Harold Wilson's secret "plan to abandon" Northern Ireland

Radio Four's Document programme on Radio 4 unearths evidence that Harold Wilson considered "abandoning" Northern Ireland. He considered making it a dominion, not part of the UK or the Commonwealth:

May 1974 was the height of the Troubles in the province but, for once, the daily story of bombings and shootings wasn’t centre stage. All eyes were on a new power-sharing executive; the first experiment of its kind, the Sunningdale Executive had recently taken over administration of the province. From the outset, though, the Executive was highly controversial and was buffeted by a series of crises and political opposition.Would it survive or not? It has always been assumed that former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, did his best to rescue Northern Ireland’s first attempt at power-sharing under the Sunningdale agreement.But documents unearthed by this programme suggest otherwise. Mike Thomson reveals that three weeks before the agreement collapsed, Wilson was already drawing up plans to get rid of Northern Ireland and cut it adrift from the rest of Britain. He proposed to make it an independent dominion that wouldn’t even have been a member of the Commonwealth). A leading loyalist from the time insists that there would have been civil war had he gone ahead with the plan because loyalists would have assumed there would be a take-over by Dublin. Another interviewee, Garret Fitzgerald (Irish PM at the time) says Dublin would have been horrified if it had know because it’s army wouldn’t have been able to deal with the resulting backlash from avenging loyalist terrorists.

That is fascinating. Gladstone had a similar idea in the 19th Century - to make the whole of Ireland a dominion, rather like Canada.