Analysis: The Irish Government had no illusions about the Wilson cabinet's lack of commitment and ineptitude over the Irish issue, writes John Bowman.
For all the effort which had been invested in the Sunningdale settlement and for all the optimism which had followed the historic breakthrough which it encompassed, there was no honeymoon for the historic power-sharing executive which took office on January 1st, 1974. Most beleaguered of all was the chief minister, Brian Faulkner.
By January 4th the Ulster Unionist Council had voted against the Council of Ireland, and Faulkner, already at a disadvantage in attempting to sell a difficult compromise to his electoral base, was obliged to quit the leadership and the party to which he had devoted his political career.
Within weeks, his opponents had used the snap Westminster election of February as a plebiscite on Sunningdale: and, worse for Faulkner, the election campaign was running at the moment of the agreement's "maximum weakness", as one Irish adviser put it.
Faulkner wrote to the Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, on March 31st outlining "very frankly" the realities concerning the proposed Council of Ireland; he believed that, as delineated at Sunningdale, it was unsaleable to the unionist community. Taking into consideration the "significant and depressing" election results, he believed he could not even carry his recently-formed Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, nor what he termed the "most sensible and well-balanced people in the professional and business community".
To press ahead with ratification might well result in a break-up of the executive and "risk the gravest consequences".
The brief written for Cosgrave in preparing for his first summit with Harold Wilson spelt out the probable consequences of any failure to ratify Sunningdale: the collapse of the executive; the reintroduction of direct rule; and a constitutional conference to explore alternative forms of governing the North with the "tacit understanding" that the British "would withdraw from their commitments in Northern Ireland".
Although there was no "hard evidence" for this scenario, Cosgrave was encouraged "to explore the possibility" that this would be Wilson's analysis, but "without necessarily pointing the way for him".
Cosgrave was reminded that in November 1971 Wilson had mooted a detailed plan envisaging a British withdrawal after 15 years.
Wilson also referred to this plan when he met Cosgrave in London on April 5th, citing it as a possible explanation for the upsurge in IRA violence which had followed Labour's return to power in the February election: perhaps the IRA were "under the impression that 'we were likely to be softies'".
Cosgrave and Irish ministers pressed the Labour ministers for early ratification of Sunningdale. Rees reported that some of Faulkner's supporters were now saying: "'All is lost. The party is finished'. More defections were expected." And Rees emphasised a traditional British concern: that security "was a must before moving on to signing the agreement. Something must come out of Dublin on this".
Garret FitzGerald, while admitting that "there was a need to fireproof Faulkner", still believed that Sunningdale should be ratified soonest. Callaghan was in agreement.
It was imperative that Faulkner "must be made to take jumps and, if necessary, would have to be pushed".
Labour ministers were not unaware of Faulkner's vulnerability, with Rees admitting that he could be "down to only one as an assembly majority. Bradford could defect and bring a considerable number with him".
Faulkner had been "publicly and vulgarly abused in the streets of Belfast about his 'republican friends' and what they had brought about".
When Sunningdale was ratified the following month, Faulkner's greatest enemies may well have been those very Labour ministers who could muster only a policy of appeasement when faced with the challenge of the Ulster Workers' Council strike. Indeed Wilson's gratuitous televised insult to the strikers, describing them as "spongers" - "Who do these people think they are?" - only had the effect of strengthening UWC resolve.
Wilson can scarcely have been unaware that such would be the result of this sneer. His motivation must be suspect as he played so tellingly to the gallery of British viewers who believed that sufficient resources had already been expended in Northern Ireland - political, economic and military - and who believed that Britain should reconsider its commitment to the province.
Another factor in the equation which Dublin policymakers had to bear in mind was the traditional nationalist myth which presumed that if the British withdrew, the unionist response would be to negotiate terms with Dublin for a united Ireland.
This utterly naive belief looked more and more shaky in the wake of the UWC strike. The SDLP from its pessimistic analysis of unionist/loyalist opinion manifestly gave it no credence.
Nor did the inter-departmental unit in Dublin charged with evaluating different scenarios in the North. They (civil servants) advised the government that the belief that British withdrawal would be followed by Irish unity was "not well founded".
