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CHAPTER TWO

‘We Can’t Stand By’:

Haughey, the Arms Crisis and

Political Abyss, 1966–1978

‘I now categorically state that at no time have I taken part in any illegal importation or attempted importation of arms into this country.’

[Charles J. Haughey, 9 May 1970]1

‘Derry came too soon’: Haughey and the Battle of the Bogside, August 1969

On his appointment as taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil in November 1966, Jack Lynch committed himself and his party to adhere to his predecessor Seán Lemass’s conciliatory approach towards the Ulster Unionist government, under the chairmanship of Northern Ireland prime minister Terence O’Neill, and to try and kick-start the stalled cross-border co-operation between Dublin and Belfast. However, by the autumn of 1968 simmering sectarian tensions on the streets of Northern Ireland brought a shattering halt to functional cross-border co-operation between the Irish and Northern Ireland governments.2

The catalyst was the attack by the RUC on a civil rights march in the centre of Derry/Londonderry on 5 October 1968. Broadcast throughout the world, ugly scenes emerged of the RUC indiscriminately attacking marchers with batons, including Nationalist MP for Foyle Derry, Eddie McAteer. Nationalist opinion was galvanised in response to the attacks and soon after McAteer announced that the Nationalist Party would no longer act as the official opposition at Stormont.

In response to the growing civil unrest in Northern Ireland, Neil Blaney, minister for agriculture, publicly spoke out against the Northern Ireland government. At a Fianna Fáil gathering in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, on 8 November, he described O’Neill as a ‘sham’ and significantly said that cross-border government discussions had proved ‘a futile exercise’.3 The following month, to Lynch’s irritation, Blaney again declared his opposition to the partition of Ireland, even hinting that in the pursuit of his goal of a united Ireland the use of force was justified.4 The following year, 9 April, speaking at a dinner in Derry in honour of Eddie McAteer, Blaney once again demanded that the British government hand over Northern Ireland to the Republic, describing partition as a ‘temporary expedient’.5

Blaney’s speech, rather than being rebuffed by Fianna Fáil headquarters, was widely endorsed. On 14 April 1969, at a meeting of the party’s national executive, attended by approximately forty-five senior party members, ‘congratulations’ were offered to Blaney for his partition speech in Derry.6 Lynch’s silence was noteworthy. The problem that Blaney’s periodic attacks created, as noted by Donnacha Ó Beacháin, was not that he was opposing Fianna Fáil policy: ‘in fact it was the reverse’. By offering the traditional anti-partitionist approach to Northern Ireland, Blaney was impairing Lynch’s ability to formulate government strategy on partition, as his actions placed an ‘ideological straitjacket on Lynch’.7

Blaney’s outbursts heralded the outbreak of an anti-partition virus, which by August 1969, infected the Southern body politic. This virus was to spread like an epidemic throughout Fianna Fáil, infecting every strand of the organisation from cabinet ministers to grass-roots supporters. Although Lynch tried to introduce quarantine measures, his actions proved wholly inadequate. Unlike Blaney, during Lynch’s initial years as taoiseach, Haughey rarely involved himself with the Northern Ireland question. Except for his private (and extremely revealing) comments in April 1969 that he saw no moral objection to the use of force but only a practical one,8 Haughey was content to allow Blaney to beat the anti-partitionist drum in the public domain. The outbreak of widespread sectarian rioting in Derry on 13 August 1969, however, awoke Haughey from his anti-partitionist slumber. In words echoing those famously spoken by Lynch during the heights of this crisis, Haughey could ‘no longer stand by’ as Northern Ireland Catholics were indiscriminately attacked, burnt out of their homes and harassed by the RUC, the B-Specials and Loyalist mobs.

The Battle of the Bogside of mid-August 1969, televised around the world, represented a total breakdown of law and order on the streets of Derry. The crisis commenced following the holding of an annual Apprentice Boys’ march in the heart of Derry city on the afternoon of 12 August. Following skirmishes between young Catholic youths, mostly from the Bogside and members of the procession, the RUC intervened to end the violence. However, by the evening of 12 August, after enduring an onslaught of missiles and stones, a cohort of RUC officers retaliated, throwing stones at the Catholic protesters. The RUC officers were soon joined by a Protestant mob, which supported the RUC in their quest to gain access to the Bogside area.

Assembled television cameras broadcast images across the world of the Bogside Catholics desperately trying to halt the RUC and Protestant hooligans from entering the Bogside. The RUC, equipped with armoured cars and water cannons, then made the ill-fated decision to permit the use of CS gas. In retaliation, a large crowd of Catholics, under the auspices of the recently formed Derry Citizens’ Action Committee, built numerous barricades around the entranceways to the Bogside. ‘The Battle of the Bogside’, as it subsequently became known, was underway. From this relatively minor incident developed a riot, which enveloped Derry for over two days and nights and was not brought under control until the arrival of the British Army into Derry on the evening of 14 August 1969.9

As the battle continued on the streets of Derry and quickly throughout other parts of Northern Ireland, notably in Belfast, the Fianna Fáil government tried desperately to deal with the unfolding political crisis. Patrick Hillery, recently appointed minister for external affairs, had predicted that some skirmishes would invariably break out on the streets of Derry following the annual Apprentice Boys’ march.10 Hillery, however, like the rest of his cabinet colleagues in Dublin, severely underestimated both the humanitarian and political scale of this crisis. In fact, the outbreak of sectarian violence on the streets of Northern Ireland in August 1969 exposed the crushing reality that Fianna Fáil had no coherent, or indeed realistic, Northern Ireland policy. It brought Fianna Fáil face to face with one of its most blatant contradictions: the gap between its rhetoric and the reality of its attitude to Irish unity.

The Fianna Fáil cabinet first met to discuss the unfolding crisis in Northern Ireland on the afternoon of 13 August. At the meeting, at approximately 2.30pm, a consortium of vocal anti-partitionist ministers, led by Blaney and Haughey, bitterly argued with Lynch and his cabinet supporters over what constituted official Fianna Fáil Northern Ireland policy. By this juncture, in the words of Ronan Fanning, Blaney and Haughey had come to despise the moderation of Lynch’s Northern Ireland policy.11 Haughey, supported by Blaney and minister for local government, Kevin Boland, demanded that the Irish army be sent into Derry or Newry or both to offer, at the very least, support to the beleaguered Catholic populations.12 Haughey maintained that the use of physical force, in the appropriate circumstances, had always represented official Fianna Fáil policy and that the outbreak of the violence was an opportunity to undermine partition and force Britain to concede to a united Ireland.13 Haughey argued that an incursion by the Irish army into Northern Ireland would, at the very least, create an international incident and thus provoke the intervention of a United Nations peacekeeping force.14

Tempers were fraught; even known moderate ministers, such as minister for transport Brian Lenihan and minister for defence Jim Gibbons, were ‘very excited’.15 Lynch was under huge pressure as he desperately tried to advocate that only peaceful actions could secure Irish unity. The absence of both Patrick Hillery and minister for justice Michael Moran did little to help Lynch’s position. Hillery’s absence, in particular, a rational and moderate figure within the government and a close ally of the taoiseach, gave more leeway to the Blaney/Haughey caucus in the cabinet (Hillery was on a painting holiday on Achill Island off Co. Mayo, with John Healy of the Irish Times and did not receive notification of the hastily arranged cabinet meeting until the afternoon of 13 August).16

Lynch’s lack of perceived republican credentials played an important part in understanding his battles to retain authority among his ministerial colleagues in relation to Northern Ireland policy. As Pádraig Faulkner, a member of Lynch’s consecutive Fianna Fáil cabinets from 1969 to 1973, explained: Lynch ‘was the first Fianna Fáil leader not to have had any involvement, personal or family, with the struggle for Irish independence or with the Civil War. In the eyes of some party supporters ... the lack of a Republican pedigree was a problem’.17 This was certainly the case in the eyes of Blaney and Haughey, with both men retaining a visceral dislike of Lynch. They viewed the taoiseach as a weak and inexperienced interim leader of Fianna Fáil, who would sooner rather than later be forced to the political side-lines.

As the raucous cabinet meeting drew to a close, the Blaney/Haughey request to send the Irish army into Northern Ireland was rejected by the pragmatists, led by Lynch. Instead, the cabinet agreed on three policies. First, that an official approach should be made to the British government on behalf of the Irish government to express Dublin’s grave concern in relation to the sectarian unrest in Northern Ireland. Second, that the Irish government request the British government to ‘apply immediately to the UN for the urgent dispatch of a peace keeping force to the six counties of Northern Ireland’. And third, that later that evening the taoiseach deliver a statement on national television declaring Ireland’s right to reunification and denouncing the actions of the Ulster Unionist government and the RUC.18

As collectively agreed by the Irish cabinet earlier that day, later that evening Lynch travelled to RTÉ studios in Donnybrook, Dublin, in advance of his scheduled address to the Irish nation, scheduled for 9 pm. On the taoiseach’s arrival Desmond Fisher, the senior journalist on duty, noticed how nervous Lynch looked. In an effort to ‘calm his nerves’, Fisher provided Lynch with a glass of whiskey. He recalled that Lynch’s prepared typed speech had alterations ‘scrawled all over it’. According to T. Ryle Dwyer, Lynch then asked Fisher what he thought would happen if he were to order the Irish army into Northern Ireland, as some of his advisors and ministers had counselled. Fisher replied: ‘I thought they would go about twenty miles into Down or Derry before they were massacred in a fight with the British.’ The taoiseach smiled ‘wanly’ at Fisher’s answer and said he had arrived at the same conclusion. By then the script was in such a mess that Fisher had it retyped in large type with double spacing to facilitate Lynch in his delivery.19

Lynch’s speech was calculated to offer the illusion that the Fianna Fáil government was doing all it could to defend Northern Ireland Catholics. He did not mince his words. Not only did he attack the very legitimacy of the Northern Ireland state, but he demanded the ‘British government to enter into early negotiations with the Irish government to review the present constitutional position of the Six-Counties of Northern Ireland’. The Irish government, he said, could no longer ‘stand by’ and continue to tolerate the Northern Ireland government’s habitual persecution of the Northern Catholic minority. The ‘Stormont Government’, he deplored, ‘is no longer in control of the situation’ and the RUC could no longer be ‘accepted as an impartial police force’.20

Upon hearing Lynch’s address, Northern Ireland prime minister James Chichester-Clark was furious (Chichester-Clark was appointed Northern Ireland prime minister on 1 May 1969 following the resignation of Terence O’Neill). He labelled it a ‘clumsy and intolerable intrusion into our internal affairs’, and said, ‘I must hold Mr Lynch personally responsible for any worsening of feeling his inflammatory and ill-considered remarks may cause.’21 The British home secretary was, likewise, taken aback by Lynch’s strong words. ‘When I heard this late at night,’ James Callaghan was to later write, ‘it really seemed to be putting the fat in the fire. We had to consider the possibility that within the next twenty-four hours we might face possible civil war in the North and an invasion from the South. I frankly could not believe the second was possible.’22

On the morning of 14 August the British ambassador to Ireland, Andrew Gilchrist, sent a telegram to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, explaining Lynch’s dilemma. ‘Derry’, he reported, ‘came too soon’, for the worried taoiseach. ‘There is this to be said for Lynch,’ Gilchrist said, ‘he warned us that when the pressure grew too great he would be compelled to string along with the Nationalist/Sinn Féin/IRA line ...’.23 Hinting at the possible outbreak of violence in the Irish Republic, the British ambassador to Ireland pessimistically noted that ‘the Irish are a dangerously emotional people … if I were a fire insurance company I would not like to have the British Embassy on my books’.24

Gilchrist’s prediction with regard to the fate of the British Embassy in Dublin ironically proved correct. The following day, 15 August, the embassy building was stoned and the Union Jack flag ripped down from the pole outside the building and torn up by Irish protestors.25

