A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Further investigation by the tribunal established that Haughey’s expensive lifestyle, which included not just his ownership of Kinsealy but also an island retreat off the County Kerry coast, had been bankrolled by a small group of wealthy Irish businessmen. The tribunal calculated that the businessmen had donated £8.5 million in the seventeen years since 1979, when Haughey first became taoiseach. Ben Dunne, who gave some £2 million, turned out to be the single most generous donor. Although no evidence was ever produced at the tribunal to suggest that Haughey had returned favors to the businessmen while in office, the suspicion lingered and was strong enough for many in Irish public life, the media in particular, to consign him forever to the rogues’ gallery of Irish politics.

  It was difficult, in watching the pursuit of Haughey, not to be aware that many of his enemies fell upon him with the sort of glee and venom that characterizes the patient hunter who at long last has cornered an elusive prey. For years significant sections of political life and the media in the Republic had held Haughey responsible for the creation and birth of the Provisional IRA, and there were some who had long hoped for the day when he would be brought low. It is, though, one of the great ironies of the peace process that no single Irish politician did more than Haughey to start the Provos on the path that eventually resulted in the cease-fires.

  His contribution was twofold. The first was that many of the political ideas on Northern Ireland developed during his time as Fianna Fail leader were incorporated almost wholesale into the strategy worked out by Adams and Reid. In many important ways the strategy was Haughey’s, not theirs. The second contribution was that by the time he left office in 1992, the theology of the peace process had been fully worked out, and the completion of the enterprise was then only a matter of internal management and negotiation. Whatever about Haughey’s role as midwife to the Provos, there is no doubt that he was in there at the beginning of their end.

  The story begins at the start of the Troubles. When the violence flared in the summer of 1969, forty-four-year-old Haughey was the ambitious minister for finance in a badly divided Fianna Fail government led by the former Cork hurling star Jack Lynch. The street violence in the North would make those divisions worse and finally propel the Southern state into what one experienced commentator later described as “arguably the most serious political conflict since the Civil War.”2 Lynch’s cabinet was riven by personality differences and by competing ambitions, but these coincided with a deep ideological fault line. Lynch had been won over by the influential Irish civil servant Dr. T. K. Whitaker to a much more moderate policy on Irish reunification than normally was Fianna Fail policy. It was one that stressed the need for unionist consent to change,3 a view echoed later by constitutional nationalists in the North and in particular by John Hume, the leader of the SDLP. The approach implied that partition was not the sole responsibility of the British and that an attitude of confrontation with the government in London or the unionists was unlikely to be productive. Whitaker preached the need for slow, gradual, peaceful change, a breaking down of barriers between unionist and nationalist, Protestant and Catholic, and Lynch agreed.

  Not everyone in Fianna Fail accepted the Whitaker-Lynch analysis. For large sections of the party the violence of 1969 signaled an opportunity to complete the unfinished business of 1919–21 and to make right the wrong that had been done to Irish sovereignty by the imposition of partition. The principal spokesman for this viewpoint in Lynch’s cabinet and the Fianna Fail party was Neil Blaney, the minister for agriculture, whose base in County Donegal was adjacent to riot-torn Derry. It was perhaps no accident that Blaney hailed from a part of Ireland that had suffered most from the partition settlement, for the Border meant that Derry lost its natural hinterland while Donegal was stranded between two states and often felt abandoned.

  Haughey seemed an unlikely member of the Blaney camp, but he did have excellent family credentials. He was born in Castlebar, County Mayo, in 1925, although his parents were both Northerners who had left Northern Ireland not long after partition. They hailed from the County Derry village of Swatragh, and his father, Sean, joined the local unit of the IRA at the outbreak of hostilities, becoming adjutant of the Second Derry Battalion. Like most Northern IRA men, he sided with Collins after the Treaty, but he appears not to have actually fought in the subsequent civil war.

