eventually rescued by the orchestrated ‘Stormontgate’ media circus.

Trimble (pictured, left), then First Minister, publicly supported the idea of holding a ‘border poll’, which he was convinced would rally support behind him and that it would “call the republican bluff”.

Papers show that concern was raised by British officials that the move would actually weaken the UUP and SDLP and boost votes for the DUP and Sinn Féin. At the time, the SDLP was warning the proposal would create a “theme park for flags”, or lead to violence.

The suggestion was strongly dismissed by British prime minister Tony Blair.

Michael Collins, the official who would go on to be Ireland’s ambassador to the US, wrote in a confidential memo: “On the border poll idea, [Blair’s advisor Jonathon] Powell said that Blair told Trimble to ‘get lost’.

“Powell said that they were still concerned that Trimble was sleepwalking into a crisis with his party.

“They were not convinced that he would escape and he could still be hit by the grey suits as early as tomorrow at his party executive meeting.”

In any event, Trimble was rescued by a theatrical PSNI raid on Sinn Féin’s offices in Stormont. A supposed investigation of a mythical IRA ‘spy ring’ served to ease pressure on Trimble by providing an excuse to collapse the power-sharing institutions.

The papers have confirmed that the ‘Stormontgate’ incident was planned for months in advance, with the advance knowledge of British officials.

On October 4 2002, a huge number of armoured PSNI vehicles were deployed to raid the Sinn Féin offices at Stormont and “unmask” what was supposed to be a republican conspiracy at the heart of the Six County administration. A number of houses were also raided.

However, no evidence of wrongdoing ever emerged and no prosecutions resulted.

Trimble’s leadership of the UUP continued for another three years, but the institutions would not be restored until 2007.

The critical importance of US support to Irish republicanism has been highlighted by newly released government files.

In 1995, one year after the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire, Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams warned of a danger of a return to armed struggle if the peace process was not seen to be working by allowing the party to raise funds in the USA.

The files record that Mr Adams said that the ceasefire had been “sold” to republicans on the basis of there being “three pieces of the jigsaw” – a new political dispensation within the north of Ireland and across the Ireland, and “the Irish-American dimension”.

He noted the government in Dublin had changed, with nationalist Albert Reynolds replaced as Taoiseach by the unionist-supporting John Bruton, while “the United States was not delivering on an issue as basic and important as fundraising”.

However, when Tony Lake, US president Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, wrote to then US attorney general Janet Reno seeking to have the fund-raising ban lifted, he got an angry response.

Ms Reno, believed to have been heavily influenced by the British government, claimed the conditions she had set for lifting the ban on fundraising had not been met, namely “concrete progress toward disarmament and demobilisation”.

She also claimed to have evidence that the IRA had continued to identify possible sources of arms.

She added that the US Departments of Justice, State and Treasury were committed to tackling “terrorism” and that this would be “undermined” by removing the Adams visa restrictions.

But some 16 years later, officials in Dublin and London were worried that a US decision to designate the breakaway Real IRA as “terrorists” might actually boost support for the armed group which was formed in 1997.

Just three years after the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the US was planning to add the RIRA to their list of foreign terrorist organisations.

Irish officials warned that this could boost “dissident republicans” by enhancing their status in the eyes of republican supporters in the US.

The advice was ultimately overturned, and the US added the Real IRA to its official list of ‘foreign terrorist organisations’ in May 2001.

England’s Queen Elizabeth spoke of her relief that the “silly marching season” in the North of Ireland was quieter than usual during a visit from the Irish ambassador in 2000, it has been revealed.

Ambassador Ted Barrington had met the Queen at a Buckingham Palace garden party and said it was not the first time he heard “her dismissive views of the Orange marches”.

The ambassador’s account was written up the next day. Mr Barrington said the late monarch’s comments “were similar to those she has made to me on previous occasions”, but which he had previously been reluctant to pass on.

In 2004, the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats government of the day in Dublin swapped insults with the Sinn Féin leadership in a major row.

The meeting in Belfast was centred on the refusal of the coalition government to release four republican prisoners in breach of the Good Friday Agreement, but expanded to include the issue of general political smears against Sinn Féin in the mainstream media at that time.

Adams read allegations quoting government sources as saying that the Provisional movement was involved in crime, adding that some people in the Dublin government were trying “to undermine Sinn Féin by criminalising it”.

The Sinn Féin leader said he resented “being depicted as a criminal”, while Martin McGuinness said “irresponsible comments” by the then hardline Minister for Justice Michael McDowell were being used by unionists in a bid to exclude Sinn Féin from talks.

Ahern backed the media reports, but denied that the government had a strategy to undermine the party.

As the meeting deteriorated, McDowell compared Sinn Féin to Nazis.

The four men were ultimately made to serve their sentences in full and were released only in 2007 and 2009.

The MI5-linked Independent Monitoring Commission, which was set up in 2004 to issue reports on the IRA and loyalist paramilitary organisations, planned to publish a list of those it believed were members of the Provisional IRA’s Army Council at the time, apparently in a bid to put pressure on Sinn Féin.

British prime minister Tony Blair’s top adviser on the North, Jonathan Powell, and secretary general of the Department of Justice in Dublin, Tim Dalton, both agreed the plan was “daft”.

Dalton had to point out to the commission that it might not “fully understand” the nature of the relationship between Sinn Féin and the IRA.

“It seemed to believe that the former could always deliver the latter. This was not necessarily the case. He felt it might be helpful if the senior officials on both sides might meet the commission to clarify this issue,” one file notes.

The head of the probation service in the North, Briege Gadd, accused prison authorities and British officials in the North of deliberately colluding “to help establish and nurture” the murder gangs of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).

In a paper dating from 1997, she also accused them of a “manipulative and malign” and promoting “a right-wing and unionist agenda”.

