THERE were six Civil Service inquiries in the space of seven years into the leaking of documents to either Ian Paisley or Peter Robinson, a 1982 file released under the 30-year rule reveals.
For the second year in a row, government records published by the Public Record Office in Belfast include an entire file about information being leaked to Mr Robinson, the then East Belfast MP.
As First Minister, Mr Robinson has in recent years attempted to stem leaks from the Stormont Executive. In 2011, Mr Robinson and the then acting Deputy First Minister John O’Dowd asked for an inquiry into the leaking of Executive documents to the media, arguing that trust was in danger of being eroded “through the actions of individuals who, for whatever motives, are pursuing a selfish and negative agenda”.
But in late 1981 and early 1982, Mr Robinson’s actions led to a detailed NIO inquiry which attempted – and failed – to identify his informant.
The then DUP deputy leader had revealed details of a Government memo which he claimed showed that the Government was “fiddling” EEC financial information in a way which meant that Northern Ireland lost out on European aid money.
A News Letter article from the end of 1981 said that Mr Robinson had at the time claimed that the letter was one of a number of confidential documents, which included ministerial briefings, inter-departmental communications and government memos which he had “received” from the NIO.
A memo from Mr RJ Christie in the Department of the Civil Service on the day that the leaked document was published said: “Mr Ewart Bell [the head of the Civil Service] would like this leak of information to be investigated as quickly as possible.”
That same day, an investigation was put in train to be carried out simultaneously in both London and Belfast.
Although the leak was treated seriously, at a meeting that day it was thought that “press interest will not be sustained on this rather complex issue”.
A confidential memo sent the following day, New Year’s Eve, said that the investigation was “already under way”.
The note from RJ Christie said: “This morning’s News Letter carried banner headlines on page 1 ‘Stormont probe on letter leak’, and stated that ‘an internal inquiry is under way at Stormont in a bid to discover how an outsider gained access to a confidential document’.”
A letter from JA Daniell, NIO Private Secretary, to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, copied to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s private secretary, on January 4, 1982 said that the document obtained by Mr Robinson was in fact a minute of a meeting “with no security grading or privacy marking and does not therefore strictly fall within the [leak] rules”.
He added: “However, both because the passing of the document is itself disturbing and because Mr Robinson also said that he was in possession of a number of other ‘confidential’ documents from the NIO, we are mounting a thorough investigation here [London] and in Belfast.”
By January 6, the London probe was complete and a two-page report was sent to Belfast. It said that five staff had been interviewed, including Ian Burns, the author of the letter.
All those interviewed said that they had not had any contact with the media since the letter was written and that they had each followed security protocols for the various copies of the letter.
The report noted that “neither the author nor his staff would appear to benefit in any way by deliberately leaking the minute” and added that the rooms where the files were stored were regarded as entirely secure, with only the Security Section having access.
Following interviews with 50 civil servants, the final nine-page report by a Belfast-based civil servant was completed in March. Its author, JS Griffin, concluded: “My enquiries revealed no breach of security by any of the officers interviewed. None of them admitted communicating with Mr Robinson or his associates. None of them expressed any pro-DUP views and all of them condemned the breach of confidence that had allowed Mr Robinson to obtain information about Government deliberations.”
He added: “I felt it should be pointed out that over the past seven years this branch has carried out investigations into six cases of the unauthorised disclosure of information to either Dr Paisley or Mr Robinson.
“All these leaks refer to housing matters and nothing else. On one occasion in 1975 the RUC were called in to conduct an enquiry into the leakage of papers to Dr Paisley.”
The report found that it may have been possible for former employees “who visited their old office to have found an opportunity to copy an unclassified document if they were desirous of doing so”, something which internal memos show concerned senior civil servants.