  By 1922 he had risen to be Brigade OC of the Second Northern Division, but then the family moved to Mayo, where Haughey Sr. took a regular commission in the new Irish army. The young Charles Haughey did not follow his father’s footsteps into the IRA, but he did the next best thing and joined Fianna Fail. An accountant and lawyer by training, Haughey was first elected to the Dail in 1957 and four years later was promoted to the post of minister for justice. Within a month he had dealt the final blow to the IRA’s dying Border Campaign, when he introduced special military courts to try republican activists. The secretary to his department, Peter Berry, later credited him with having made the move that “broke the back of the organisation.”4 That and the fact that only once before the crisis of 1969 had Haughey mentioned Northern Ireland in a speech5 led many to conclude that he held no noticeably strong views on the national question. Haughey had made a bid for the Fianna Fail leadership when his father-in-law, Sean Lemass, retired as taoiseach but withdrew when Lynch was adopted as the compromise candidate acceptable to most tendencies in the party. But such was the impact of the violence of August 1969 in the Republic that the leadership question seemed ready to be reopened.

  The violence forced the Lynch government to make some sort of response; the television scenes of blazing Catholic houses and refugees flooding across the Border had roused public opinion in the Republic. Lynch managed to resist efforts to send the Irish army across the Border but agreed to set up a special cabinet committee to relieve “the distress” suffered by Northern nationalists, whose control he placed in the hands of his enemies, Blaney, Haughey, and another cabinet hawk, Kevin Boland. As minister for finance, Haughey was charged with administering a fund of £100,000 to spend on the North, a considerable sum in 1969–70. Haughey and Blaney also liaised with Captain James Kelly, an officer in Irish military intelligence who was mixing with Northern republicans and nationalists on behalf of the government.

  From these circumstances came two extraordinary allegations. One was that Haughey, Blaney, and others, including a senior Belfast IRA man, John Kelly, had tried to import weapons from Europe to supply defense committees in Belfast. The allegation was all the more staggering given the size and quality of the arsenal supposedly involved: 200 submachine guns, 84 light machine guns, 50 general-purpose machine guns, 50 rifles, 200 pistols, 200 grenades, and 250,000 rounds of ammunition, enough to equip a battalion of the British army.6 Since the defense committees were under the sway of either the Official IRA or, in more cases, the new Provisional IRA, it meant the weapons were headed for republicans who would not hesitate to use them, and not necessarily in a defensive mode.

  Haughey, who along with Blaney was later sacked by Lynch when the affair became public, was charged with conspiracy to import weapons. The subsequent hearing, known simply as the Arms Trial, was one of the most sensational in Irish history, but it ended with Haughey’s acquittal, while the charge against Blaney was dropped at an earlier stage. Although spared shame and imprisonment, Haughey was banished to the Fianna Fail equivalent of a political Siberia. John Kelly was similarly acquitted.

  The other allegation was that, along with Captain Kelly and Blaney, Haughey had conspired to foment a split in the IRA with a twofold aim: to neutralize or weaken the politically radical and increasingly violent Gould-ing leadership in Dublin, while creating an instrument in the North that would be more amenable to Fianna Fail control. Cabinet papers of the day that have recently been published acquit Haughey of this particular charge; they reveal that this was a policy agreed upon by all Lynch’s ministers in April that year, long before the August riots. The papers show that the Department
of Justice had recommended a policy of dividing the IRA’s rural conservatives from the urban radicals and that the cabinet endorsed this. Even so, the working out of the policy put Haughey and Blaney at the center of the scheme, almost as if it was their private, freelance plan.

  In the wake of the Arms Trial, Haughey was dispatched to the political wilderness, but he turned this into an opportunity. He cultivated the grassroots and discovered that the rank and file responded well to a tough republican rhetoric. In 1977 Fianna Fail won a thumping majority in the general election, unseating the strongly anti-IRA Fine Gael–Labour coalition. Lynch was obliged to include Haughey in his cabinet, making him minister for health and social welfare. Within two years Lynch was gone, forced to quit by a series of by-election reverses, and Haughey narrowly won a hard-fought leadership contest with the retired taoiseach’s preferred successor, George Colley.

