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Despite claiming to love transparency, Stormont is getting more secretive, with a dramatic decrease in the number of government files declassified today at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI).
An 80-year-old file from the Second World War which has just been declassified reveals the alarm within Stormont caused by a young teacher in rural Co Derry running an amateur dramatic society named after Padraig Pearse.
Just eight months before the IRA’s first major ceasefire in 1994, intelligence showed there was a “close to 50/50 split” in opinion among volunteers about the Downing Street Declaration, according to a secret government file.
Senior NIO officials were split on whether the Government should break off contact with the political representatives of loyalist paramilitaries at a point where loyalist murders were dramatically increasing in the early 1990s, a previously secret document has revealed.
A minister in the old Stormont government wanted the unionist regime to take control of nuclear power - and there was a plan to build a nuclear reactor on the shores of Lough Neagh, newly-declassified government files have revealed.