The Northern Ireland Office has stated that it is instead Prerogative of Mercy that was applied to a small number of cases under the Early Release Scheme to resolve technical anomalies.
Before his appointment as Arts Minister, Lord Donaldson had served for several years as a Minister of State at Britain's N.I.O. at Stormont.
He took up his post in 1988 after a series of senior appointments in the Ministry of Defence and the Northern Ireland Office.
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He was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Hugo Swire, the Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office in 2010, before which he briefly sat on the Education select committee.
Woodfield and Steele also represented the British Government at that meeting, along with William Whitelaw, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and Paul Channon, a millionaire Guinness heir and minister of state at the Northern Ireland Office; the IRA was again represented by Adams and Ó Conaill, along with Seán MacStiofáin, the leader of the delegation, Séamus Twomey, Martin McGuinness, Ivor Bell, and Myles Shevlin, a solicitor.
This strategy was outlined in an unpublished 1975 British strategy paper titled "The Way Ahead" produced by a committee of senior Army, RUC and intelligence officers, chaired by John Bourn, a Northern Ireland Office civil servant.