Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  Lynch's initial reluctance to stand led the other candidates for the leadership to view him as a caretaker until the party got a leader more in tune with its traditions. Lynch's low-key style, a strong desire for consensus and his apparent lack of strong views on most issues led to the early years of his government being characterized by conservatism, lack of control over the cabinet and the loss of the momentum of the Lemass years. Symptomatic was the Taca episode. Taca (Irish for ‘support’) was a party organization created in 1966 with the object of raising money from the business community. Lemass had been involved in his own discreet fund-raising efforts in his later years, setting up a committee with John Reihill of the coal-importing family as chairman.93 However, Taca, of which Haughey and Blaney were the foremost supporters, was a more brazen affair. Supporters were invited to join by making an annual payment of £100 per year towards the party's electoral fund, while the interest was used to fund dinners at which members of Taca could mix with cabinet ministers.94

  Taca was seen by critics of Fianna Fáil as proof of the corruption of its founding principles, with Máirín de Búrca of Sinn Féin claiming that ‘the selfless idealism of Easter Week has become the self-seeking degeneracy of Taca.’ 95 Within the party Colley, who had not given up his leadership ambitions, openly criticized Taca and demanded that the party return to its original tradition of seeking ‘justice for all sections of the community but with special concern for the small man, the small farmer, the urban working man and the clerk’.96 The Taca episode may well have contributed to the depth of the government's defeat in the October 1968 referendum on a proposal to replace proportional representation with a simple majority system. That this was the first time since 1932 that the party had failed to get more than 40 per cent in a national poll and that many TDs and Senators had not campaigned for the change gave rise to much speculation about the future of Lynch's leadership.97

  Fianna Fáil's victory in the 1969 election did much to shore up Lynch, in the short term at least. He won in partnership with Haughey, whom he had made director of elections. Choosing to deal with his most formidable potential leadership opponent by a strategy of generous accommodation, he had made him Minister for Finance and tolerated Taca until internal criticism led to its being phased out in 1968. The 1969 campaign combined Haughey and Blaney's brutal anti-communist assault on Labour with Lynch's low-key but effective series of visits to convents to deliver the same message. The campaign was noteworthy as the first in which a leader's telegenic qualities had an effect. For whatever reservations some of his colleagues and the party grass-roots had about Lynch's lack of decisiveness, his soft-spoken, ‘honest Jack’ image on television was successful with the electorate.98 Relations between Lynch and Haughey were warm during the campaign, but within months of victory developments in Northern Ireland would open up a chasm between them.

  The Arms Crisis

  Soon after the outbreak of major disorder in Derry and Belfast in August 1969, a senior Irish official recalled a journalist's caustic comment that ‘our mass media and general public opinion only discovered the Six Counties on October 5 1968.’99 There is little evidence that the political and administrative class was much better prepared. In retirement Lemass had become a member of the Dáil Committee on the Constitution, which he had initiated when still Taoiseach. Its report in 1967 was characterized by a realism that some Fianna Fáil fundamentalists found disturbing. It argued that, so far from looking provisional, partition had ‘hardened to a degree which only the vaguest of optimists can think of as temporary’,100 and suggested that Article 3 of the Constitution, which laid legal claim to Northern Ireland, should be reformulated in less ‘polemical’ terms as an aspiration. Although Lynch sympathized with this approach, the strength of opposition within party and government dictated that nothing was done. When T.K. Whitaker, in his final year as Secretary to the Department of Finance, wrote to Charles Haughey, his minister, arguing the advantages of a recasting of Articles 2 and 3 in improving relations with unionists, Haughey's response was vehemently republican, emphasizing that there was no moral objection to the use of force but only a practical one.101

  For those like Lynch and Whitaker who wished to maintain Lemass's approach and for whom unity would come through North–South rapprochement assisted by some gentle prodding from London, the civil rights movement was a new, unpredictable and not entirely welcome development. Lemass was initially dismissive, claiming that ‘two or three wet days will finish things’.102 While the British state, however reluctantly, was substantially increasing its involvement in Northern Ireland, the Irish government's approach was somnambulistic. As O'Neill's administration buckled in the spring of 1969, the Irish cabinet had its only discussion of Northern Ireland before the disastrous events of August. Frank Aiken was sent to New York to speak to the Secretary-General of the United Nations but, as he explained to the British Ambassador in Dublin, the purpose of the UN initiative was a temperature-lowering exercise on both sides of the border.103

  As northern temperatures stubbornly continued to rise, those who had favoured a moderate line could only watch with increasing dismay. Whitaker, who had moved from Finance to become Governor of the Central Bank, continued to impress on his former minister the need for moderation and responsibility. Echoing the views of those on the right of unionism, he cautioned that Dublin should avoid playing into the hands of the ‘extremists who are manipulating the civil rights movement and who wish to stir up trouble and disorder’. His hope that the Irish government could appeal to the civil rights movement for a period of restraint with an end to all street protests was ignored, as was his advice that it should ‘do nothing to inflame the situation further, but aim to impress and encourage the moderates on both sides’.104

