EX-TAOISEACH Garrett FitzGerald pushed Margaret Thatcher for several different police services in Northern Ireland - citing the example of Brussels having 46 different forces.
The Irish premier privately told his British counterpart during crunch talks leading to the Anglo-Irish Agreement that the region was not normal and could not be dealt with in normal ways.
Problem policing could not be resolved in Derry and Belfast by simply recruiting more Catholics to the RUC, he argued.
Turning to the Belgian capital, Mr FitzGerald said a Walloon police force could be accepted by the Walloon population and a Flemish force by the Flemish people.
"We must get away from what Peel thought or did in 1846," he warned her during talks at Chequers in November 1984.
Robert Peel, father of the modern Conservative Party, founded London's Metropolitan Police and was also known for reacting slowly to the Irish famine, accusing the Irish of a tendency towards exaggeration.
Demanding urgent police reforms, he said one fifth of Belfast had been expelled from their homes since the outbreak of the Troubles in the "greatest mass movement of population since the last War", secret notes of the meeting reveal.
"You simply could not leave these enclaves without normal policing," he said.
Mr FitzGerald said in the absence of a reorganisation of policing it would be left to the IRA to police nationalist areas.
Young people were growing up in areas with a tradition of violence and anarchy, he said, adding: "They had never known a normal society."
But Mrs Thatcher asked if he wanted to see "Republican enclaves" with their own separate police forces.
She said there could "be no freedom unless there was law".