At 11am, as Gilchrist was offering his observations on that state of Irish politics, the second Irish government meeting in as many days, commenced. To Lynch’s relief, Hillery had returned from his holidays on Achill Island and was present at this meeting. On arriving at the cabinet meeting Hillery was aghast to find that the Blaney/Haughey caucus were still calling for the Irish army to intervene in Northern Ireland, describing the meeting as ‘a ballad singing session’.26 Hillery subsequently noted: ‘Frankly, the army was not equipped or capable of doing what some people would like it to do. It is silly to think that the cartoonist in office saying that the army is fully equipped, would put up a better show than if not equipped at all [sic] …’ He sarcastically noted that the anti-partitionists within the cabinet, who included Haughey, ‘smothered in lashings of creamy patriotic ballads singing type of thing’, were all ‘talk’ and no action. ‘It would appear to me,’ he said, ‘that their hearts were not in it. It would appear to me that they want to take the right posture but get no scratches.’27

As at the cabinet meeting on 13 August, after heated discussions, the majority of ministers firmly opposed military intervention or covert support for political violence in Northern Ireland; they instead sought to place diplomacy at centre stage. In an attempt to placate the Blaney/Haughey argument that the Irish army should be sent into certain areas of Northern Ireland to protect the beleaguered Catholic minority, a decision was instead made to establish field hospitals along the border and to authorise the mobilisation of approximately 2,000 of the first-line reserve of the Irish defence forces.28 The decision was also taken that Hillery, in his capacity as minister for external affairs, would seek a meeting with the British secretary of state for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs or the secretary of state for the Home Office, as soon as possible.29

Following the conclusion of the Irish cabinet meeting, events in Northern Ireland dramatically altered. Under mounting pressure and faced with a depleted RUC force, the Northern Ireland authorities were forced to request the assistance of the British army in Northern Ireland.30 At 5pm a company of the First Battalion of the Prince of Wales Own Regiment arrived in Waterloo Place, in the heart of Derry. The arrival of the British army was initially welcomed by the Bogside Catholics. On the morning of 15 August the Irish Times led with the title: ‘Troops greeted by Bogside defenders’. It reported that ‘the troops had been welcomed by the defenders of the Bogside, who joked with them and at one point gave three cheers for the British’.31 However, this honeymoon period between the Bogside residents and the British army was to be short-lived.

News of the British army’s arrival in Northern Ireland caught Lynch by surprise and in the words of Gilchrist left the taoiseach ‘shaken’.32 Although the British army’s presence had calmed tensions in Derry, by the early hours of 15 August, Lynch received reports of fierce gun battles occurring across Northern Ireland. On the night of 14 August, six people, including a child, were killed in Belfast and Co. Armagh. In Belfast, the Irish government had received reports of sectarian riots, the widespread burning of Catholic homes and the setting up of emergency shelters in schools and churches throughout West Belfast. In the Irish Republic, the Irish army went ahead with the cabinets’ orders to establish several field hospitals, under the control of the Medical Corps, along the Irish border. The field hospitals were situated at Castleblaney, Cavan, Dundalk, Fort Dunree on Lough Swilly and Letterkenny, ‘from where the entire operation was being commanded’.33 News that the Northern Ireland government had also decided to send out the B-Specials to police the streets only added fuel to the fire. It seemed that Northern Ireland was on the brink of anarchy.

Alarmed by the unfolding events, in the early hours of the morning of 15 August, the taoiseach sent a Gárda car to the house of the secretary of the Department of Finance, Thomas Kenneth (T.K.) Whitaker, who was renting a holiday home in Carna, Co. Galway.34 Whitaker was Lynch’s key adviser on Northern Ireland from 1966 to 1971. They had been close since Lynch’s period as minister for finance. Previously, on intermittent occasions, Whitaker had also advised Seán Lemass on Northern Ireland and had been a key player in instigating the Lemass–O’Neill meetings of the mid-1960s.35 As taoiseach, Lynch now continued this informal, but important, function. Lynch greatly valued his friend’s recommendations, knowing he could talk to him in absolute confidence.

At 10 am, Whitaker travelled to the Gárda barracks in Carna where he contacted the taoiseach via telephone. During the conversation, Whitaker advised Lynch on a number of key points and later that day Whitaker posted a summarised letter of the conversation from Galway city to Dublin. Central to Whitaker’s thesis was the unequivocal argument that the use of physical force would not secure a united Ireland. Rather he argued that Lynch must attempt to ‘woo’ the Protestant population of Northern Ireland. He warned the taoiseach of any ‘temptation’ to ‘cash in on political emotionalism’. Irish unity, he said, could only come about by ‘scrupulously’ respecting the right of Northern Ireland Protestants.36

Following Lynch’s council from Whitaker, later that morning at 11.30am, the Irish cabinet convened for the third time in as many days. All ministers were present except for Hillery who was in London. Ministers discussed the present situation in Northern Ireland. Again the possibility of sending the Irish army into Northern Ireland was considered, but by this juncture the Blaney–Haughey anti-partitionist camp realised that proposal had no chance of being accepted by the cabinet collectively. Instead ministers reached agreement that Hillery inform the British government that:

In anticipation of their agreement to the proposal regarding a United-Nations Peace-Keeping Force in the Six Counties, or failing that, to an alternative proposal, which the Minister is putting to them regarding the provision of a joint Irish–British military Peace-Keeping Force in the Six Counties, the Government have authorised the mobilisation of the First-Line Reserve of the Defence Forces, so as to ensure that they will be in readiness at the earliest practicable date.37

Kevin Boland was not satisfied with the government’s decision. Instead, he called for Irish soldiers on United Nations peace-keeping duty to be recalled to the country immediately. Boland recollected that ‘I had gone to the Cabinet meeting intending to resign,’ he explained, ‘unless the Cabinet was prepared to give a real indication to the United Nations of the seriousness of the position in the country by the recall of our troops from Cyprus and by calling up a second-line reserve.’38

By this meeting Boland had ruled out the use of the Irish army because it would have undoubtedly invited the massacre of nationalists in Northern Ireland. However, he failed to realise the danger of threatening an invasion by recalling the Irish troops in such a public manner.39 Pádraig Faulkner later wrote that if the troops were recalled from Cyprus, in his view ‘it would have been interpreted by the Unionists and British government as a sign that we were preparing to use military force’. Although Boland was on record as being opposed to such action, he did not see the contradiction involved at the time. Faulkner later explained that, ‘If we’d agreed to his proposal it would have involved us in a futile and dangerous gesture.’40 This would have only led to heightening the tensions that had reached almost fever pitch following Lynch’s televised speech two days earlier.

Boland was to later confess: ‘I looked around the Cabinet and saw a no-good pathetic lot.’41 He promptly announced his resignation and walked out of the meeting, shouting ‘treachery and betrayal’.42 The Irish president, Éamon de Valera, was asked to try and convince Boland to reconsider his resignation, which he quickly did. Faulkner later recalled how he was ‘particularly perturbed as Kevin left the meeting’. At previous meetings, Faulkner explained, Boland had walked out of gatherings because he had not been given enough money for social services and he felt that this was simply another instance of Boland venting his frustration.43

Following that Irish cabinet meeting, on the evening of 15 August the British army arrived on the streets of Belfast. What had begun as a minor riot in the Bogside of Derry had now erupted into a full-scale humanitarian and indeed political crisis. Within the Irish cabinet, for the interim at least, it seemed as though Lynch’s moderation had won out over the anti-partitionist extremists led by Blaney and Haughey. The taoiseach’s success at curtailing the republican faction within the heart of the Irish government, however, was short-lived.

In a blatant act of defiance of an essential constitutional obligation on any Irish minister, that of ‘collective responsibility’ of the government, Haughey played an integral role in a subversive scheme to arm Northern Ireland nationalists with guns and ammunitions. The net result of Haughey’s actions would lead to his sacking as a government minister and see him face criminal prosecutions for allegedly using government monies to import arms. This defining chapter in contemporary Irish history is famously known as the ‘Arms Crisis’.

Covert republican or political opportunist? Haughey and the Arms Crisis

To this day Haughey’s role in the Arms Crisis continues to fascinate many. In truth, there will never be a definitive account of Haughey’s involvement with the Arms Crisis – such an account is impossible. The three investigations charged with examining the Arms Crisis, the two Arms Trials in 1970 and the Dáil Committee of Public Accounts in 1971, failed to arrive at any concrete conclusions with regard to what occurred, and more specifically Haughey’s role.44 Moreover, although there has been some first-class investigative journalism devoted to this subject, notably by the Magill magazine in 198045 and several published works on the Arms Crisis,46 many questions still remain unanswered regarding Haughey’s role. The job in assessing Haughey’s involvement with the Arms Crisis is made all the more difficult because of the lack of available archival sources, together with his categorical refusal to speak about the Arms Crisis throughout his lifetime.

Despite the many barriers that confront the historian when trying to address Haughey’s role in the Arms Crisis, this study does analyse four central research questions. Firstly, was Haughey aware that senior figures within the Irish state, including members of Irish Military Intelligence (IMI), were involved in attempts to import guns and ammunitions into Ireland in order to arm Northern nationalists? Secondly, if he was aware of these activities, did he exploit his position as minister for finance to facilitate such actions? Thirdly, did Haughey, albeit indirectly, play a role in helping to facilitate the emergence of the nascent Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA)? And lastly, whether Haughey’s involvement with the importation of arms was sanctioned at the highest level of the Irish government, or alternatively, did he operate at a covert level, unbeknown to Jack Lynch?

As is analysed below, the answer to the first three questions is a definite yes. The last question, however, is more problematic. While Lynch was certainly not as ignorant to events as he claimed at the time, there is no evidence to suggest that he approved of Haughey’s escapades. One point is certain, however, Haughey’s fingerprints are all over the Arms Crisis. Despite his repeated denials to the contrary, from the beginning Haughey played a prominent role in the attempts to import arms. In fact, in retirement he allegedly defended his actions during the Arms Crisis, arguing that providing Northern nationalists with weapons would have forced the British government to recognise the impossibility of an internal settlement to the Northern Ireland conflict and as a result agree to negotiate an end to partition with the Irish government.47

The origins of the Arms Crisis stem from a meeting of the Irish cabinet on 16 August 1969, the fourth in as many days.48 At this meeting government ministers, collectively, authorised the establishment of a four-man Northern Ireland sub-committee to deal with certain aspects of Northern Ireland affairs. Along with Haughey, three border county TDs, Neil Blaney, Joseph Brennan and Pádraig Faulkner were appointed.49 In reality, the committee was defunct from the start, only ever meeting on one occasion. As Faulkner later wrote, ‘The committee never met again and, effectively, ceased to exist.’50 The only committee, as such, comprised Haughey and Blaney. Both men were effectively conducting their own Northern Ireland policy, at odds with official government policy. Their fellow cabinet colleague, Hillery, later concluded that ‘there was a government within a government’.51 As Diarmaid Ferriter noted with the establishment of this sub-committee, Haughey and his sidekick Blaney ‘deliberately kept other cabinet members in the dark’.52

Haughey combined his role on the new sub-committee with control of a special Northern Ireland relief fund of £100,000, voted for by the Dáil, to provide ‘aid for the victims of the current unrest in the Six-counties’.53 As minister for finance, he held the most power and was responsible for ensuring that the £100,000 was used for its intended purpose; what actually occurred, however, was that at the very least, approximately £50,000 was used to buy guns for Northern nationalists.54

On the same day that the Northern Ireland sub-committee was formed, 16 August, three Nationalist MPs, Paddy Devlin (Northern Ireland Labour Party MP for Belfast Fall), Paddy O’Hanlon (Independent Nationalist MP for South Armagh) and Paddy Kennedy (Republican Labour MP Belfast Central) arrived at Dáil Éireann demanding to see the taoiseach. They had come to Dublin in response to Lynch’s television address to the Irish nation three days earlier on 13 August. They believed that the taoiseach’s comments had been an explicit acknowledgement on behalf of the Irish government of Dublin’s willingness to help the Catholic minority to defend themselves against sectarian acts of violence. As Kennedy explained, the taoiseach’s speech was ‘magnificent’ and he now ‘hoped it was not merely words but would be followed by further action if necessary’.55

Unable to meet Lynch or Hillery, the three Northern Ireland MPs purportedly stressed to Eamonn Gallagher of the Department of External Affairs the plight of Catholics in Derry and Belfast and noted that if ‘Irish troops were not sent into the North, they wanted guns.’56 Devlin was reportedly so angry at Lynch’s cold-shoulder that the police armed guard protecting the taoiseach’s house was increased.57 Although rebuffed by Lynch, Haughey and Blaney met Devlin and both expressed their determination to obtain guns for Northern nationalists.58 Blaney subsequently claimed that he knew the names of twenty-five politicians in Dáil Éireann who in August 1969 had given their own guns for use in Northern Ireland. He said that ‘truckloads of surplus small arms were at the time loaded in trucks ready to be moved to the North’.59