  On 13 August, the day after an Apprentice Boys parade had ignited ‘The Battle of the Bogside’, Lynch attempted to get cabinet approval for an address to the nation that he proposed to make on RTE that evening. A substantial section of his government, led by Haughey, Blaney and Kevin Boland, the Minister for Local Government, regarded the draft as too mild and forced a major revision. In his broadcast Lynch, claiming that the Stormont government was no longer in control, opposed the introduction of British troops and called for the introduction of a UN peacekeeping force. With equal futility he requested the British government to enter into negotiations on the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. He announced that the Irish Army was to open field hospitals for victims along the border and, in lines that would encourage nationalist hopes of more direct intervention and loyalist paranoia, he declared: ‘The Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse.’105 Both Blaney and Boland favoured sending Irish troops across the border into Derry and Newry, but the majority of their colleagues recoiled in horror from this lunatic counsel, precipitating Boland's unpublicized temporary resignation from the government. The Planning Board of the Irish Defence Forces stated that the army had ‘no capability of embarking on a unilateral military operation of any kind’ and that all it could do was provide military training for northern nationalists in the Republic and supply arms, ammunition and equipment to nationalist elements within Northern Ireland.106 Even this was recognized to have the danger of assisting ‘subversive organisations’: ‘care would have to be taken to ensure that training would not be given or weapons supplied to organisations whose motives would not be in the best interests of the state.’107 But if the invasion option was rejected, Lynch appears to have been powerless to prevent some of his ministers from sponsoring what became a serious attempt to subvert partition by forming an alliance with those northern republicans who were to become the nucleus of the Provisional IRA.

  Haughey was to play a central and, to many who had observed his previous political career, surprising role in what became known as the Arms Crisis. While Blaney and Boland's visceral anti-partitionism was not in question, many had doubts about Haughey's, seeing in his involvement little more than a
n opportunistic use of the North in a bid to topple and replace Lynch. His public utterances had hitherto displayed no more than the conventional republicanism to be expected from any prominent member of Fianna Fáil. When he was appointed Minister for Justice in 1961, he had pinpointed the crushing of the IRA as his main objective and had reactivated the Special Criminal Court to achieve it.108 He had, as Minister for Agriculture after the first O'Neill–Lemass summit, met with Harry West, his northern counterpart, and been a powerful advocate of the advantages of the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement.109 However, his private response to Whitaker's revisionist ideas on the North suggests there was more to his role than opportunism. The British Ambassador, who met him in October 1969, came away convinced of his ‘passion for unity’ after Haughey told him that there was nothing he would not sacrifice for unity, including the position of the Catholic Church and Irish neutrality.110 His father and mother came from Swatragh in County Tyrone, and both had been active in the republican movement during the War of Independence.111 Three decades after the crisis Haughey would refer to his family being ‘deeply embedded in the Northern Ireland situation’.112 In fact, his connections were with a part of Northern Ireland, mid Tyrone, which had a strongly republican tradition. It was for this area that the dissident IRA man Liam Kelly was returned to Stormont in the 1950s. Insofar as his northern connections influenced Haughey, they were unlikely to have encouraged moderation. His father had fought on the pro-Treaty side during the Civil War – something for which Frank Aiken had never forgiven him – and this influenced Aiken's apparent detestation of his son.113 This ‘Free-Stater’ stain on his pedigree may have encouraged a compensatory lurch into an alliance with Blaney and Boland. For Haughey, the events of August 1969 produced a powerful confluence of ideological affinity and political ambition.

  Exploiting the febrile atmosphere of mid August, he and his allies seized temporary control of the government's response to northern events. As Minister for Finance he was given the responsibility by the cabinet for a relief fund of £100,000 for victims of the unrest. He was, along with Blaney, part of a new cabinet subcommittee given the task of liaising with northern nationalists to promote ‘a united cohesive force of anti-unionists and anti-partitionists’.114 Over the next few months he and Blaney would establish links, both directly and through a network of Irish military intelligence officers and other government employees seconded to work in Northern Ireland, with some of the most militant elements of northern nationalism.

  In response to the August events, a special section had been created in the Government Information Bureau aimed at improving liaison with nationalist opinion in Northern Ireland and putting the Irish case internationally. George Colley was given charge of this operation, which was largely staffed by public relations officers seconded from bodies such as Bord Bainne, the Irish Milk Marketing Board. Some of those employed would play key roles in linking Haughey and Blaney with those traditional republicans in Derry and Belfast who were most vociferous in their criticisms of Cathal Goulding, Chief of Staff of the IRA, for leaving Catholics undefended. Part of the £100,000 that Haughey assigned to the Northern Relief Fund thus found its way into the financing of a new virulently anti-partitionist and anti-Goulding newspaper, The Voice of the North, which began publication in October. It was edited by Seamus Brady, a former speech-writer for Blaney, who was until September 1969 an employee of the Government Information Bureau. His successor as editor was Hugh Kennedy, an employee of Bord Bainne, who had become Press Officer of the Central Citizens' Defence Committee in Belfast in the immediate aftermath of the August violence.115 Both men and Captain James Kelly, an Irish Army intelligence officer, were active in promising northern republicans support as long as they cut their links with the ‘communists’ who controlled the IRA.