The unit concluded that withdrawal was more likely to be followed by an attempt, possibly successful, to establish an independent state of Northern Ireland, initially over the entire six counties, but ultimately over those areas dominated by the loyalists.
Once the executive fell, Dublin's policy advisers invested considerable resources in examining all possible scenarios. Unlike many of their more propagandistic predecessors, they were willing to acknowledge the many weaknesses in Dublin's anti-partition armoury.
While keeping the ultimate aspiration to unity in mind, they did not allow it to obstruct the necessity for hard-headed realistic assessments of the vulnerability of Northern nationalists. It was emphasised in one position paper that all British policy in Northern Ireland was invariably limited to "minimum, necessary, movement".
The brief for the Anglo-Irish summit in September advised that the British should be encouraged to let the loyalists know what the costs of any attempted unilateral declaration of independence would be. Such a declaration would result in the loss of the British subsidy of £400 million; the loss of the "British security umbrella"; and the "likelihood of a civil war situation in the North, as minority communities make their feelings on the subject known. This could involve the South".
Cosgrave was advised that a "process of attrition" by the British where they spelt out these dangers, "could well convince the extreme loyalists that power-sharing may the least of the evils facing them".
The briefing note acknowledged that all shades of unionism were now opposed to any Council of Ireland, while being prepared to work with Dublin "on social and economic matters". It was therefore vital "to approach the question of an 'Irish dimension' with particular care in the forthcoming discussions".
Wilson reported on the "doomsday terms" in which more than one member of the SDLP delegation had expressed themselves at a meeting with him. He assured Cosgrave that power-sharing and an Irish dimension remained cornerstones of British policy.
Any attempt by a loyalist majority coming out of the convention election to declare a unilateral declaration of independence was unacceptable, just as it would be for Yorkshire or Cornwall. "The North could not live for a day without Britain." The UWC strike might have been effective "as a destructive tactic, but you could not run a government or an administration on this principle".
Wilson boasted that "in recent months some very nasty men had been lifted on the unionist side" including "the perpetrators of the Dublin bomb outrages". These were now in detention although "it was impossible to get the evidence to try them in ordinary courts".
There was some discussion of Enoch Powell's decision to contest the forthcoming UK election, the second of 1974. He had lost his Wolverhampton seat in February and now proposed standing for south Down as a candidate for the United Ulster Unionist Council.
Wilson told Irish ministersthat such were Powell's convictions on economics and Europe that there was "no possibility of a Powell-led UUUC group and the Conservatives led by Heath getting on together indefinitely".
He quipped that Powell's switch of party and constituency had come about because of UUUC dissatisfaction with their leaders. They had "adopted the football club expedient of hiring an expensive outsider. It was unlikely to work".
Much of this same ground was again covered at a further summit in London on November 1st. Wilson promised "to put up a barrage of information, White Papers, etc" to convince the people of Northern Ireland "that their area would be a very impoverished country if they strike out on their own".
Wilson again promised that his government would not abandon power-sharing and an Irish dimension as the cornerstone of its Northern policy. He claimed that the Conservatives in the October election had been "toying with the idea" until he had "rumbled it". Perhaps some Conservatives might still contemplate abandoning power-sharing "but they certainly would not do so under Whitelaw. 'He would vomit' at the thought".
Although Wilson attempted to portray his government as custodians of the values which had underpinned Sunningdale, the files in the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Taoiseach's office for 1974 reveal that the Cosgrave Government and its advisers remained appropriately sceptical.
Dublin had been told by John Hume in August that Heath had confided to him that he believed the Labour government wished to withdraw from the North. But the most telling guide to Labour's Irish policy was its ineptitude in May in not defending the executive. The Irish records for 1974 show an administration in Dublin with no illusions on Labour's reliability on the issue. Ministers preparing for the September summit were advised that the Labour cabinet had "no great political concern or interest in the Northern situation" aside from four senior ministers: Wilson, Rees, Mason and Callaghan.
Although otherwise preoccupied since becoming foreign secretary, Callaghan was "probably politically the surest of the four"; and given the "ineffectiveness of Rees and Mason, and Wilson's loose style of leadership", it was scarcely surprising that the Northern situation had "seriously drifted".