British Considered Ethnic Cleansing in 1970s Ireland

This made for interesting reading. The British Government in the early 1970s, faced with a virtual civil war in Ireland following the imposition of military rule, seriously examined two tactics which worked well for them in South Africa and India/Pakistan: ethnically cleansing the Irish Catholic population, either into concentration camps within Northern Ireland itself (the South African “solutional”) or expelling them into Southern Ireland (the India/Pakistan “solution”). Apparently, the only thing holding them back was that they thought the US would never go for it. I don’t think the current Administration would have a problem with this solution today. In fact, given that the US had in the 1970s just finished a program of concentrating compliant Vietnamese into “strategic hamlet” concentration camps, I think if the UK had pushed they might have got away with it.