Bank probe unlikely to tell us the full story

Dates to be used raise only more questions, writes Political Correspondent Paul O’Brien

UNDER the 30-year rule, previously confidential state papers are made publicly available three decades after they have been created. At the end of last month, for example, the state papers from 1979 became available, and an array of fascinating – and previously unknown – information came to light.

They revealed, for example, how it took almost nine hours for civil servants to track down the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch on his holidays in Portugal to tell him about the IRA assassination of Lord Mountbatten. The papers also showed that the Government secretly forged trade links with Libya in the 1970s despite privately acknowledging the north African state was arming the IRA.