Within four days of the bombings, Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary, announced that the Irish Republican Army was to be proscribed within the UK. Two days later, on 27 November, Jenkins introduced the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974,which granted the police in mainland Britain the right to arrest, detain, and question people for up to seven days if they were suspected of the commission or preparation of an act of terrorism on the British mainland, and their subsequent deportation to either Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland if culpability was proven. Jenkins later described the measures of this Act as being "draconian measures unprecedented in peacetime".