  The day after his election as Fianna Fail leader, on December 7, 1979, Haughey signaled a new assertive direction regarding Northern Ireland matters, an end to Jack Lynch’s tractable approach to London. Not only did the new Irish leader flag a more confrontational line with the British, but he hinted that the way forward was for the two governments to bypass the unionists altogether and deal directly themselves with a shared problem. The government’s line, he announced, would revert to the traditional Fianna Fail program that called on the British to encourage Irish unity and to declare their commitment to implement “an ordered withdrawal” from the North.

  His first Fianna Fail Ard Fheis, in February 1980, gave an opportunity to signal the changes in a way the ordinary grassroots would more readily understand. Haughey was piped into the Royal Dublin Society’s auditorium, not far from the British embassy in affluent Dublin 4, by a trade union band to the air of “A Nation Once Again,” the hymn of nationalist Ireland. He followed that with a speech that for the first time rejected the traditional goal shared by the British and the Irish governments of securing an internal settlement. Northern Ireland, he told the wildly cheering delegates, had “as a political entity, failed and… a new beginning was needed.”7

  ACCOMPANIED BY cabinet colleagues, Haughey traveled to Downing Street for talks with the new British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in May 1980. This teapot diplomacy, so named after the silver-plated gift that Haughey brought as a present for Thatcher, launched the Anglo-Irish approach to Northern Ireland. Although it was to culminate five years later in the Hillsborough agreement, the diplomacy also contained the germs of ideas that would re-emerge during the peace process dressed in Sinn Fein garments. In a Dail debate after the Downing Street summit, for example, Haughey obliquely introduced the idea of an all-party conference if the British were to make a declaration expressing their interest in ultimate Irish unity. “If that interest were declared,” he told TDs, “we could then start working together, the Government here, the British Government and Irishmen of every tradition in the North towards a solution which will guarantee permanent peace and stability.”8

  The proposal for an all-Ireland conference was hardened up between 1983 and 1984, during sittings of the New Ireland Forum in Dublin, a body set up by constitutional nationalists to meet what was widely perceived to be the burgeoning threat from Sinn Fein’s growing electoral strength in the North and its alarming potential to cause political instability in the South.

  In his contribution to the forum report, Haughey made clear that in his view the way to achieve unity would be for Britain to respond positively to proposals for an all-party conference at which unionists and nationalists would thrash out the institutional details and constitution for the whole island. Sinn Fein could attend, but only if the IRA ended its violence and the party renounced violence. This was one of the central proposals contained in the later secret British correspondence with Adams. It had been borrowed wholesale from the Fianna Fail leader and made British policy, at least in the private diplomacy with the Sinn Fein leader.

  But that was not all. During one private, unreported session of the forum in October 1983 Haughey produced a formulation on the crucial issue of unionist consent whose ambiguity was later borrowed almost entirely by Gerry Adams. Its significance was that it opened the door to a reinterpretation of the consent principle that would allow Adams to accept the unionist right to self-determination and thus to accept, if only in a de facto sense, the existence of the Northern Ireland state. In his address to the forum, Haughey said, “As regards the veto—the constitutional guarantee [to unionists]—we should make a clear distinction on consent. Consent is only applicable to arrangements on a new Ireland. But consent by the Unionists to British action to find a solution is not required.”

  By the end of 1984 Haughey had articulated three of the principal features of what would eventually become the Sinn Fein peace strategy. His denunciation of Northern Ireland as a “failed entity,” his call on the British to declare their interest in seeing Ireland united, and his proposal for an all-Ireland constitutional conference were all vital ingredients in the mix.

  But it was Haughey’s assertive style with the British that gave his politics the color that Adams and Reid needed. In 1982, for instance, he had refused to endorse Britain’s military expedition against the Argentinean invaders of the Malvinas, or Falkland Islands, and when the SS Belgrano was sunk he reasserted Irish neutrality at the United Nations, much to the fury of Mrs. Thatcher and the delight of Irish republicans, of the Provisional as well as the Fianna Fail variety.

