BRITAIN deliberately delayed the demolition of its army watchtowers in Northern Ireland for political reasons, even though they had become an unnecessary financial burden, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland has revealed.

Peter Hain said the only reason they had stayed up for so long was to provide him with a reciprocal opportunity after the IRA had made its statement renouncing violence.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Hain said Lt General Sir Redmond Watt, the commander of British forces in Northern Ireland, regarded the towers as a drain on resources and was pressing for them to be demolished. Sir Hugh Orde, the PSNI chief constable, had also told the secretary of state they were of no value to him.

Hain said: “People assume the taking-down of the watchtowers was some premature concession. The truth is that [they] have not been of any practical use to us in surveillance and security terms for some time.”

This assessment contradicts unionist claims that the demolition of the towers was a security gamble to appease the IRA. Hain insisted they had been a waste of manpower because “each of them requires nine soldiers to guard it all the time. Dismantling them and releasing the resources is something that the army wanted to do and had been pressing me to do”.

He added: “I kept them until after the IRA had made a statement to see what it contained . . . Then I thought it appropriate that the army would do what they wanted to do anyway.” His advice is that the watchtowers would not be needed “even if the IRA campaign resumed”.

Hain has also decided to disband home service battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment with more than 3,000 soldiers, formerly known as the UDR. The home service battalions cannot be sent abroad and were a permanent military backup for the police during the Troubles. The decision has been criticised by unionists as another sop to terrorism.

Quoting previously unpublished statistics, Hain said: “The figures shown to me by the army before July 28 [when the IRA formally ended its campaign] indicate that the home battalions were operating at 4% of capacity.

“Even over the weekend of violence which followed the re-routing of the Whiterock parade only 1,200 out of 3,000 RIR home-service soldiers were actually deployed on the streets. So in a very difficult situation, with the police under fire, you still didn’t need a lot of them. You can’t actually justify them on security grounds or on the wider imperatives of the United Kingdom’s strategic defence needs.”

Even in peacetime about 5,000 regular soldiers would be garrisoned for training at Northern Ireland bases, and there would, Hain says, be more than enough to back up the police in any emergency.

The secretary of state is not counting on violence resuming. He believes the IRA is in “shut down” mode and he is working to get the loyalists to do the same.

Over the summer he was pressed by most of the political parties to declare the UVF ceasefire at an end by “specifying” the organisation that murdered four people as part of a feud against the rival LVF. Hain, however, stayed his hand until he thought the moment was right. For several days he claimed not to have had time to read an independent monitoring report showing that the UVF ceasefire was at an end.

Hain revealed that he delayed the decision to allow for mediation between the rival factions. “There were attempts to broker an end to the feud,” he said. “A premature specification could have got in the way of that.”

He insists he had kept up the security pressure throughout the summer and had “personally authorised a whole series of preventative measures, to stop murders taking place”. This could be coded language for bugging and surveillance operations, but the minister refused to elaborate.

For the time being Hain has vetoed negotiations with loyalist paramilitaries and removed funding from organisations in which they are involved.

In the longer term he argues that “dialogue with people who claim a political objective is always the best way forward. We are a long way away from that but let’s just say we have an intensive process of engagement ahead. I hope it will be successful and I have every indication that it will be”.

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