DUBLIN: Italy and Spain canvassed Ireland's support in the late 1940s to put the holy city of Jerusalem under Roman Catholic control within the young Jewish state of Israel , according to classified Irish government documents published on Thursday.

Details of behind-the-scenes talks on the proposal, which also included Portugal, but never got off the ground, were revealed in the documents made public by the National Archives in Dublin.

Spain - then ruled by dictator Francisco Franco - put forward the first initiative following a November 1947 vote by the UN General Assembly for the partition of Palestine that stipulated that Jerusalem would be established as a "corpus seperatum" under a special international regime.

The scheme for the city - accepted by the UN by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions - stipulated that it would remain in force for an initial 10 years and would then be subject to revision.

A 1949 Irish foreign ministry file said there was "great difficulty and complexity" surrounding the problem of how to guarantee the security of and access to the "holy places" in Jerusalem.

It recalled that Jerusalem was "a site of importance for the followers of three great monotheistic faiths" - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and that it had been "dominated by 11 empires and states in the course of its troubled history".

The file said the first Irish contact with the Jerusalem question came in December 1948 when Spain was concerned by an implied suggestion by Pope Pius XII that international control of the city and guarantee of the holy places should be entrusted to the United Nations.

That was seven months after the end of British rule in Palestine and the proclamation of the State of Israel. Madrid advocated the "Spanish, Portuguese and Irish representatives to the Holy See should make separate and concerted demarches to the Vatican suggesting that, if any form of international regime were to be established in the Jerusalem area, the mandate should be entrusted to Catholic countries".

Spain believed this was preferable to a body like the United Nations "from which the principal Catholic countries in Europe were at that time excluded," the Irish document added.

Having consulted its Vatican ambassador and the Portuguese government, the Irish government came to the conclusion that the Spanish suggestion was "ill-conceived and unrealistic".

"The matter was, accordingly, quietly let drop," according to the foreign ministry file. The matter arose again in April 1949 "when the Italian government approached us with a proposal that all Catholic nations who are not members of UN" should approach the Catholic nations within the international body.

Again the plan involved Spain and Portugal. The file said it was understood that Austria was also invited to take part, but declined. The ambassadors of Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal held talks in the Vatican, but it was felt that "nothing serious" could be done by the non-UN governments acting alone.

The file said the Holy See was reluctant to put forward concrete demands "which might lead to the Vatican itself being saddled with responsibility for promoting further disturbance in Palestine".The initiative of the four Catholic countries remained stalled.

It did not go further "due to the reluctance of the Vatican to disclose its hand and the natural disinclination of the four Catholic countries involved to proceed further without the assurance that whatever line they take will have Vatican concurrence".

There was also concern about "creating an impossible position" for more moderate sections of political opinion in the newborn Israeli state. The file advised that Dublin had even less interest in upsetting Israeli politicians because "Jewish opinion throughout the world" could be important in connection with Ireland's "partition problem" - the border between the Republic and British-ruled Northern Ireland.-AFP