Ms Gadd claimed such actions were being done deliberately “to help establish and nurture” the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).

The sectarian killer gang had splintered from the Ulster Volunteer Force after Wright, who was known as “King Rat,” rejected the UVF’s ceasefire in 1994. Under Wright’s leadership, the LVF became one of the most notorious loyalist death squads.

Ms Gadd’s comments arose from the controversial decision to allocate Wright and other LVF prisoners their own wing in Long Kesh prison which officially recognised the LVF as a distinct paramilitary group.

Files show Dublin officials had expressed anger at the decision to officially recognise the LVF as a distinct group, claiming the move would bolster Wright’s self-importance and serve as a rallying point for ultra-violent loyalists.

The 26 County Department of Foreign Affairs admitted a report into “public confidence” in the then Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) police amounted to propaganda.

A 1996 report by the Police Authority of Northern Ireland (PANI) into the RUC claimed that 90pc of Protestants and 60pc of Catholics, when questioned about ordinary policing duties by the RUC, said they had confidence in the ability of the RUC.

In reality, trust in policing among Catholics was at its lowest after the RUC, in a u-turn, infamously beat nationalists taking part in a peaceful sit-down protest in order to clear a path for an anti-Catholic march through a nationalist enclave in Portadown.

An unusually direct briefing note from the Department of Foreign Affairs described some of the high-profile figures put forward by unionists and the British Government as ineffective politicians, bad lawyers and, in one case, as having a “bitchy temperament”.

In 1991, a chair was being sought for Strand Two talks leading into the Good Friday Agreement.

Among nine names proposed by unionists, the Irish side determined that George Thomas, ‘Lord Tonypandy’, is “widely disliked” at the House of Commons, where he had previously held the role of speaker.

The briefing document says: “He has a petulant and ‘bitchy’ temperament and does not forgive slights, alleged or real.”

Expanding on what the commentary describes as a “large streak of sycophancy” towards British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the author of the briefing says that a senior journalist described him as a “kind of Welsh Uncle Tom”.

Plans under the Good Friday Agreement for an all-island marketing strategy to boost tourist numbers were blocked after David Trimble expressed shock at the referral to Britain as “an overseas market”.

Under the Good Friday Agreement, tourism across the entire island was singled out as having an area for enormous potential through co-operation. Under “cross-border” proposals, tourism had been planned to have an all-island approach. Tourism Ireland (TI) was established in 2002 to promote the sector across the across the entire island.

But one file noted there was a “delay”.

“This decision had been blocked by Secretary of State [Paul] Murphy, following objections raised by David Trimble to the designation of Great Britain as part of [TI’s] ‘overseas’ market,” the file said

Several meetings were held to tackle the British government as it sought to renege on even the more mundane and mutually beneficial elements of the Good Friday Agreement.

“This was unacceptable and that [the Dublin government] expected the North-South bodies to be allowed to get on with their important work without such interference,” one file, released in Dublin, noted.

“The reluctance on the British side to progress even those projects which have been mandated by the [North/South Ministerial Council], due to political [unionist] sensitivities, must be challenged.

“There can be no unionist veto on North/South co-operation. Successful functioning of these bodies is of strategic importance to us.

“The success of Tourism Ireland, for example, is not a political issue.”

British officials could have done more to offer protection to murdered human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson, a top official accepted “in hindsight”, according to newly released documents.

Mrs Nelson was repeatedly threatened by RUC police before she was killed by a car bomb outside her home in Lurgan, County Armagh in March 1999.

Just days before she was killed, Mrs Nelson contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs fearful about her safety, with an official noting: “She is very worried and asked if it would be possible to meet with the Minister to discuss her case.”

In the end, even basic external security lights for her property failed to win approval.

A public inquiry into Mrs Nelson’s death found no evidence of a direct Crown Force role in her murder, but could not rule out that elements within the RUC may have assisted the killers.

Tony Blair was embarrassed when his ignorance about Ireland became evident with the suggestion that nationalists might support England in the World Cup after Ireland was knocked out, according to reports of a 2002 meeting.

The former prime minister was said to have been dismayed by his gaffe.

Blair attended a meeting with the SDLP leader to discuss policing and a recent criminal justice bill.

On entering the room, Blair is said to have commiserated with Durkan over Ireland’s defeat and “offered, apparently genuinely, that the SDLP were now supporting England”.

In an understated footnote by a British official, it notes: “Blair was a bit crestfallen to hear Durkan express himself in a very non-committal manner on the matter of England’s likely fortunes.”

British authorities claimed to take seriously a supposed republican plot to poison English water supplies in 1999.

Although dismissed by republicans as certainly false, and a likely false flag, British officials claimed the idea was technically feasible.

The British Embassy received the supposed threat in June 1999 on behalf of what they called the “Republican Revenge Group”. No group by the name has ever existed.

The claim was that it would introduce weed killer into the water supply in England unless the British government announced its intention to withdraw from the north of Ireland by the following day.

British officials claimed the threatening letter was “cohesive and literate”, and had been sent to the “right people”. They saw no problem with references to “HMG” (Her Majesty’s Government) throughout, a phrase normally used only by British officials themselves.

The Dublin government was furious at having to learn about the appointment of former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten as head of the ‘Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland’ from a British newspaper.

One document confirmed that the government had only learnt about the appointment of Mr Patten to the role from an article in the London Telegraph.

“It was not the way to do business. [The] credibility of the commission is already damaged as a result. We need to ensure that this is not repeated.”

The RUC became suspicious of a loyalist paramilitary after he arrived at a police station still wet from a shower, presumably to avoid being identified by forensic tests.

“The person in question was not known for his regular bathing habits,” one file noted.

Urgent Appeal