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ANGO IRISH RELATIONS:THE FIRST face-to-face meeting between Northern secretary of state Roy Mason and minister for foreign affairs Michael O'Kennedy was marred by a war of words over remarks by taoiseach Jack Lynch on Irish unity and Mason's suggestion that the IRA perpetrators of the La Mon bombing atrocity in which 12 died, had "fled South".

At the outset of the meeting in Iveagh House on May 5th, 1978, O'Kennedy said his government had been very concerned that, without any notice to them, the secretary of state indicated that those responsible for La Mon might have come South. It had provoked a severe reaction in Dublin.