Whitehall drew up plan to segregate Northern Ireland

Whitehall drew up secret plans to pacify Northern Ireland by redrawing the border and shipping 500,000 Catholics to the Irish Republic as anarchy threatened the province after Bloody Sunday.

The proposal envisaged forcibly moving Catholics and Protestants into religiously pure enclaves as a solution to a worst-case scenario in which Northern Ireland had become ungovernable.

It was seen only by Edward Heath, the Prime Minister, and five senior ministers and was ultimately rejected as a move that would bring international condemnation of Britain and could trigger a civil war. But the plan, which is among 3,500 declassified documents from 1972 released by the Public Record Office today, demonstrates the apocalyptic options the Government was considering as violence spiralled after Bloody Sunday.

The dossier, marked Top Secret: UK Eyes Only, was produced on 23 July 1972, two days after the IRA exploded 22 bombs in Belfast, killing 11 people and injuring scores more.

The plan was designed to be put into operation if the IRA further intensified attacks, loyalist paramilitaries responded in kind, normal life in Northern Ireland became impossible and the Government was "on the point of losing control".

A political solution would be imposed by separating the communities by "redrawing the frontier" to take Catholic republicans out of Northern Ireland and by "otherwise transferring them" into the Republic or "homogeneous enclaves" in Northern Ireland.

"Almost one third of the population of Northern Ireland would be on the move," it said.