At the height of bloodletting in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, the British government considered trying to end the sectarian conflict by forcibly moving hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics to the Irish Republic, according to the Associated Press.
Citing newly released government documents, AP reports the top-secret contingency plan was rejected out of concern that it would not work unless the government was prepared to be “completely ruthless” in carrying it out and that it would provoke outrage at home and abroad, especially in the United States.
“We do not believe that the government would be able to obtain the support of public opinion in Great Britain for the drastic actions that we consider in this paper,” the newly declassified document said. “Any faint hope of success must be set against the implications of a course which would demonstrate to the world that [the government] was unable to bring about the peaceful solution of problems save by expelling large numbers of its own citizens and doing so on a religious basis.”
The plan came to light in a batch of formerly confidential papers declassified after 30 years and released by Britain’s Public Record Office. The plan is contained in a report commissioned by the government of then-prime minister Edward Heath to prepare for a time when Britain was on the verge “of losing control” in Northern Ireland, the document says, according to AP.
Signed by former Cabinet secretary Sir Burke Trend, the plan called for a “massive reinforcement of troops” in the province accompanied by “searches, interrogation and possibly internment” of Roman Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups.
If that failed, another suggested solution involved either redrawing the border or a “compulsory transfer of population” affecting more than one-quarter of the province’s 1.5 million residents.
More than 200,000 Roman Catholics would be moved from Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic or “into homogenous enclaves within Northern Ireland.” A similar number of Protestants living in lands ceded to the Irish Republic would be moved into what remained of Northern Ireland.
The report notes, according to AP, such a plan “raises obvious political difficulties” and would provoke outrage in the U. S. and among Britain’s other allies.
“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 transfer of population would be negligible,” the document said.
It advised the government continue the “present policy of reconciliation, tempered with a firm but selective military response to terrorism.”
Almost 500 people were killed in 1972, more than any year since. On Jan. 30 of that year – now
known as Bloody Sunday – British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed Roman Catholic protesters in Londonderry.
The documents provide the first indication that Britain once considered using ethnic cleansing, a strategy denounced by Britain and many other countries when Serbs used it against Muslims and Albanians during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