Shortly after the formation of the government Northern Ireland sub-committee, Haughey and the minister for defence, Jim Gibbons, attended a meeting with senior military officers at McKee Barracks in Dublin. Haughey sought specific answers regarding the supply of arms to Northern nationalists, including the Irish army’s military capabilities and what contingency plans were in place to ensure that weapons could be made available to designated recipients.60 Haughey’s intervention should not merely be viewed as ad hoc intrusion by an emotive politician, during this same period the Irish defence forces produced top-secret interim reports which also considered the pros and cons of supplying Northern nationalists with arms, ammunitions and equipment. Contingency plans were also drawn up in the event of a ‘doomsday scenario’, which envisaged that unconventional small-scale operations by the Irish army might be contemplated in certain areas of Northern Ireland.61

In the meantime, before any possible plans might be put in place to supply weapons, Haughey realised that a line of communication must be opened between the Irish government, under the auspices of the Northern Ireland sub-committee, and those Northern nationalists on the ground. On the suggestion of the director of the Irish Military Intelligence (IMI) Colonel Michael Hefferon, the name of a young officer on his staff, Captain James Kelly, was put forward as a possible intermediary.62 When the violence first erupted in Derry on 12 August, Captain Kelly was in the city having taken a few days leave to witness the annual Apprentice Boys’ parade. On the evening of 13 August, in the aftermath of the Apprentice Boys’ parade, Captain Kelly travelled to Belfast to visit his brother, Martin Kelly, then a priest in the Falls Road, Belfast. The following day, 14 August, Captain Kelly decided to return to Dublin to report immediately to Colonel Hefferon his first-hand experiences of the unfolding events on the streets of Northern Ireland.63

Significantly, in one report on the riots in Belfast, Captain Kelly suggested that the Irish government should give serious consideration to co-operating with the IRA. By then the IRA were being widely taunted with the slogan ‘I ran away’, because of the movement’s inability to defend Catholic areas of Northern Ireland. Following discussions with Gerry Fitt and John Kelly (a leading figure in the Citizens’ Defence Committees springing up throughout Belfast at this time), Captain Kelly advised that the Irish government provide monies to John Kelly in order to purchase guns and ammunitions.64 Captain Kelly was told by Kelly and others within the Citizens’ Defence Committees that what they wanted from Dublin was ‘technical assistance’ in the purchase of arms.65

Captain Kelly later testified to the Public Accounts Committee in 1971 that his recommendation to arm Northern nationalists was met by Haughey’s expressed approval.66 Over the following weeks and months the relationship between Captain Kelly and Haughey became integral to the entire affair. Captain Kelly effectively became Haughey’s ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground in Northern Ireland. The former regularly kept Haughey (and Blaney) up-to-date with unfolding events, chiefly in Belfast.67 Indeed, at his subsequent trial for the alleged attempt to import arms, Haughey publicly acknowledged that Captain Kelly had been a vital link between the Irish government, under the auspices of the Northern Ireland sub-committee, and Northern nationalists during this period.68

By September 1969, Northern nationalists in Belfast were beginning to fall under the command of the newly established Central Defence Committee (CDC), chaired by Jim Sullivan. As Justin O’Brien noted, this committee ‘organised life behind the barricades, negotiating with the RUC and British army, briefing the media, and organising internal security’.69 Significantly, the CDC believed that in its dealings with Captain Kelly it had garnered the official support of the Irish government, and that weapons would soon be delivered.70 This newly constituted committee was to form the nucleus of what was to become known as the PIRA. From Captain Kelly’s perspective, his ability to infiltrate the CDC in Belfast permitted the IMI a unique opportunity to help split the IRA between the traditional Marxist leadership in the South, led by the movement’s chief of staff Cathal Goulding, and a new generation of Northern republicans (hereafter referred to as the ‘Northern Command’).

The precise date of when the decision was taken on behalf of the Blaney/Haughey caucus and the IMI to supply the emerging Northern Command with weapons can be traced to a meeting held at Bailieborough, Co. Cavan on 4–5 October 1969. According to Captain Kelly, this meeting was a cover for the arming of the Northern republicans under the guise of the CDC. It was organised as a ‘stock-taking exercise’ in which representatives of the CDC could provide information to the IMI, which could then be passed on to Haughey.71

Within the space of a few hours news of the Bailieborough meeting quickly reached John Fleming, chief superintendent and head of the Gárda Síochána Special Branch. Aghast by the news, Fleming immediately travelled to Mount Carmel nursing home to visit Peter Berry, secretary of the Department of Justice. Berry was in hospital undergoing tests on the day of the Bailieborough meeting. Fleming informed Berry that republican elements of the defence committees at the Bailieborough meeting had requested financial assistance from the Irish government to procure weapons for defensive purposes.72 Berry was horrified to learn of this news, which he believed was a subversive plot that could undermine the Irish state.73 He attempted to telephone his minister Michael Moran,74 but to no avail (Moran, by this stage, had a ‘serious drink problem’75). He then tried to contact Lynch, but was unsuccessful.

Berry then contacted Haughey, unaware that it was the minister for finance who had provided the funds for the Bailieborough meeting. Haughey answered the phone and immediately agreed to visit Berry at Mount Carmel nursing home later that evening.76 On his arrival Berry informed the minister of the information he had received from the Gárda Síochána Special Branch. Throughout their conversation Haughey pleaded ignorance, making no attempt to make Berry aware of his knowledge of the Bailieborough meeting.77 Berry was dismayed to learn subsequently that only two days earlier, on 2 October, Haughey had met Captain Kelly and Col. Hefferon at his Kinsealy home, at which Haughey authorised that £500 be made available to cover the expenses of the Bailieborough meeting and any subsequent follow-ups.78

Haughey was by now playing a very dangerous game. On the one hand, he was maintaining a covert line of communication with militant republicans in Northern Ireland. Yet on the other, as minister for finance within the Irish government, he was constitutionally, indeed morally, obliged to maintain law and order and protect the Irish state against subversive forces. Not only had Haughey opened a line of communication with leading republicans in Belfast and elsewhere through his relationship with Captain Kelly, but the minister for finance had also allegedly held secret discussions with the IRA’s chief of staff Cathal Goulding. According to the Irish Special Branch, which had apparently placed Haughey under surveillance in and around August/September 1969, ‘a deal had been made’ between an unnamed Irish government minister (believed to be Haughey) and Goulding that the IRA would have a ‘free hand in operating a cross-border campaign in the North’, provided it called off its campaign of violence in the Irish Republic.79 According to Gárda intelligence, Haughey even supplied Goulding with £2,500.80 Haughey subsequently vigorously denied this accusation.81

Haughey’s covert activities during this period did not end there. In fact, on 4 October, the day of the Bailieborough meeting, Haughey secretly attempted to sound out the British government’s thinking in relation to Northern Ireland. During a private meeting at his Kinsealy home with the British ambassador to Ireland, Haughey said that ‘there was nothing he would not sacrifice’, including the position of the Catholic Church and Irish neutrality in order the ‘get a united Ireland’.82 A federal solution, Haughey felt, could even be found. He also informed Gilchrist that if Britain wanted Ireland back in the Commonwealth or requested Irish bases he would ‘accept that’. Further trouble, Haughey predicted, was ‘on its way, which would mean the end for Chichester-Clark’. It was therefore ‘essential’, he said, ‘to kill the foolish idea in the North that Stormont could gradually revert to its former status with a new Lemass/O’Neill type honeymoon at the end of it’.83 The British ambassador to Ireland was surprised by such comments, thereafter being convinced of Haughey’s deep-rooted ‘passion for unity’, as he phrased it.84 By going behind Lynch’s back this encounter with Gilchrist demonstrated Haughey’s utter contempt for the taoiseach’s authority and more generally cabinet collective responsibility.85

By this juncture Haughey wanted action not words when it came to determining the Irish government’s Northern Ireland policy and more specifically the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. Only two weeks previously, on 25 September, Haughey sent Lynch a draft letter in which he suggested the taoiseach consider sending ‘to the Ministers in charge of the Departments named in the programme of work attached. The draft is self-explanatory’, Haughey wrote. ‘The object, briefly, is to complete as quickly as possible a dossier of the practical problems that would have to be solved in the context of any moves to evolve a new constitutional relationship between North and South.’ Contained within the draft letter was a recommendation on behalf of Haughey that ‘the kind of examination I have in mind would cover all major areas of government activity’. He elaborated: ‘A start has been made by the Department of Finance, which has completed a study of the financial implications of the ending of Partition ...’. Haughey said that he was particularly anxious that attention focus on ‘the comparative’ arrangement vis-à-vis the constitutional relationship between Belfast and Dublin, with a ‘view of identifying the main problems of assimilation’ in relation to securing Irish unity.86

Haughey was evidentially sick and tired of the Irish government’s ‘official’ Northern Ireland policy. He had come to see Lynch and many of his cabinet colleagues as mere hyperbole anti-partitionists, devoid of a genuine desire to see Ireland united. Foreshadowing his future mantra as taoiseach during the 1980s that Northern Ireland was a ‘failed political entity’, incapable of reform from within, he sought a radical new approach. Dublin and London, he believed, must work together to decide the constitutional future of Northern Ireland, over the heads of the Ulster Unionist government in Stormont. His attempts to arm the nascent PIRA must be seen within this context. By arming Northern republicans and thus helping to further destabilise the state of Northern Ireland, he hoped that the British government might reconsider its traditional opposition to a united Ireland.

In conjunction with supplying the new Northern Command with weapons, Haughey’s attention focused on the training of Northern republicans in the use of guns. By this stage Captain Kelly, with the support of Haughey, came to the conclusion that if Northern nationalists were to be armed with weapons for defensive purposes, training exercises would need to be put in place. During September and October 1969 the IMI, under the command of Col. Hefferon, and with the approval of minister for defence, Jim Gibbons, and Haughey’s knowledge, attempted to organise and conduct military guerrilla warfare training in the Irish Republic for ten Derry Republicans from the Bogside at Fort Dunree, Co. Donegal. This was a pilot course, which was to be extended. However, on hearing about these planned military exercises Lynch called for their immediate termination.87

The first known attempt to supply the Northern Command with weapons involved the Belfast republican John Kelly and Pádraig (Jock) Haughey, the minister for finance’s older brother. In November, the two men travelled to London to meet a purported arms dealer, Captain Markham Randall. £11,450 was provided to purchase the weapons via a Baggot Street Munster and Leinster bank account, under the name of George Dixon. The deal, however, fell through, when Kelly became suspicious, believing Captain Randall to be a British spy.88 The following month, in mid-December, there was a further attempt to import arms, this time from the United States. On this occasion John Kelly and Seán Keenan, with Blaney’s ‘express orders’, travelled to America to ‘ascertain how quickly arms would be available in New York from the Irish-American community’. The American-Irish venture, however, never got off the ground. It failed for two reasons. Firstly, insufficient monies were raised to purchase the required weapons, and secondly, Blaney personally intervened to rule out further attempts to bring arms into Ireland via the United States, instead articulating his preference for a Continental European deal.89

It was during these abortive attempts to arm the Northern Command that a defining event in the history of Irish Republicanism took place. In December the IRA split, setting up two factions: the Official IRA (nicknamed the ‘Stickies’ after their supporters’ habit of sticking their Easter lilies on their lapels) and Seán MacStiofáin’s PIRA (or Provos) and the equivalent two political wings, Official and Provisional Sinn Féin. The formal severance of the Republican movement occurred on 11 January 1970 when Sinn Féin delegates met for their showdown Ard Fheis in Dublin. The split was as a result of a sharp division among Republicans regarding the issue of elected representatives entering any of the three parliaments – at Leinster House, Stormont and Westminster – and because of the IRA’s perceived inability to protect Northern Catholics when the sectarian violence first broke out in Northern Ireland in August 1969. The Officials mostly based in Dublin and comprised of old-guard Marxists, under the influence of Cathal Goulding, were viewed as irrelevant and outdated by the newly formed PIRA leadership, including, MacStiofáin, Joe Cahill, Seamus Twomey, Dáithí Ó Conaill and Billy McKee (and to a lesser extent a young Gerry Adams).90

Significantly, news of the split within the Republican movement did not detract Haughey from his goal of helping to arm Republicans in Northern Ireland. The question therefore arises, did Haughey’s covert support for the arming of the Northern Command help set up the PIRA? The answer is yes. While it may never have been his intention to play a role in establishing the embryonic PIRA, the fact remains that his subversive involvement in the distribution of monies, guns and ammunitions indirectly facilitated the emergence of this terrorist organisation. To argue otherwise is counterfactual. Blaney was to admit as much in an interview in 1993. ‘We didn’t help to create them [PIRA],’ he acknowledged, ‘but we certainly would have accelerated, by whatever assistance we could have given, their emergence as a force.’91 Therefore, whether it was simply poor judgement or a genuinely misguided attempt on Haughey’s behalf to try and help the beleaguered Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, he must share some of the responsibility for bringing the PIRA into existence.

