A man who spent 20 years as an intermediary between the IRA and the British government has donated his private papers, detailing his secret work, to the University of Ulster and NUI, Galway.
Derry’s Brendan Duddy, known only as ‘The Link’ or ‘The Contact’, was a key intermediary between the IRA’s army council and British intelligence. Sometimes using his own house as the venue for secret meetings, Mr Duddy was an intermediary in the negotiations aimed at resolving the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981 and also played a central role in the efforts to negotiate the IRA ceasefire in 1994.
Now his private papers are to go on public display as part of the University of Ulster’s online archive of material relating to the Northern Ireland conflict.
The Brendan Duddy Digital Archive is to be hosted by the University of Ulster’s Conflict Archive on the Internet through INCORE, the university’s international conflict research centre, in collaboration with the National University of Ireland in Galway.
“It is a pleasure and privilege to entrust my papers to NUI, Galway where, I hope, they will be of some value to scholars of Irish history in the generations to come,” said Mr Duddy. “I am particularly happy that the archive is to be shared with the University of Ulster, based in my home town of Derry.”
