IRA REPORT:THE BRITISH Foreign Office secretly passed a copy of a British army assessment of the Provisional IRA to an official at the Irish Embassy in London, although the document was being withheld from members of the House of Commons.
The document, Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends, was prepared in November 1978 by Brig Gen James (later Sir James) Glover (1929-2000), the senior British Army officer involved with intelligence work in the North who had since become Commander of Land Forces, Northern Ireland.
Known as “The Glover Report”, the document fell into the hands of the IRA, apparently through the postal system, and reports of its contents appeared in the media shortly before it was given to the embassy official in May 1979.
The news stories were a source of embarrassment to the British government because of the document’s contention that the Provisional IRA had the capacity and support to continue its activities for the foreseeable future.
The embassy official forwarded the document with a covering letter to David Neligan, assistant secretary at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin, on May 16th that year, and both items have been released to the National Archives under the 30-year rule.
In the letter, the official describes how the document was given to him by Michael Newington, at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. “Newington asked me to convey two points with particular emphasis. Firstly, they would be glad if we would not under any circumstances reveal publicly that they have passed it to us.” It was not intended to distribute it to MPs in the UK, as this “might convey or enhance the impression that it is an agreed official assessment paper”.
“Secondly, he asked me to make it quite clear that the paper is an internal Ministry of Defence document, which was given no Northern Ireland Office or FCO distribution, and which is to be regarded in no way as an agreed British intelligence assessment.”
In London, a newly released file on the same incident reveals that the British were worried that the document would cause a rift in Anglo-Irish relations. Michael Newington expressed his concern about the leak on the morning of May 10th, just hours before Jack Lynch was to meet Margaret Thatcher for the first time.
The first concern was that the Irish government would be worried about paragraphs 11 and 12, which discussed the political situation in Northern Ireland. These did not foresee any role for Dublin in the North in the near future, and recommended the continuation of direct rule as the only option which “offers any real prospect of political calm and hence waning support for the terrorists during the next five years”. This section was published by The Irish Times shortly after the leak.
A much more worrying prospect was that the IRA would also publish the paragraphs of Glover’s report which related to cross-Border security co-operation. These claimed the headquarters of the IRA were in the South, which “provides a safe mounting base for operations and secure training areas” where “terrorists can live without fear of extradition for crimes committed in the North”. The report concluded that the South “provides many of the facilities of the classic safe haven so essential to any successful terrorist movement”.
The refusal of the Irish government to extradite suspected IRA members remained a source of controversy between the two governments in 1979. However, some British officials thought Glover’s report also contained dangerous oversimplifications, particularly in its criticisms of the gardaí and the judiciary as “less than whole-hearted” in tackling the IRA.
Co-operation between gardaí and the RUC had improved considerably in recent years, and these passages were “bound to cause deep offence” in Dublin, wrote one official. Moreover, Irish failure to successfully prosecute IRA members could be “set side by side with the similar failure of the prosecutions of Gerry Adams and the inability even to bring charges against Martin McGuinness in the North”.