The third attempt to import arms into Ireland occurred during the early months of 1970.92 This time Blaney, with Haughey’s full knowledge, decided that contact should be made with a professional arms dealer in Europe – Otto Schleuter in Hamburg, Germany. Blaney not only supplied Captain Kelly with the name of Schleuter, but also the use of the services of Albert Luykx, a Belgian-born businessman, who ran a restaurant in Sutton, Co. Dublin. The importing of the weapons was to be carried out by the IMI under the authority of Colonel Hefferon and with the knowledge of Gibbons. According to Justin O’Brien, the IMI was now working under the direct orders of the Northern Ireland sub-committee, or more appropriately under the command of Blaney and Haughey.93

In-mid February, Captain Kelly made arrangements to travel to the Continent to inspect an arms shipment, bringing with him £10,000 drawn from the George Dixon account in the Munster and Leinster Bank.94 The deal was to consist of ‘200 sub machine guns, 84 light machine guns, 50 general purpose machine guns, 50 rifles, 200 grenades, 70 flak jackets and 250,000 rounds of ammunitions and 200 pistols’.95 Captain Kelly met Schleuter in Antwerp where arrangements were made to ship the ‘cargo’ to Dublin. However, one stumbling block remained. In order for the cargo to be shipped authorisation from either the Department of Defence or Justice was required, due to restrictions on the importation of arms.96

To sidestep this legal stipulation Haughey became directly and personally involved in the affair. Under Irish law the Department of Finance, Haughey’s department, could exempt goods from custom inspection. In mid-March Captain Kelly approached Haughey, via the minister’s personal secretary, Anthony Fagan, with a request for an exception. According to Fagan’s subsequent testimony in court, Haughey’s reply to this request was to ‘see that it is done’.97 To the frustration of the conspirators, however, when the ship assigned to transport the arms consignment, The City of Dublin, docked in Dublin on 25 March, the guns were not on board. Rather, the consignment was impounded in Antwerp due to the lack of an ‘end user’s certificate’, the procedural formality which only the Department of Defence or Justice could supply.98

By this stage the entire episode had turned into something of a farce. Captain Kelly, however, had not given up hope of importing the arms consignment. In April, accompanied by Luykx, Captain Kelly travelled to Hamburg to meet Schleuter. The German arms dealer explained that all was not lost. It might be still possible to transfer the cargo by air. Captain Kelly then returned to Ireland and acting as ‘an assistant to Mr Haughey’s assistant’ attempted to bring the arms consignment to Dublin on a scheduled Aer Lingus flight. When it became apparent that international regulations did not permit the transportation of firearms, Captain Kelly approached John Squires, managing director of a charter subsidiary of Aer Lingus. Yet again, however, this attempt failed due to legal considerations.99

The Special Branch then got wind of what was going on. In response Fagan telephoned Haughey to warn his minister that if the consignment of arms arrived at Dublin Airport it would be seized by the Special Branch.100 Peter Berry was then made aware of the unfolding debacle; although he still remained unaware of the extent of Haughey’s involvement in the attempts to import arms.101 In a telephone conversation on the evening of Saturday, 18 April, Berry informed Haughey that the guns would be seized by the Special Branch if the attempted shipment arrived at Dublin Airport. According to Berry’s record of this conversation, Haughey said, ‘I think that is a bad decision.’ Haughey then asked, ‘What will happen to it when it arrives?’ Berry replied, ‘it will be grabbed’. On hearing Berry’s words Haughey noted that ‘I had better have it called off.’102 The following day, on 19 April, working through Fagan, Captain Kelly was informed that Haughey had decided to call an immediate halt to the operation.103

At this juncture, Lynch’s actions, indeed inactions, must be addressed His behaviour during this period raises more questions than answers. On 18 April, five days before Berry’s conversation with Haughey, the secretary of the Department of Justice met the taoiseach at Government Buildings to discuss recent events. This was the first occasion that both men had met one another since Lynch had visited Berry at Mount Carmel nursing home in October 1969. For the second time in less than six months (the first occasion being at their October encounter)104 Berry informed the taoiseach of attempts to import arms into Ireland and of the possible involvement of Haughey and Blaney in this affair.105 Lynch, as he had also done the previous October, decided not to act on this information.

It was because of Lynch’s unwillingness to confront either Haughey or Blaney that Berry took the unusual and unprecedented decision to contact Irish president, Éamon de Valera, to force the taoiseach’s hand.106 On 18 April, following his telephone conversation with Haughey, Berry informed de Valera during a telephone conversation that he had become aware of matters of national concern but did not elaborate on the nature of the information. De Valera immediately advised the secretary of the Department of Justice to once again ‘speak to the Taoiseach’.107 Two days later, on 20 April, Berry eventually met Lynch and supplied the taoiseach with a full report on Haughey’s recent activities.108 By this stage Lynch, who was ‘enraged’ by Berry’s decision to contact de Valera,109 knew it was only a matter of time before information regarding the attempts to import arms found its way into the public domain.

On 29 April, Lynch summoned Blaney to the Taoiseach’s Office. Lynch made it clear that he knew all about the covert plans to import weapons. He said that he was determined to stop it and demanded his unruly minister’s immediate resignation from government. Blaney vigorously protested his innocence and refused to resign. Later that day Lynch then visited Haughey at the Mater Hospital where Haughey was recuperating having purportedly injured himself either falling from his horse or having been badly beaten with an iron bar during an altercation in a public house on the morning of 22 April.110 Haughey also protested his innocence and because of his ill-health, Lynch felt that he could not continue his meeting with the frail minister, who was reportedly in a ‘very weak sedated state’.111

The question arises as to why Lynch waited until late April 1970 before he decided to confront either Blaney or Haughey regarding Berry’s accusations. If the secretary of the Department of Justice’s account is to be believed – there is no other available reliable evidence to contradict Berry’s account – Lynch had been aware of such activities since October 1969. It is Lynch’s inaction over this six-month period that has aroused numerous conspiracy theories among writers interested in this subject. Was Haughey actually working under the direct authority of the taoiseach? Did Haughey have the collective support of the Irish cabinet to arm Northern nationalists with guns and ammunitions? Or, in fact, did Lynch simply turn a blind eye on learning of the Blaney–Haughey plot?

Lynch’s role remains unclear and like Haughey’s involvement, one will never be able to garnish a definitive picture of the taoiseach’s actions and motivations during the Arms Crisis.112 Nonetheless, it seems implausible that Lynch officially sanctioned Haughey’s covert activities. It seems equally implausible, however, that the taoiseach remained completely ignorant of the unfolding crisis before April 1970. Rather, Lynch’s actions during this period can be best described as politically naive, even imprudent. Ostrich-like, Lynch stuck his head in the sand, hoping that Haughey and his co-conspirators would see the error of their ways or simply become bored and abandon their activities. This was a dangerous tactic on Lynch’s behalf. With Berry’s intervention, Lynch realised the time had arrived to weed out the Blaney–Haughey rump faction from his government.

On 1 May 1970, Lynch addressed a crucial meeting of the Irish government. He informed those in attendance that nobody could initiate Northern Ireland policy without his explicit endorsement. He then dropped a bombshell. Serious allegations of attempts to import arms, he said, had been made against both Blaney and Haughey. Both, he explained, vehemently denied the allegations. Pádraig Faulkner recalled that he was shocked by the allegations and noted that if they proved to be true the taoiseach would have no choice but to demand the resignation of the two accused.113 In his memoirs, Faulkner wrote, ‘I can still clearly recall Neil Blaney ... vigorously arguing a point on the subject [of agriculture]. It was as if the Taoiseach had said nothing of any significance.’114 George Colley was reportedly left dumbfounded, with his mouth wide open, demanding to learn more about the requested resignations.115 Hillery’s recollection of the meeting is most revealing. He recalled that he felt that his ‘heart would burst with the excitement’ as Lynch ‘stood beside me speaking’.116

Over the coming days, Lynch weighed up the situation, seeking council from the old guard within Fianna Fáil. He visited Seán Lemass, who informed him: ‘you’re the Taoiseach: do what you have to do’.117 Although Lynch was not reported to have spoken to de Valera directly, on meeting Hillery at Áras an Uachtaráin, the Irish president reportedly ‘whispered’ that ‘we were right and stick it out the people will see we are right’.118 Desmond O’Malley later recounted that during 1970, de Valera prophetically told him, on at least two occasions, that if Haughey was allowed to retain a prominent position within Fianna Fáil, the latter would ‘inflict great damage on the party, and that the bitterness and division would last for years’.119

Frank Aiken, by then a backbencher TD, was more forthright. In a meeting with the taoiseach at government buildings, in which Lynch supplied him with ‘files on the two’ ministers, Aiken demanded that the whip be withdrawn from Haughey and Blaney. Aiken said that ‘you are the leader of the Irish people – not just the Fianna Fáil Party’.120 Lynch also held a meeting with Captain Kelly in Government Buildings, in which he quizzed his guest regarding the roles played by Blaney, Gibbons and Haughey in relation to the attempts to import arms.121

As Lynch considered the fate of his ministers, events outside his control forced his hand. On 5 May 1970, the leader of Fine Gael, Liam Cosgrave, received a tip-off about the plot to import arms. Later that evening Cosgrave confronted Lynch regarding his news. After some procrastinating Lynch eventually approached Blaney and demanded his resignation. He refused. Lynch then phoned Haughey in hospital who also refused to resign. Returning home, Lynch consulted a small number of his closest circle of advisers. Soon afterwards, on the morning of 6 May, the Government Information Bureau issued a statement announcing the sacking of Blaney and Haughey for their alleged involvement in an illegal attempt to import arms.122 In the space of two days the Fianna Fáil government had lost three of its ministers; Lynch having also forced the resignation of his weak minister for justice, Michael Moran, the previous day.123

Blaney’s involvement with attempts to import guns into Ireland and help arm Northern nationalists was unsurprising. A quintessential localist politician, over the years he had built up a strong power base within Fianna Fáil and had a loyal following among his Donegal constituents. He had a reputation as a hard-line republican and was widely known to harbour a lifelong visceral anti-partitionist mentality. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, he had previously not ruled out the use of force to secure a united Ireland, and always maintained that violence could be considered in the right circumstances.124

Apart from a deep-rooted ideological affinity for a united Ireland, pragmatic, or, more appropriately, personal ambition, also played a factor in Blaney’s actions during this period. Since Lynch had assumed the position of president of Fianna Fáil in 1966, Blaney had shown remarkable contempt towards him.125 He therefore saw the outbreak of the violence on the streets of Northern Ireland as his opportunity to destabilise the taoiseach’s powerbase within Fianna Fáil, helping to accelerate his ultimate goal of securing the Fianna Fáil leadership. During this period Garret FitzGerald offered a stinging description of Blaney. ‘Mr Blaney’, FitzGerald said, ‘[is] ... ruthless ... feared by so many members of his party, the Paisley of the Republic, with a Hitler-like ability to stir up a mob, determined to oust the Taoiseach ...’126

