Jack Lynch

Documents released by the British Government on May 27th, 2010, under the thirty year rule give a telling insight into how the British viewed the north and the Irish Government.

In 1970 the then British Home Secretary, James Callaghan was told by a senior British Diplomat that the Prime Minister (Taoiseach) of the Irish Republic, Jack Lynch needed to realise that the only way to Irish unity would be by way of the “seduction, not the rape of Northern Ireland”. Mr Oliver Wright, a senior British Diplomat had written his observations in a letter to Mr Callaghan after Mr Wright had served as a Diplomat for six months at Stormont in Northern Ireland.
Mr Wright continued, “So long as we keep the North quiet, the South will give us no trouble, for Mr Lynch also went to the edge of disaster last August and stepped back in time [in his “we will not stand by” speech].

“His courageous speech to his party conference in January marked a change from fantasy to realism about the Irish question,” “If he recognises, as he now does, that force cannot be used to solve the problem of partition, he must come to realise that the only prospect of Irish unity lies in the seduction, not the rape of the North. The South will, I suspect, be a long-time a-wooing, if they ever start: the Irish tend to marry late, I believe,” he wrote.

Wright had been sent to the north in 1969 after British troops had been deployed as peace keepers. Wright described Catholics as ‘Micks’ and Protestants as ‘Prods’, both derogatory terms used in local sectarian parlance in the north.

“It is a tribal society, and the natives stranded by partition on the wrong side of the borders like and trust each other about as well as dog and cat, Arab and Jew, Greek and Turkish Cypriot.” The “Orange Protestant ascendancy” had abused “the existence of British-style democracy” to guarantee and perpetuate a most un-British-style injustice towards the Catholic community” said Mr Wright.

“But the minority, though perhaps more sinned against than sinning, has been far from blameless. In true Irish fashion, the Micks have enjoyed provoking the Prods as much as the Prods have enjoyed retaliating”.

“Catholic attitudes have been at best ambivalent and at worst treacherous. It makes the Prods’ blood boil – and all Irish blood boils at a very low temperature – to see the Micks enjoy the superior material benefits of the British connection while continuing to wave the tricolour at them,” said Mr Wright in truly Imperialist tone.