  His opposition to an internal Northern Ireland settlement was given tangible expression that same year when he appointed the SDLP deputy leader, Seamus Mallon, to the Irish Senate, even though British law barred Mallon from sitting in the locally elected Stormont Assembly at the same time. An embarrassed British administration was forced to expel Mallon from its own parliament. He publicly accused the Duke of Norfolk of being a British spy and regularly lambasted the Fine Gael leader Garret FitzGerald for a weak-kneed attitude to the Thatcher government, on one occasion accusing him of colluding and secretly collaborating with the British on security matters.

  A year after the Hillsborough agreement had been signed, Haughey was the first mainstream politician to complain that the deal had not only failed in its declared objective of improving the lot of Northern Nationalists but that “the position of Nationalists in the North has, in fact, seriously worsened.” Whatever the private thoughts of Gerry Adams and his closest colleagues about the Hillsborough deal, this was an echo of what they too were saying in public.

  By December 1986, two months before Haughey was to take power for the fourth and last time, Adams was able to tell Fianna Fail’s newspaper, the Irish Press, that he regarded the taoiseach-to-be as “a genuine Nationalist.”9 Haughey’s role during the 1981 hunger strike—an accessory along with Fine Gael’s Garret FitzGerald “to the legalised murder of ten true and committed Irishmen,”10 according to the IRA prisoners’ statement at the end of the protest—was forgotten.

  Haughey’s forceful brand of Irish nationalism appalled significant sections of Irish political society, but it was precisely this quality that allowed Adams and Father Reid to contemplate advancing the fledgling peace process in the mid-to late 1980s. Haughey was the right man, in the right place, at the right time. Had any other recent Fianna Fail leader, from Jack Lynch onward, been taoiseach at this time, it is likely the project nursed by Adams and Reid would have been stillborn.

  HAUGHEY’S LEADERSHIP of the Irish government and his forceful brand of nationalist politics made possible the next seminal moment in the Irish peace process, one kept a tightly guarded secret until now by all the participants, not least because once again, as with the secret British diplomacy, it signaled not just the private desire of Gerry Adams for an end to the IRA’s violence but his willingness to accept a settlement that fell short of what most republicans would find acceptable, from the Army Council to the Volunteers on the streets of Belfast, Derry, and South Armagh.

  So it was that sometime in the s
econd week of May 1987, the editor of the Irish Press, Tim Pat Coogan, delivered a lengthy written message from Father Alec Reid to Charles Haughey, containing Gerry Adams’s terms for an IRA cease-fire. It was a remarkable document whose message said not just that an opportunity existed to call an IRA cease-fire but that if the enterprise was handled properly, the proposal brought by the Redemptorist priest on behalf of the Sinn Fein leader could mean taking the gun out of nationalist politics forever.

  As Reid explained the initiative, it became clear that he was communicating not just on his behalf or on Adams’s but on behalf of the Irish Catholic Church as well. The enterprise, he explained, had been endorsed by the Redemptorist order in Ireland and by other senior church figures, most notably Cardinal O Fiaich, who would give political cover to Haughey if the dialogue were ever publicized. It had been developed after lengthy thought and debate, Reid said, which involved church figures talking widely to key figures in the nationalist and unionist communities. The message the church had received, he said, was the same from everyone. As the body with the required resources, influence, and access to power centers, it should and would try to get this peace initiative under way.

  Since the church’s aim was primarily to bring the IRA’s violence to an end, it had made a priority of approaching Gerry Adams, Reid explained. Adams also had told them that the church could play an important role in finding the ways and means of ending the armed struggle but that there was no chance of persuading the IRA to do this unless there was unrestricted dialogue with fellow nationalists aimed at formulating a strong political alternative to the armed struggle involving all Ireland’s nationalist parties. Only in that way, Adams had told them, could the peace initiative succeed.