To this day Haughey’s motivations vis-à-vis the Arms Crisis is seen by many as little more than political opportunism. The prevailing argument within the relevant historiography is that Haughey used the emotive subject of Northern Ireland in his attempt to replace Lynch as Fianna Fáil leader. Bruce Arnold, for example, claimed that Haughey’s involvement in the Arms Crisis was motivated not by any ‘burning zeal’ to secure Irish unity but was, in fact, ‘a republicanism created to defend a political flank’.127 The idea, Arnold wrote, that Haughey ‘was a committed, if covert, republican ... simply does not add up. There is no evidence for it’.128 Indeed, Blaney, Boland and Faulkner were reportedly as surprised as the rest of the cabinet when Haughey joined them in the argument for a stronger line on Northern Ireland, including sending the Irish army into Northern Ireland.129

Haughey’s motivations during the Arms Crisis, the common argument goes, were thus primarily motivated by political ambitions, ‘there was not, as so often had been stated, any deep commitment to the Northern Ireland minority’.130 This perception of Haughey as a covert republican was backed up Dick Walsh. Prior to August 1969, Walsh noted, Haughey had ‘shown no signs of republican sympathy since his days as a student’.131 According to an unidentified close Fianna Fáil parliamentary colleague, before 1969, Haughey ‘never ... uttered a peep at all about the North – at party meetings or anywhere else’.132 Boland subsequently argued that Haughey’s active participation in the Northern situation was motivated solely by a desire to enhance his republican credentials within Fianna Fáil in his ultimate ambition to become party leader.133

In particular, writers point to Haughey’s period as minister of justice during the early 1960s, when under the Seán Lemass-led government he showed no remorse for his suppression of the IRA border campaign (1956–62).134 However, Haughey’s clampdown of the IRA and his general endorsement of Lemass’s Northern Ireland policy, do not necessarily contradict his perceived alleged ‘greening’ by 1969–70. As Justin O’Brien observed, for an ambitious young minister, as ‘he ascended the ranks of the party and government, there was little to be gained in emphasising the gap between rhetoric and reality’ in relation to Northern Ireland.135 Better for Haughey to bide his time. The outbreak of violence on the streets of Northern Ireland and the harassment of the Catholic minority by the RUC, struck a chord within Haughey and ‘his passion for Irish unity was revealed and his well-hidden anti-partitionist feelings reignited’.136

As mentioned earlier in this book, since at least the mid-1950s, during his tenure as honorary secretary of the Fianna Fáil Tomas Ó Cléirigh cumann, Dublin North-East, Haughey had demonstrated a strong and virile anti-partitionist mentality.137 In 1954, for example, he had privately supported the argument that the Irish army might ‘invade’ Northern Ireland and undertake a campaign of ‘guerrilla warfare’ in that region. At this time he also advanced an Irish government-sponsored supplying of Northern nationalists with arms and ammunitions.138

Therefore, Haughey’s strong sense of republicanism, which was first publicly exposed in the summer of 1969, cannot simply be disregarded as ‘political in its motivations and enigmatic’, as articulated by Arnold.139 It would be disingenuous not to agree that political ambition was a motivating, if not central, factor in Haughey’s thinking during this period. However – and this is an important point – his actions were also motivated by a genuine and hitherto unrecognised deep-rooted commitment to a united Ireland.

‘My fellow-patriots’: Haughey and the Arms Trials

In the immediate aftermath of the ministerial sackings, Patrick Hillery telephoned Seán Lemass to enquire ‘if he wished to speak to me after Haughey and the others had been fired from government’. Lemass did not object to the sacking and cryptically informed Hillery that what Haughey ‘must avoid now is doing anything that would make it impossible to recover’.140 It was the most bizarre series of events since Fianna Fáil first entered the Dáil in 1927 and there was widespread public anxiety, not only about the stability of the government, but whether the institutions of the state could cope with the unfolding events.

Pádraig Faulkner recalled that when the Fianna Fáil cabinet met on the morning of 6 May he looked around the table and saw ‘the four vacant chairs, like black holes, in the circle’.141 At the cabinet meeting, Lynch proposed the immediate filling of the vacant ministerial posts.142 Later that evening, at 6pm, the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party gathered from an hour-long meeting to discuss the fallout from the ministerial sackings. To Lynch’s relief, he received ‘unanimous’ support for his actions; even Kevin Boland spoke in a conciliatory tone. Moreover, both Blaney and Haughey supported a motion put forward at this meeting that affirmed the taoiseach’s right to make whatever appointment he desired. Lynch concluded the meeting noting that he was ‘very grateful to the Party for its unanimous decision’. He even ‘paid tribute’ to the sacked ministers for the ‘outstanding service that they have given’.143

Despite such pronouncements Lynch was in no mood to compromise. He decided to seize the initiative and firmly clampdown on the last remaining outward critic of his Northern Ireland policy within the cabinet. Later that night, at 10pm, in the aftermath of the parliamentary party meeting, Lynch announced that he had asked the Irish president to accept the resignation of Kevin Boland. Angered and aggrieved, Boland resigned the following day, 7 May 1970. In protest, Paudge Brennan resigned as parliamentary secretary to the minister for Local Government.144 While for the time being Haughey remained quiet, Boland was furious and made his feelings known in public. In an interview with the Irish Independent he accused Lynch’s government of employing ‘Gestapo tactics, of tapping politicians’ phone calls and acting like a dictatorship.’145

Lynch’s ability to retain ‘unanimous’ support from his parliamentary party (in the public dominion at least) was, in the words of the Irish Times correspondent Dick Walsh, ‘probably the most remarkable example of an Irish party’s instinct for self-preservation overcoming its internal divisions, an example of pragmatism without parallel in the history of constitutional nationalism in Ireland’.146 A plausible explanation for the muted response of Fianna Fáil TDs to Lynch’s actions was provided by party deputy for Clare, Sylvester Barrett. Patrick Hillery noted that in the aftermath of the parliamentary party meeting of 6 May he asked Barrett: ‘Will we have great trouble with the Party for firing them?’ Barrett replied that ‘the more he fired the better’, referring to the ever present ambitions for promotion among many members of Fianna Fáil.147

As Lynch desperately sought to secure agreement among Fianna Fáil deputies within the parliamentary party for his decision to sack his unruly ministers and more generally regarding his Northern Ireland policy, the taoiseach also had to face questions regarding the unfolding debacle surrounding the ‘Arms Crisis’ in Dáil Éireann. Over two days, 7 and 8 May, the Dáil convened to debate the recent events. Lynch attempted to explain to the Dáil the sequence of events that had eventually led to the ministerial sackings. Opposition deputies were astonished. They listened as the taoiseach outlined how members of the Irish cabinet had purportedly conducted covert operations to help arm Northern nationalists. At all times, Lynch maintained, the Irish government had acted appropriately and responsibly.148

Haughey did not attend the two-day debate as he was still recuperating from his accident. Blaney, however, was in attendance. During the second day of debate, 8 May, he told his fellow TDs that he had played no part, in any shape or form, with attempts to import weapons. ‘I have run no guns, I have procured no guns, I have paid for no guns,’ he definitely declared. With Lynch clearly in his sights, Blaney continued: ‘I have provided no money to buy guns and anybody who says otherwise is not telling the truth.’149 Blaney concluded his contribution by stating for the record that there was ‘no question whatever, or no doubt whatever, as to the allegiance of myself and Deputy Charlie Haughey’ to the Fianna Fáil party.150 By this stage, in a sign of utter contempt for Lynch, both Blaney and Haughey were refusing to surrender their seals of office. Their resignation was eventually forced through when Éamon de Valera, in his capacity as president of Ireland and acting under the Irish Constitution, intervened.

The following day, 9 May, the Irish Times published a statement issued on behalf of Haughey (who was still in hospital) through his solicitor:

The Taoiseach informed the Dáil that he requested my resignation on the grounds that he was convinced that not even a slightest suspicion should attach to any member of the Government. I fully subscribe to that view, as I have been able to gather the Taoiseach received information of a nature which in his opinion cast some suspicion on me. I have not had the opportunity to examine or test such information or the quality of its source or sources. In the meantime however I now categorically state that at no time have I taken part in any illegal importation or attempted importation of arms into this country. At present I do not propose to say anything further except that I fully accepted the Taoiseach’s decision as I believe the unity of the Fianna Fáil party is of greater importance to the welfare of the nation than to my political career.151

The above statement is the only recorded comment attributed to Haughey during this period prior to the Arms Trials. Unlike Blaney,152 Haughey refrained from publicly speaking about his involvement with the attempts to import arms either in the media or Dáil Éireann. In this statement Haughey said that he was willing to sacrifice his own political future – a future that many had predicted would witness him become taoiseach – in order for him to save his beloved Fianna Fáil from self-implosion. In reality, his comments were a master-class in political spin. In a desperate attempt to salvage his political career and a classical example of political deceitfulness, he denied any knowledge of attempts to illegally import arms into Ireland. Yet, despite Haughey’s attempts at self-deception, the available evidence provides compelling evidence that he played an integral role in attempts to import arms into Ireland, first by sea and then by air.

In the immediate aftermath of the series of ministerial sackings, Frank Aiken privately criticised Lynch for failing to expel Blaney, Haughey and Boland from the Fianna Fáil Party. In a handwritten letter to Lynch, Aiken wrote that the ‘crisis of confidence in Fianna Fáil will not just fade away’. ‘Ireland and the Irish people,’ Aiken lamented, ‘must go down in confusion before long’, unless immediate action was taken against Blaney, Haughey and their co-anti-partitionist collaborators. ‘I would appeal to you for the sake of the people of the North and for the sake of the Irish people as a whole,’ he concluded, ‘to summon a party meeting and take the action I suggested to you the other night in getting rid of them out of the party.’153 Aiken was particularly wary of Haughey. He greatly disliked and mistrusted his younger parliamentary colleague, whom he saw as a ‘Free-Stater’ opportunist in Fianna Fáil clothes.154

Lynch, however, refused to adhere to Aiken’s request. A few days after receiving Aiken’s letter the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party met on 13 May 1970. At the meeting no motion was tabled calling for the removal of Blaney, Haughey or Boland.155 Aiken was incensed. Shortly after the conclusion of the meeting, he again wrote to Lynch to express his ‘grave disappointment that at the party meeting this morning you did not move to withdraw the Whip from the four members, who by their actions and statements have publicly repudiated the policy of non-violence in regard to the Six Counties’.156

Recent events reached a crescendo in late May. On 27 May, the Gárda Síochána Special Branch arrested John Kelly as he left Captain Kelly’s home in Terenure. Later that afternoon Captain Kelly was also arrested. Albert Luykx was subsequently arrested following his arrival back to Dublin from a trip to Brussels. The three men were ‘charged with conspiring to import arms illegally into the State’ in contravention of section 17 of the Firearms Act (1925) as amended by section 21 of the Firearms Act (1964).157 Except for John Kelly, Captain Kelly and Luykx were given bail in advance of their trial, scheduled at the Central Criminal Court.