  In August prominent Northern politicians, including Paddy Devlin of the NILP and Paddy Kennedy of Gerry Fitt's Republican Labour Party, arrived in Dublin to demand that, if the government would not send troops, it should at least provide Catholics with the weapons to defend themselves.116 Captain Kelly visited Fitt's home in early September to hear the politician exclaim: ‘It's not next month we need arms. It's now’.117 Lynch refused to meet Devlin and his colleagues; Haughey and Blaney did, and both were determined to obtain arms for the North. The purpose of these weapons was made clear in Captain Kelly's report to his superior, Colonel Michael Hefferon, the Director of Irish Army Intelligence, on 23 August: ‘It would seem to be now necessary to harness all opinion in the state in a concerted drive towards achieving the aim of reunification. Unfortunately, this would mean accepting the possibility of armed action of some sort as the ultimate solution.’118

  There were failed attempts to buy weapons in London, in which Haughey's brother Padraig was involved, and in the US. Eventually Captain Kelly was able to make an arrangement with a German arms dealer, and 500 pistols and approximately 180,000 rounds of ammunition were set to be flown from Vienna to Dublin on 21 April 1970.119 It was Haughey's failure to arrange clearance for the arms at Dublin Airport, when his former Secretary at the Department of Justice, Peter Berry, made it clear the guns would be seized by the Irish Special Branch, that precipitated the Irish state's most serious crisis since its formation. By this time the dangers inherent in the Blaney–Haughey line were increasingly apparent. In early February 1970 delegations of northern nationalists had come south to meet Lynch and other ministers about their fears of imminent loyalist attacks. The Chief of Staff was instructed to ‘prepare and train the Army for incursions into Northern Ireland if and when such a course becomes necessary’. Arrangements were to be made for arms, ammunition and respirators to be ready for distribution to Catholics in the North who had to defend themselves.120 In April, after Blaney told the Chief of Staff that attacks on the minority were imminent and that the British security forces would be withdrawn, 500 rifles, 80,000 rounds of ammunition and 3,000 respirators were moved north to be near the border with Northern Ireland. Irish military intelligence subsequently discovered that Blaney's story had no foundation, and the weapons were returned to their original stores. By this time Captain Kelly's superiors were alarmed at his activities. In October, Garda Special Branch had observed a meeting in Bailieborough, County Cavan, which Kelly had arranged with the assistance of £500 from Haughey's Distress Fund. It was attended by leading IRA figures.121 Military intelligence observed that Kelly failed to keep in regular contact with Dublin and was ‘openly consorting with illegal groups’. His ‘emotional reaction’ to events in the North meant that he was now judged to be incapable ‘of that cool behaviour so necessary in an Intelligence Officer’.122

  Although Lynch was informed of the plot by Berry, he attempted to contain its reverberations by accepting denials of involvement from both Blaney and Haughey. It was only when news about the failed importation was leaked to the Fine Gael leader, Liam Cosgrave, that Lynch was forced to act. On 5 May he demanded the resignation of the two ministers, and, when they refused, he sacked them. He had already forced the resignation of his weak and incompetent Minister for Justice, Micheál Ó Moráin. Boland resigned in protest at the firings, and so in one day Lynch had lost three senior ministers. Blaney and Haughey were subsequently arrested and charged with an attempt to import guns illegally into the state. The charges against Blaney were dismissed in a Dublin district court, but Haughey, along with Captain Kelly, a Belgian-born businessman and a Belfast republican, was brought to trial at the High Court. They were all eventually acquitted in October, the jury possibly finding it difficult to accept that the arms importation did not have at least covert government sanction.

  Although Lynch has been subject to criticism for not moving against the conspirators earlier, his defenders would suggest that he had played a subtle game, allowing Blaney and Haughey sufficient rope with which to hang themselves. His achievement, given the precariousness of his position, has been well summed up by Garret FitzGerald:

  His handling of the Arms Crisis was very di
fficult for him: he was dealing with people who had deeper roots in the party than he had. His success in overcoming that difficulty and stabilising the Government and in mar-ginalising those who had adventurous ideas about the North was of crucial importance to the stability of the state and of the island as a whole.123

  On his acquittal Haughey demanded Lynch's resignation, but the Taoiseach was able to use party members' overwhelming desire to maintain unity and stay in government against the much weaker mobilizing capacity of anti-partitionism. Such was the power of the imperative of party over ‘national’ unity that both Blaney and Haughey voted with the government against an Opposition motion of no confidence.124 Not since 1940 and de Valera's rejection of the British offer of unity in exchange for an end to neutrality had the primacy of twenty-six-county nationalism been so apparent. Public sympathy for the Catholic victims of northern violence was still strong, but it did not extend to support for those who appeared ready to contemplate direct involvement in arming one side in a potential sectarian civil war. An opinion poll carried out just after Haughey's dismissal showed that 72 per cent of the electorate supported Lynch's decision, while a staggering 89 per cent of those who had voted for Fianna Fail in the last election still supported him as their preferred choice as Taoiseach.125