British government officials explored the idea of resettling 5.5m Hong Kong residents to Northern Ireland in 1983, at the height of the Troubles.

A government file, recently released to the National Archives in Kew, London, shows that the proposal was intended to found a city state, nestled between Coleraine and Derry.

The Guardian reports that the idea was first proposed by a sociology lecturer at Reading University, Christie Davies, and was championed by one civil servant in particular – George Fergusson, who first saw the idea in a newsletter and then brought it to the Foreign Office’s attention. One of the men involved in discussions, Mr David Snoxell, has now told the BBC the idea was "a spoof between colleagues who had a sense of humour... it wasn't intended seriously."

The proposal was filed under the title ‘The Replantation of N. Ireland from Hong Kong’. The problem it intended to solve was what the UK could od with the 5.5m Hong Kong citizens due to come under Chinese rule in 1997 when the territory was returned to China.

Fergusson felt the relocation could reassure “Unionist opinion of the open-ended nature of the Union”, while also showing the United States there was a “possibly happy outcome to the uncertainties currently surrounding Hong Kong.”

Fergusson appeared to admit the potential political complications of adding 5.5m people to an already grossly complicated milieu were hard to gauge.

“We are undecided here whether the arrival of 5 and a half million Cantonese would make government policy (on devolution) … more or less easy to implement,” Fergusson said.

“Arithmetically, recognition of three identities might be thought more difficult.”

The hope was that perhaps adding a third group to the country could in some way weaken the animosity between the two communities.

“On the other hand, the newly arrived ‘third’ identity would be hard not to recognise and this in turn might lessen the scale of the problem in recognising the other two.”

While the prospect in general could seem a preposterous one, Fergusson pointed to Gibraltar and the Falklands as precedents for such a proposal of relocation.

“If Gibraltar and Falkland Island inhabitants … may be EC citizens, how could Brussels … seriously object to the inhabitants of Hong Kong, particularly if they were living in the Magilligan area?”

The files show that one official responded to the proposal with: “My mind will be boggling for the rest of the day.”

The tongue in cheek nature of the proposal was perhaps most evident in the reply of an official based in the Dublin office of the Department of the Foreign Office, David Snoxell, who responded to Fergusson's proposal by saying:

"My initial reaction... is that the proposal could be useful to the extent that the arrival of 5.5 million Chinese in Northern Ireland may induce the indigenous peoples to forsake their homeland for a future elsewhere.

"We should not underestimate the danger of this taking the form of a mass exodus of boat refugees in the direction of South East Asia."