The following day, 28 May, Haughey and Blaney were arrested at their homes and charged with conspiracy to import arms. At approximately noon Haughey was brought to Bridewell Gárda station. After caution he replied ‘not guilty’ to the charge of conspiring to ‘import arms and ammunitions illegally into the State’. He then appeared before District Justice Mr Good in Court No 4. Although the Gárda opposed granting Haughey bail, District Justice Mr Good agreed to grant the disgraced ex-minister bail on his own bond of £500, with one independent surety of £1000. Blaney was granted bail on the same terms as Haughey.158

News of the arrests caused shockwaves within Fianna Fáil. Kevin Boland again led the protests. He accused Lynch of ‘felon-setting’ and demanded a special meeting of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party.159 Fianna Fáil elected representatives duly met on 3 June. Speaking at the meeting, Lynch noted that any attempts to import arms into Northern Ireland would only lead to ‘civil war’ throughout the island of Ireland. Boland refused to withdraw his ‘treachery’ allegations against Lynch. The taoiseach described Boland’s accusations as ‘inadequate and unacceptable’. After three and a half hours of heated exchanges, the meeting was adjourned until the following day.160 The next day the party convened once more. This time Lynch did not intend to compromise and following a secret ballot, Boland was expelled from the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, by sixty votes to eleven.161

The dust was allowed to settle for a few days. However, tensions again came to the surface on the evening of 22 June at a specially arranged meeting of the Fianna Fáil national executive. At the gathering, which lasted over four hours, Lynch demanded Boland’s removal as joint secretary of Fianna Fáil.162 Seán MacEntee was the taoiseach’s principal defender; he seconded a motion calling for Boland’s removal as joint secretary and for Dermot Ryan’s expulsion from the party’s national executive.163 ‘Jack Lynch,’ MacEntee noted, ‘whose record and conduct since he came into public life in the dark days of 1948, has entitled him to nothing but respect and esteem.’ He accused Boland of intentionally trying to divide Fianna Fáil. ‘No state, no party, no organisation,’ he bemoaned, ‘will prosper if it is encumbered with two leaders! Yet dual leadership is in effect what Kevin Boland is asking us to accept.’ ‘As this government cannot have two leaders,’ he said, ‘neither can it have two policies.’ If the national executive endorsed Boland’s policies, he warned, Fianna Fáil was in danger of imploding. ‘It will be the death too of any likely reunification ...’, he lamented.164

After much debate Boland and Ryan resigned as members of the national executive. In protest, Boland’s father Gerald Boland resigned as vice-president and trustee of the party, although he retained his Fianna Fáil membership. ‘I want no part of a party,’ Gerry Boland complained, ‘where an honourable man like my son appears to be an embarrassment.’165 Hillery subsequently wrote that Kevin Boland’s resignation ended the latter’s ‘spoilt child days’ around the cabinet table. Boland, Hillery noted, had ‘expected to be coerced to withdraw his resignation. But this time Jack did not coax him’.166

The rift between MacEntee and Boland soon became public. Writing in the Irish Times on 30 June, MacEntee publicly held Kevin Boland responsible ‘for the fires and killings which occurred in Belfast over the weekend’. Boland, he said, in advocating that Northern Catholics be supplied with guns for defensive purposes, held a ‘moral responsibility’ for ‘those who used their weapons against five Protestant Irishmen – now dead’.167

By this juncture, acts of sectarian violence had become a common feature of day-to-day life in Northern Ireland. Severe rioting broke out again in Derry, while in Belfast Orange Order parades down the Crumlin Road ignited widespread protests. For its part the nascent PIRA intensified its bombing campaign, while the British army’s heavy-handed security operations only further alienated Northern Catholics. On 27 June alone, a reported ninety-six people were injured in Northern Ireland.168 In a statement Lynch appealed for calm, but the violence went from bad to worse in the first week of July.169 The British army began a security crackdown in West Belfast and imposed a curfew lasting thirty-four hours. It was within this sense of despair and confusion that the Fianna Fáil government found itself trying to operate.

On 2 July, the charges of the attempted importation of arms were dropped against Blaney. District Justice Dónal Kearney determined that there was ‘not enough evidence linking the former minister to the specific charge of conspiring to import weapons between 1 March and 24 April’.170 Haughey, however, with his three co-accused, Luykx, Captain Kelly and John Kelly, were returned for trial in the Central Criminal Court. The first trial formally began on 22 September. The event was a thrilling spectacle. Only twenty-one journalists were permitted access to the court. While outside the courtroom the lobbies and adjacent rooms were packed full of assembled press. Blaney and Boland were also in attendance. The senior council for the state, Séamus McKenna, commenced proceedings by immediately focusing on Haughey’s telephone conversation with Peter Berry on 18 April, which concerned the request for security clearance for the cargo due to come into Dublin Airport. McKenna argued that this phone call was ‘of paramount importance’, the ‘final act in a conspiracy in which the accused jointly and illegally agreed to import weapons and ammunition, in contravention of the Firearms Acts’.171

The four defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges put forward by McKenna. Captain Kelly, John Kelly and Albert Luykx all admitted their role in the attempts to import arms, claiming that their actions were not illegal or covert, but had been sanctioned by the Irish government facilitated through Blaney, Haughey and Gibbons.172 Haughey, however, had a different strategy. His defence team sought to dispel the argument that he was aware of attempts to import weapons into Ireland. Haughey’s evidence directly contradicted four witnesses, including Peter Berry. During cross examination by the prosecution, Haughey accepted that he did try to arrange the importation of cargo through Dublin Airport, however, he argued that he only did so to facilitate IMI and because he was under the ‘clear impression that the shipment was required under the contingency plans agreed by the Government’. He maintained that at no time was he aware that the mentioned cargo included arms or ammunition.173

Captain Kelly later claimed that Haughey’s denial that he knew arms and ammunitions were involved was a blatant lie. ‘He did know,’ Captain Kelly exclaimed.174 Gibbons next entered the fray. His evidence at the trial was crucial to the prosecution case. Under the terms of the indictment, the prosecution had to prove that the attempts to import weapons were illegal because the minister for defence played no role in the affairs. Under oath Gibbons categorically denied that he ever agreed to sanction or even support attempts to import weapons.175 On 29 September the first arms trial dramatically and unexpectedly collapsed following Mr Justice Aindrias Ó Caoimh’s withdrawal from the case. Haughey was furious. As he left the courtroom he reportedly bemoaned: ‘Get off the bench Ó Caoimh. You’re a disgrace.’176

The second trial got underway on 6 October 1970. It was not until several days into the spectacle, 19 October, that Haughey was provided with his unwelcomed moment in the spotlight. Under oath, as is accordance with his arguments during the first trial, Haughey said that at all times he had operated in the best interests of the state and that in his capacity as chairman of the Northern Ireland sub-committee, always tried to ensure monies designated to help alleviate the distress of Northern Catholics was dispersed appropriately. He vigorously denied that he had any knowledge that monies were misappropriated to help arm the various Northern defence committees.177

On 23 October, Haughey was acquitted of alleged involvement in the attempt to import arms and ammunitions into Ireland. The jury took less than two hours to come to its decision. The verdict was apparently determined by Gibbons’s admission that Captain Kelly had told him of attempts to import arms and a ‘wider sense that the plot was an understandable response to the plight of Northern Catholics’.178 The jury found it difficult to accept that the arms importation did not have at least covert government sanction. In arriving at an acquittal verdict the jury concluded that the four accused men had ‘operated under properly delegated authority’. As a result the charges against the co-accused could not be sustained.179 Haughey felt vindicated. Nonetheless, in light of Justice Séamus Henchy’s argument that either Haughey or Gibbons had committed perjury during the proceedings, the trial cast a long shadow over the health of Irish democracy.

Most importantly, while Haughey may have personally felt vindicated, the fact that he was eventually acquitted, to quote Vincent Browne, ‘is no evidence that the jury believed that he knew nothing about the attempted arms importation or had no involvement in it’.180 As the foreman read out the ‘not guilty’ verdicts the court erupted. Chants could be heard throughout the High Court of ‘We want Charlie’ and jeers demanding ‘Lynch must go.’181 Blaney, Boland and Ó Móráin were carried shoulder-high out of the building, where they were met by the assembled media.182 During the celebrations Haughey then delivered a short statement, a sort of eulogy to his followers. ‘On behalf of myself and my fellow-patriots,’ he declared, ‘I would just like to say that I am grateful to you all, each and every one of you ... for your loyalty, devotion and faithfulness you have shown me during these recent difficult times.’183 Haughey next focused his attention on Lynch.

Later that evening speaking to some assembled reporters, following his acquittal, Haughey demanded Lynch’s resignation – albeit in an ambiguous fashion. ‘I think those who are responsible for this debacle have no alternative but to take the honourable course that is open to them,’ Haughey said. He believed that the verdict was a complete vindication of his innocence and sombrely remarked that the ‘political implications will be far reaching’. When asked about the ongoing plight of the Catholics in Northern Ireland Haughey said that he would continue to help them ‘in every way’. He also said he could not answer a question on whether the Irish army should be sent into Northern Ireland and jokingly added: ‘Ask John Kelly, here standing behind me!’184 Interviewed later that evening on RTÉ’s ‘7 Days’ programme Haughey said that he had been ‘shocked’ and disagreed strongly with Lynch’s recent comments at the UN in which the taoiseach suggested that the majority population of Northern Ireland had the right to vote themselves out of a united Ireland.185 In Haughey’s mind the stage was now set for a leadership challenge against Lynch. Indeed, he said as much during his interview on RTÉ television. He conceded to his interviewer that he had ‘always been interested in the leadership of the party’.186

The taoiseach, however, was able to use Fianna Fáil parliamentary party members’ overwhelming desire to maintain unity and stay in government against the protests of the anti-partitionists within the organisation. An opinion poll carried out after Haughey’s dismissal showed that seventy-two per cent of the electorate supported Lynch’s decision and eighty-nine per cent of those who voted for Fianna Fáil in the last election still supported him as their preferred choice of taoiseach.187 On 26 October, following Lynch’s return from a meeting of the general assembly of the UN, he was met at Dublin Airport by the entire government and some fifty TDs and senators, including Fianna Fáil heavyweights Frank Aiken and Seán MacEntee. It was a brilliant public display of support for Lynch and as the Irish Times noted, ‘if anyone, after that display, wishes to say that they are better Republicans than Mr Lynch in Fianna Fáil, then they have a formidable task ... it was the Republic par excellence’.188

In the end, realising that he had little hope of defeating Lynch (for the meantime, at least), Haughey backed down and within days voted confidence in the Dáil for his taoiseach and Jim Gibbons; the very minister whose word could have put him behind bars for twenty years!189 That said, the sacking of Blaney and Haughey and their subsequent public humiliation, caused uproar among some Fianna Fáil supporters, including party elected representatives. Not for the first time Blaney led the protests. An Irish Times editorial quoted him as having stated on British television that had he been taoiseach he would have sent the Irish army into Northern Ireland in August 1969.190 Within the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party several TDs reportedly supported the two disgraced former ministers, including North-County Dublin TD, Desmond Foley, and South-West Cork TD, Flor Crowley.191

A consortium of Fianna Fáil grass-roots was equally incensed by Lynch’s treatment of Blaney and Haughey. The Evening Herald quoted Haughey’s election agent, Pat O’Connor, who announced that the people of Dublin North-East were in a rebellious mood.192 Haughey’s own Fianna Fáil branch, the Tomas Ó Cléirigh cumann, issued a resolution to party headquarters calling for the reinstatement of Haughey and Blaney in the cabinet and Lynch’s resignation.193 In Donegal, preparations were made to give Blaney a hero’s welcome. ‘Bonfires blaze for Blaney’ was the headline in the Evening Herald.194

In June 1970, Patrick Hillery received reports from Jack Daly, a prominent Fianna Fáil activist in Clare, that there were ‘a number of “malcontents”, who were trying to stir up opposition to the Taoiseach ...’.195 In the same month, irate Fianna Fáil members even issued death threats to Seán MacEntee, who had proposed Kevin Boland’s removal from the joint secretaryship of Fianna Fáil; they also threatened to burn MacEntee’s house to the ground.196 Clearly, the pledges of loyalty to the Fianna Fáil leadership were seen by the Blaneyites and Haugheyites as empty formulae, intended to gloss over their differences with Lynch, not to eliminate them.197

A ‘phased British withdrawal’: Haughey and Northern Ireland, 1971–78

Jack Lynch’s ‘victory’ over the anti-partitionists within Fianna Fáil at the 1971 Ard Fheis, forever dispelled the suggestion that the use of physical force to secure Irish unity was a legitimate policy, which could be utilised by the Irish government if the ‘appropriate’ circumstance arose.198 Under Lynch, the Fianna Fáil leadership successfully stood out against the Blaney/Haughey camp within the organisation that had advocated physical force nationalism. In the aftermath of the 1971 Ard Fheis, the Fianna Fáil national executive rallied behind Lynch pledging its ‘... approval and full support ...’ for his ‘handling’ of the party’s Northern Ireland policy.199 Likewise, the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party members, including a now sheepish Haughey, recorded that they ‘fully supported’ the taoiseach’s stance on Northern Ireland.200

Therefore by the summer of 1971 the Fianna Fáil government had not only survived the most turbulent period in the party’s history, but in the process became a much more effective and cohesive unit. The removal of Lynch’s leading opponents from the cabinet eliminated the division that had paralysed and distorted the government’s Northern Ireland policy over the previous years. Henceforth, Fianna Fáil’s stance on Northern Ireland, channelled through Lynch, followed a moderate and conciliatory approach. Ambiguity, sympathy or support for political violence was unequivocally rejected by the Lynch-led Fianna Fáil government.201

