EDWARD HEATH was willing to overrule Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority in 1972 and redraw the border with the Irish Republic, forcing up to half a million people to leave their homes.

Official papers released today under the 30-year rule show that Mr Heath’s Conservative Government was so desperate to find a solution to the bloodshed in Northern Ireland that it considered a form of “ethnic cleansing” that would have created a Protestant-only statelet.

The plan even envisaged running down British Army numbers at the edge of the Iron Curtain to more than double the number of battalions in the Province.

Historians, who have long suspected that the Heath Government was toying with radical measures as it flailed from crisis to crisis in Northern Ireland, expressed astonishment at a plan which would almost certainly have caused great bloodshed and would have proved hopelessly impractical.Officials said that the scheme would provoke widespread resistance, offered no guarantee of peace and might wreck Britain’s reputation in the eyes of the world.

Paul Bew, Professor of Irish Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, said: “From the autumn of 1971 through to the summer of 1972 government thinking was all over the place. What was completely absent from the British Government’s thinking was the concept that the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was an absolute value to be defended.”

The idea of redrawing the border around Northern Ireland has been intermittently floated since the 1930s. It was even reported that Margaret Thatcher discussed repartition before signing the Anglo-Irish agreement in 1985.

It was the unique events of 1972, when Northern Ireland appeared to be on the verge of civil war, that forced officials in Whitehall to dust down old ideas about repartition and consider it for the first time as a serious possibility. Nearly 500 people lost their lives in 1972, the bloodiest year of the Troubles, which opened with the Bloody Sunday massacre in Londonderry on January 30, and saw the resumption of direct rule from London after 50 years.

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