Writing to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in March 1971, the British ambassador to Ireland, Sir John Peck, aptly summed up the extent that Lynch had marginalised the Blaney/Haughey anti-partitionist-camp within Fianna Fáil. Despite his repeated public outbursts, Peck noted, Blaney was pleading quietly for ‘tolerance’, Haughey ‘never uttered a word’, while Lynch finally cooked ‘Mr Boland’s goose’. ‘Mr Lynch is master,’ Peck noted, ‘the party of Republicanism has formally and overwhelmingly endorsed the policy laid down by Mr Lynch.’202 Kevin Boland subsequently pinpointed the 1971 Ard Fheis as representing a turning-point for Fianna Fáil’s stance on Northern Ireland. He acidly wrote that on the subject of partition, ‘there was no Fianna Fáil policy on that matter anymore’. Instead, there was the bi-partisan policy of a unified approach. ‘It was,’ he exclaimed, ‘the policy of Cumann na nGaedheal, the one-time government “under contract with the enemy to maintain his overlordship”.’203 In Boland’s eyes, echoing Peck’s comments above, Fianna Fáil had become the ‘Party of Pragmatism’ rather than the ‘Republican Party’.204

Disgusted with Fianna Fáil’s alleged volte-face on Northern Ireland, in May 1971, Kevin Boland resigned from the party. Later that year he established a new political party, Aontacht Éireann. Aontacht Éireann failed to make an impact on Irish politics and eventually disbanded in 1976. Boland was left to complain that the people ‘didn’t want a Republican Party’.205 Boland’s exit was soon followed by Blaney’s expulsion from Fianna Fáil in 1972. Blaney easily retained his seat in Donegal as an independent Fianna Fáil TD, but remained in the political wilderness thereafter. He never wavered from his conviction that the use of physical force was a legitimate Fianna Fáil policy ‘... if the circumstances in Northern Ireland demanded’.206

Although Haughey also considered leaving Fianna Fáil, it did not take him long to rule out this proposition.207 Instead he decided to stick it out, to play the long-game, believing that sooner rather than later Lynch would be overthrown. Little did he know that Lynch was to retain the presidency of Fianna Fáil for several more years, eventually retiring in 1979. In the intermediate period Haughey publicly accepted Lynch’s leadership and towed the party-line. Speaking on RTÉ’s ‘7 Days’ programme in early November 1971, Haughey said that his future was in Fianna Fáil. ‘It was the one organisation,’ he noted, ‘which had the capability to provide political stability which we need and it is through that party that I hope to make any contribution I can to the life of my country.’ Asked about his involvement with the Arms Crisis he dodged the issue. ‘The time has come to move away to more important things,’ he said.208 He concluded his interview by stating, somewhat disingenuously, that he had ‘always subscribed to the aims and objectives of a united Ireland by peaceful means’. However, he added a caveat. ‘I believe in a healthy political party like Fianna Fáil there should be plenty of room for debate and discussions as to possible alternative methods, possible alternative policies, within the overall directive principle of securing a Irish unity by peaceful means.’209

Despite Haughey’s attempts to paint a picture of himself as a politician happy to sit on the backbenches, content to serve his party in any way he could, the reality was that he cut a very depressing figure during this period. Marginalised within Fianna Fáil, he had lost his previous status as a prominent government minister and all the limelight and public adoration that went with such a high-profile job. At party level, he was even removed from the Fianna Fáil national executive. Haughey, however, was a fighter. He sought to turn his period in the political abyss to his advantage. Between 1970 and 1975 (before his reinstatement to the Fianna Fáil frontbench), in the words of the British Embassy in Dublin, Haughey slowly ‘managed to rehabilitate himself’.210

His wife Maureen later recalled that this time was ‘miserable’, however, Haughey, never considered giving up politics. ‘Politics is Charlie Haughey’s life,’ she proudly pronounced. ‘Even during the time when he was out of office after the arms trial,’ she recalled, ‘he never contemplated doing anything else.’211

During the early to mid-1970s, with a few close associates, Haughey assiduously groomed the Fianna Fáil grass-roots throughout the country on a ‘rubber chicken circuit’. In cars supplied by the Gallagher Group, Haughey travelled throughout Ireland, sometimes three or four evenings a week, to address local Fianna Fáil cumainn. It was on these visits that Haughey built up a loyal, hard-core, fan base among the Fianna Fáil faithful.212 The time and resources that he gave towards cultivating grass-roots support would play a crucial role in Haughey’s return to frontline politics. Indeed, at the 1972 Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis, Haughey was re-elected as one of party’s five honorary vice-presidents.

Haughey’s regular contacts with local Fianna Fáil supporters allowed him to capitalise on his continuing ambivalence regarding the conflict in Northern Ireland. As Pádraig Flynn later explained, during the wilderness years of the 1970s, Haughey promoted his image as ‘a good Republican’.213 Haughey’s trips around Ireland also permitted him to cultivate an image as a man of the people, someone who understood the needs and plights of the typical working-class Fianna Fáil member. The reality, however, was altogether different. Haughey appeared to be living the life of an eighteenth-century aristocrat rather than that of a backbencher TD, earning a relatively moderate salary. Astonishingly, in 1973 Haughey purchased Inishvickillane, an island off the Dingle peninsula in Co. Kerry. At great expense he built a holiday home on the island with building materials transported from the mainland by helicopter. Haughey’s extravagance did not end there. Native Irish red deer were brought to the island as part of a breeding programme, while efforts were also made to establish the white-tailed sea eagle there.214

Despite finally gaining control of Fianna Fáil’s Northern Ireland policy it was events outside Lynch’s control that again stirred up the ghosts of physical force nationalism. Although the British Conservative government, under prime minister Edward Heath strongly supported keeping the Northern Ireland prime minister, James Chichester-Clark, in office, by March 1971, the latter’s position was untenable. London sought to avert the prospect of direct rule, which would be the direct consequence of the collapse of the Stormont government, by propping up the Chichester-Clark regime. However, the murder of three British soldiers in Belfast on 10 March 1971 dealt the final blow to the Northern Ireland prime minister’s administration. Chichester-Clark resigned on 21 March. His replacement as Northern Ireland prime minister was Brian Faulkner, who despite being an extremely capable politician, was deeply mistrusted by Northern nationalists and the Fianna Fáil government in Dublin.215

By this point Northern Ireland appeared ready to errupt. In August 1971, Lynch received a personal message from Heath that the British government, willed on by Faulkner, intended to introduce internment without trial in Northern Ireland. ‘Operation Demetrius’ began in the early hours of 9 August when 464 people, mostly Catholics, were arrested in initial raids, with 342 being detained without trial. The deployment of internment was a grave blunder, which served only to heightened Catholic alienation from the Northern Ireland state.216

On 11 August, Haughey still lingering on the Fianna Fáil backbenches, issued an emotive public statement deploring the actions of the British government (and foreshadowing his thesis that Northern Ireland was a ‘failed political entity’) said that an internal solution to the conflict was not possible. This was to be Haughey’s last known public statement in relation to Northern Ireland prior to the 1973 Irish general election. He pronounced that ‘every day it becomes clearer that the cynical experiment of partitioning Ireland has ended in total, tragic failure’. He described the introduction of internment as unleashing a wave of ‘terror’ throughout Northern Ireland. The British army, he implored, was ‘no longer a peace-keeping force’, having lost the confidence of ‘a large section’ of the Northern Ireland community. He therefore called for the introduction of a UN peace-keeping force.217

Haughey’s speech did little to calm the situation. Northern Ireland was in the midst of chaos, with reportedly 4,339 people from the North taking refuge in the South. A special train had brought women and children from Belfast to Dublin, while many took refuge in temporary housing supplied by the Irish army.218 Lynch attempted to clarify his government’s position. On 12 August he issued a public statement condemning the actions of the Ulster Unionist government and the British decision to introduce internment. Significantly, his speech explicitly demanded the abolition of the Northern Ireland government. ‘The Stormont regime,’ he said, ‘which has consistently repressed the non-Unionist population and bears responsibility for recurring violence in the Northern community, must be brought to an end.’ In its place, foreshadowing a central component of the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, he called for the creation of a power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland between Unionists and Nationalists.219

This was a bold speech. Lynch had shifted government policy from national unity to an agreed power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland. The Irish Times reported as significant that Lynch, as head of the Irish government, had made a ‘full frontal attack on the elective representatives of the Northern State’.220 In one brave swoop Lynch rejected the aspirations of the Downing Street Declaration of August 1969, in which London and Belfast had committed themselves to the fair and equal treatment for all citizens of Northern Ireland. Simultaneously, his condemnation of the Stormont regime meant that the Fianna Fáil government’s long-term policy of cross-border co-operation between North and South was effectively dead.221

Lynch also appealed to London to permit Dublin a voice in the affairs of Northern Ireland. In a telegram to Heath on 20 August, Lynch requested a meeting ‘of all the interested parties designed to find ways and means of promoting the economic, social and political wellbeing of all the Irish people North and South...’.222 Initially, Heath firmly rebuffed Lynch’s request to permit Dublin’s involvement ‘in the affairs of the United Kingdom’.223 Nevertheless, realising the error of internment, in early September 1971, Heath invited Lynch to a two-day summit to discuss Northern Ireland at the official residence of the British prime ministers at Chequers.

Given the fiasco of internment, Lynch worried that he might face criticism from the nationalist community North and South of the border if he took up the British prime minister’s offer. Nonetheless, Lynch disregarded the possibility of protests, realising that Heath was, in effect, recognising the Irish government’s legitimate right to discuss Northern Ireland. Lynch did not need to worry; members of the Fianna Fáil national executive, for example, offered Lynch their ‘full support’.224

The Chequers summit marked a milestone in Anglo-Irish relations. Lynch spoke of his commitment, and that of the Irish people, to a peaceful policy to the attainment of a united Ireland. Support for the PIRA, he said, could only be diminished if political initiatives were put in place and all internees released.225 In reality, the summit did not produce any dramatic breakthrough on Northern Ireland. But like Lemass’s visit to Belfast to meet Terence O’Neill in 1965, the fact that it happened was significant in itself. The summit was followed shortly afterwards by a tripartite summit, which also included Faulkner, at Chequers on 27 September 1971. This was the first meeting between the heads of government in Dublin, London and Belfast since the boundary agreement negotiations in 1925. Such discussions would have never been possible if not for the grim backdrop of internment, the PIRA campaign and the political stalemate at Stormont.226

However, all the good diplomacy undertaken between Dublin and London, during the latter months of 1971, was shattered by the events in Derry on 30 January 1972. Following a civil rights march from Creggan to the Bogside of Derry, soldiers of the British Parachute Regiment killed fourteen unarmed civilians and seriously injured many more in what was to become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. The Saville Inquiry in 2010 found no evidence that any of those who died during the protests on ‘Bloody Sunday’ were carrying weapons or explosives.227 The shootings caused widespread outrage and nationalist revulsion throughout Ireland and unleashed a wave of anti-partitionist and anti-British emotion not witnessed since the summer of 1969.

The most significant political consequence of Bloody Sunday was the British government’s dramatic change in policy. Direct rule, not the propping up of the Stormont regime, was London’s preferred option. Heath intended to take full control over the security and criminal justice in Northern Ireland. Faulkner was dismayed and threatened to resign, however, Heath was in no mood for compromise and on 30 March 1972 introduced direct rule. William Whitelaw was appointed as secretary of state for Northern Ireland. The suspension of Stormont transformed the political landscape in Northern Ireland.228 The British outlined a policy of ‘reconciliation’ with all parties across the political spectrum in Northern Ireland.229 The British initiative also permitted a thawing of relations between Dublin and London and the Irish ambassador, Donal O’Sullivan resumed his post in London.

However, not for the first or the last time, the PIRA thwarted political progress. On 21 July 1972, the movement committed one of the worst atrocities of the Northern Ireland conflict. On ‘Bloody Friday’ the PIRA killed eleven people and injured a further 130 in a carefully co-ordinated series of bombs in Belfast.230 Such atrocities proved a brutal reminder that the conflict in Northern Ireland had bypassed both governments. Thereafter, the situation in Northern Ireland settled into a military and political stalemate. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) escalated their respective campaigns of terror, while the PIRA failed to force the withdrawal of the British forces from Northern Ireland.

At the 1973 Irish general election Fianna Fáil found itself voted out of office for the first time since 1957. Although the party secured more than 22,000 additional votes compared to the 1969 election, it secured six fewer seats. Ironically, two of the sacked Fianna Fáil ministers, Blaney and Haughey, headed their polls with 8,368 and 12,901 votes respectively. The result brought Fianna Fáil’s sixteen years in government to an abrupt end. Fine Gael and the Labour Party, who had been pursuing independent opposition policies since 1957, suddenly agreed on 6 February to an electoral pact and fought the election as an alternative coalition government. This pact proved somewhat appealing to the electorate and in late February, a ‘National Coalition’ under Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave was formed.

The run up to the general election once again exposed the divisions within Fianna Fáil. The election was the first since the Arms Crisis and at least one founding member, Frank Aiken, felt the ‘wrong sort of people were gaining ground’ – the ‘wrong sort of people’ being Haughey. Aiken informed Lynch that if Haughey was ratified as a Fianna Fáil candidate to run in the 1973 general election, he would resign from the party. Aiken also protested that he would write a letter to the papers explaining the precise reason for his resignation. Lynch asked de Valera to intervene on his behalf, which he duly agreed to do. However, Aiken would not budge.231

On 12 February, Aiken learned that Haughey had been ratified. Aiken immediately withdrew his nomination. It was only after Lynch mobilised the services of Seán MacEntee, George Colley, Paddy Smith and his close friend Joe Farrell, that Aiken agreed not to publicly accord his reasons for retiring from public life. He would not, however, waver from his decision to bow out of Irish public life. The following evening, 13 February 1973, Lynch announced that with great regret the former tánaiste and minister for external affairs was retiring from politics on ‘doctors’ orders’. Outraged by Lynch bringing Haughey back to the opposition frontbench in January 1975, Aiken was never to attend another Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis or party event in the last ten years of his life. It was a sad end to a long and distinguished political career.232

The next chapter in Haughey’s involvement with Northern Ireland, albeit indirectly, was in response to the Sunningdale Agreement, signed on behalf of the British and Irish governments and the designated parties involved in the Northern Ireland Executive on 9 December 1973. Paragraph five of the Agreement acknowledged that the Irish government ‘fully accepted and solemnly declared that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland desired a change in that status’. For its part, the British government recognised that if in ‘the future the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish’.233 As part of the Agreement it was announced that a power-sharing administration for Northern Ireland, comprising the Ulster Unionist Party, the SDLP and the Alliance Party, would be established. To facilitate Dublin’s calls for an ‘Irish dimension’ in the affairs of Northern Ireland, the accord also contained a clause to set up a so-called ‘Council for Ireland’.234

The Fianna Fáil leadership, under Lynch, endorsed the Agreement.235 Speaking in the Dáil at this time, Lynch welcomed the power-sharing ‘partnership’, linking it to the Council of Ireland as first envisaged under the Government of Ireland Act of 1920.236 However, not everyone within Fianna Fáil supported the Agreement. Privately, Haughey ‘strongly’ opposed its implementation.237 He felt that the Fianna Fáil’s commitment for the attainment of a united Ireland had been diluted by the party’s support for the Agreement. As Martin Mansergh subsequently argued, Haughey ‘detested’ the Sunningdale Agreement ‘as compromising the republican position’.238 Haughey was particularly uneasy regarding the language used in paragraph five of the communiqué, issued on behalf of the British and Irish governments in the aftermath of the Sunningdale Agreement. He believed that by signing up to this Agreement the Irish government had indirectly committed itself to agree to recognise the de jure existence of Northern Ireland, thus reneging on its support for Article 2 of the Irish Constitution. Despite making his protests known in private, he refrained from publicly condemning the Agreement, aware that such a stance might see him expelled from the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party. For the meantime, at least, he remained tight lipped.239

In 1975, in view of the abject performance of Fianna Fáil and widespread demands for his restoration, Lynch reluctantly reinstated Haughey to the party frontbench. Gibbons, Haughey’s arch nemesis from the Arms Crisis, warned Lynch that Haughey would eventually destroy the party.240 Both George Colley and Seán MacEntee likewise strongly counselled Lynch against this move, but Lynch gave in under considerable pressure.241 Haughey’s return also set off alarm bells in London. Although politically Haughey was described as being ‘in another league’ compared to his rivals in Fianna Fáil, the British Embassy in Dublin was convinced that his sole remaining ambition was to oust Lynch and secure ‘power’.242 Despite grumblings of discontent among Haughey’s parliamentary colleagues and British officials, rank-and-file Fianna Fáil supporters were ecstatic on learning of his return. At the 1975 Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis in February the new opposition spokesperson on health received a two-minute standing ovation during his contribution to proceedings.243

It was no coincidence that Haughey’s return to the Fianna Fáil frontbench coincided with a dramatic change in the party’s official stance on Northern Ireland. By late 1975 sharp differences emerged within Fianna Fáil over Lynch’s Northern Ireland policy. In early October of that year and without Lynch’s consent, Fianna Fáil’s spokesman for foreign affairs, Michael O’Kennedy, called on London to make a ‘commitment to implement an ordered withdrawal from her involvement in the Six-Counties of Northern Ireland’. Described in British circles as a ‘liability’ when it came to Northern Ireland,244 O’Kennedy declared that the British government should ‘encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement … and in a harmonious relationship between the two islands’.245

The circumstantial evidence supports the argument that O’Kennedy and Haughey collaborated jointly in the announcement of this new policy. Indeed, Henry Patterson wrote that at this time O’Kennedy was ‘in awe’ of Haughey.246 In fact, the previous year in February 1974, at a meeting of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, Haughey had first proposed a motion calling on ‘... the phased withdrawal of the British army from Northern Ireland ...’,247 and O’Kennedy’s comments must be seen within this context. By using O’Kennedy as a ‘stalking horse’, to quote a confidential British source, Haughey was seeking to undermine Lynch’s conciliatory approach to Northern Ireland and more generally his leadership.248 The American Embassy in Dublin certainly believed this to be the case. ‘The “bipartisan” policy on Northern Ireland in the Irish Republic,’ the American Embassy reported back to the United States Department of State, was ‘shattered’ by the Fianna Fáil policy statement on Northern Ireland, which was described as a ‘radical swing in policy’.249

Lynch was caught off guard. Hitherto, a request for Britain to make a declaration of its intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland had not constituted official Fianna Fáil policy. Lynch reacted immediately and said O’Kennedy’s speech represented a ‘conflict of expression rather than of policy’.250 However, the signs were ominous. O’Kennedy’s remarks were a huge embarrassment for Lynch and his spokesman on Northern Ireland, Ruairí Brugha (the son of Cathal Brugha). An editorial in the Irish Times, ‘Shattered consensus’, asked why O’Kennedy had selected that time to add his voice to those calling for a British declaration of intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland. The obvious explanation, the paper noted, was that ‘he had taken the temperature of his party and found that there is a majority in favour of demanding a declaration of intent – and thereby posing a renewed challenge to Mr Lynch’s policies and leadership’.251 The explanation offered by the Irish Times was seemingly accurate – a poll conducted three years later, in 1978, revealed that 78 per cent of the Irish electorate favoured British withdrawal of troops and rule from Northern Ireland.252

Lynch soon buckled under the pressure from the ‘hawkish’ elements within Fianna Fáil, led by the Haughey/O’Kennedy caucus. On 29 October, in an attempt to present a united front within Fianna Fáil regarding its official stance on Northern Ireland, Lynch agreed to the publication of the controversial ‘Fianna Fáil policy statement on Northern Ireland’. Prior to its publication – and despite Lynch’s personal intervention – the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party ‘unanimously approved’ the contents of the statement.253 Significantly, in line with the Haughey/O’Kennedy-line the statement called on ‘Britain’s commitment to implement an ordered withdrawal from her involvement in the six counties of Northern Ireland’.254

The Irish Times described Fianna Fáil’s statement as ‘Civil War politics’. It pointed out that an aspiration for Irish unity and the view that a British withdrawal was inevitable was one thing, but to ‘issue demands for a declaration of intent to withdraw could not possibly help progress towards finding a workable solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland’.255 Reaction from the British government was likewise alarmist. One British official, Ann Symonds, noted that Fianna Fáil’s revised stance on Northern Ireland ‘can only make the task of a return to normality in Ireland, North and South, more difficult’.256

By this stage Haughey could sense Lynch’s political vulnerability. Fianna Fáil’s crushing by-election defeat in West Mayo to Fine Gael’s incumbent candidate, Enda Kenny, in mid-November, led to further speculation regarding Lynch’s position as Fianna Fáil leader. Not for the first or last time, Haughey used the Northern Ireland question to test the mood of the party in relation to Lynch’s leadership. Several days later on 19 November, at an event in Hollybrook Hotel, arranged under the auspices of the Dublin Artane Fianna Fáil constituency organisation, Haughey publicly accorded his support for Fianna Fáil’s recent policy statement on Northern Ireland. He specifically focused on the demand for British withdrawal. Haughey said he fully supported the statement, which he described as a ‘positive approach’. ‘The responsibility of ensuring that the achievement of Irish unity is kept firmly at the centre of democratic Irish politics’ was central to Fianna Fáil’s political DNA, he noted.257

Confronted by overwhelming support from within Fianna Fáil for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, Lynch was reluctantly forced to adopt this policy-line for the remainder of his period as Fianna Fáil leader. However, Lynch and his supporters did try to distinguish from calling on the British government to implement a withdrawal from Northern Ireland to instead focus on the long-term plans towards facilitating Irish unity. Speaking on 6 December 1975, Ruairí Brugha said that ‘it is Britain alone who holds the key to the solution’ in Northern Ireland. ‘Britain,’ he exclaimed, must face this ‘political reality’. ‘No one has suggested,’ he said, that Britain ‘should suddenly withdraw her economic and financial support for the North. No one has suggested that she should withdraw her military forces in a precipitate fashion.’258 Indeed, addressing a meeting of the Fianna Fáil national executive the following week, 15 December, Lynch said that the purpose of the Fianna Fáil policy statement on Northern Ireland ‘was to point to the long term solution – unity of Ireland by agreement and in harmonious relationship’.259

In conclusion, despite Haughey’s best attempts to undermine Lynch’s leadership, the latter led Fianna Fáil into the 1977 general election campaign. The campaign was well-planned by Fianna Fáil, fought on a platform of widespread tax reforms and increased employment. Lynch’s image was also central to the campaign, with party slogans of ‘Bring back Jack’.260 During the election campaign the ghosts from Haughey’s dark past continued to haunt him. He was routinely taunted by Conor Cruise O’Brien regarding his involvement with the Arms Crisis. The outgoing minister for posts and telegraphs promoted the argument that ‘a shadow of suspicion’ continued to be cast over Haughey because of the latter’s alleged sympathy for the objectives of the PIRA. Haughey described O’Brien’s criticism as a ‘character assassination’ and that such accusations were ‘unfounded’.261

When the votes were counted in mid-June, Fianna Fáil won an unassailable majority, securing eighty-four seats, giving the party an overall majority of twenty seats. To Haughey’s dismay Lynch recorded the greatest electoral success in the history of the Irish state. Given Lynch’s stunning win at the polls, Haughey quickly realised that for the meantime at least his leadership ambitions would have to be put to one side. When the twenty-first Dáil assembled on 5 July 1977, a new Fianna Fáil government replaced the incumbent Fine Gael–Labour Coalition, which had been in power since 1973. Lynch was again appointed taoiseach. Haughey was given the job as minister for health and social welfare; a position that Lynch hoped would absorb his minister’s energies and distract him from his obvious political ambitions. As the minister responsible for health and social welfare, Lynch had also deliberately ensured that Haughey did not have access to the key security related ministries in the Irish government (those of the Departments of Justice and Defence).

Although, he may have been somewhat marginalised within the new cabinet, Haughey was elated to find himself back in the cut and thrust of frontline politics. Seven years on from the humiliation surrounding his sacking as minister for finance he was now presented with the opportunity to resurrect his naked ambition to secure the leadership of his beloved Fianna Fáil. As is discussed in the next chapter, over the following two years, until his appointment as Fianna Fáil leader and taoiseach in December 1979, Haughey made much capital out of his republican reputation, which he had insidiously nurtured since the days of the Arms Crisis.