soon paid off. Following the 1961 Irish general election, which Fianna Fáil won, Haughey was appointed minister for justice, following Traynor’s retirement from mainstream politics. Haughey immediately threw himself into his first ministerial portfolio. He implemented a major programme of legal reform, including the 1962 Criminal Justice (Legal Aid) Act, the 1964 Succession Act and the abolition of capital punishment for the majority of offences.107 Despite their subsequent animosity towards one another, Peter Berry, secretary of the Department of Justice, later noted that of the fourteen ministers he had served under in the Department of Justice, Haughey was by far the most able.108 Indeed, Haughey’s future political arch-nemesis, Garret FitzGerald, later recounted that the former was an ‘excellent minister, particularly in Justice’.109
Apart from a crusade to modernise and reform Ireland’s legal field, Haughey is best remembered during this period for helping to suppress the IRA border campaign, which had been ongoing since 1956. Following Fianna Fáil’s return to government in October 1961, Lemass was determined to tackle the IRA head on. Although he commanded only a minority position in the Dáil, he considered Fianna Fáil’s position safe enough to wage a campaign against the illegal organisation. Throughout 1961 the IRA carried out a number of horrific murders. On 27 January, the movement shot dead a young Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) corporal, Norman Anderson. This was followed by further IRA attacks throughout 1961. The most brutal of these was carried out in November, when the movement ambushed an RUC police patrol in Jonesborough, Co. Armagh. During the ambush an RUC policeman, Constable William Hunter, was killed.110 These attacks, which were an increasing source of embarrassment for the Irish government, reinforced Lemass’s opposition to physical force republicanism.
In response to the renewed IRA campaign, the Irish government, led by Lemass and Haughey, reactivated the Special Criminal Courts by filling vacancies created by retirements or deaths.111 The minister for justice orchestrated a publicity campaign portraying the IRA as an illegal organisation that, in his words, did not ‘serve the cause of national unity’.112 Although Haughey referred to the deep resentment felt by the people in the Irish Republic to partition, he condemned as ‘foolish’ any attempts to secure a united Ireland by force.113 The government’s propaganda offensive proved successful and by the early months of 1962 public sympathy for the IRA had waned. In February of that year, realising the futility of its military campaign, and the general public’s apathy, the IRA leadership issued orders for the movement to ‘dump arms’.114 As Barry Flynn noted: ‘So in February 1962, the curtain fell on a campaign that had failed, and failed utterly to achieve any of its primary objectives.’115
Haughey’s role in bringing the IRA border campaign to an end fitted in nicely with Lemass’s more conciliatory approach to Northern Ireland, as compared to his predecessor de Valera. Lemass’s appointment as taoiseach in 1959 raised hope to a new generation of Fianna Fáil supporters that he ‘would cast aside the ghosts of the past and deal with Irish unity, not as a theoretical aspiration, but as a long-term reality’.116 Significantly, under Lemass, partition and economic policies became intrinsically linked as he adapted Fianna Fáil’s traditional approach towards Northern Ireland to the new economic realities of the 1960s. Guided by one central motivation, the Irish economy, his entire approach to Northern Ireland was based on securing support from Ulster Unionists for his wish to establish a free trade area between Dublin and Belfast.
The Irish government’s 1958 programme for economic expansion, inspired and implemented by the secretary of the Department of Finance, T.K. Whitaker, emphasised the importance of an open market free trade area between Ireland and the United Kingdom. Particular emphasis was placed on dismantling the Irish protectionist regime in preparation for European Economic Community (EEC) membership.117 This new initiative had ramifications for partition. Lemass believed that the first step in securing a free trade area between the Republic and Great Britain was the dismantling of Dublin’s protectionist system against Belfast within the island of Ireland.118 Throughout Lemass’s reign as Fianna Fáil leader, Haughey rowed in behind his father-in-law’s Northern Ireland policy. As part of Lemass’s drive for cross-border co-operation between North and South, Haughey also supported the taoiseach’s occasional use of the term ‘Northern Ireland’ rather than the ‘Six Counties’. Since the early years of the Irish Free State the standard practice in political and administrative circles in the South of Ireland was the constant usage of the term ‘Six-Counties’ to refer to Northern Ireland. This formula was an easy way for politicians in the Irish Republic to propagate their non-recognition of the Northern Ireland state. Although Lemass had no intention of succumbing to Ulster Unionist demands that Northern Ireland should be recognised de jure as part of the United Kingdom, he ‘did want to deal with the political realities of North and South relations’.119
In correspondence with Vivion de Valera, in May 1960, Lemass explained that the use of terms like ‘Belfast government’, ‘Stormont government’, had been the ‘outcome of woolly thinking on the partition issue’.120 If Ulster Unionists were to ever agree to enter a united Ireland based on a federal solution (with a subordinate Northern Ireland parliament in Belfast), he argued that it was nonsensical that the Irish government continued to refrain from using the title ‘government of Northern Ireland’. It was, therefore, merely ‘common sense that the current name would be kept’.121 Haughey followed a similar line of argument in correspondence with the minister for external affairs, Frank Aiken, in 1967. The Irish government, Haughey explained, ‘should introduce a greater degree of flexibility in our practice by permitting the use, as occasion may require, of the terms “Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland”’. Irish politicians, he wrote, ‘needed to take a less rigid line in the matter of nomenclature’.122
Haughey’s general endorsement of Lemass’s Northern Ireland policy can be ascertained by his support for the taoiseach’s personal crusade to build a bond of mutual trust with the political force of Ulster Unionism, specifically the taoiseach’s attempt to officially accord de facto recognition to Northern Ireland. As part of Lemass’s ambition to commence direct talks with Northern Ireland prime minister, Terence O’Neill, Haughey was involved, to quote Mary Colley, with a ‘gradation of initiatives’ with Ulster Unionists throughout the mid-1960s in the hope that it would ‘open up a new way’ via-à-vis Fianna Fáil’s official stance on Northern Ireland.123
To understand Lemass’s approach to Northern Ireland, it is important to lay emphasis on his indirect and private initiatives to bring about a revision of Fianna Fáil’s traditional Northern Ireland policy. Central to this approach was Lemass’s use of senior Fianna Fáil elected representatives. On two separate occasions during 1962, Lemass sent two of his leading government frontbenchers, minister for commerce and industry, Jack Lynch and Haughey to Northern Ireland on separate kite-flying exercises. The aim of their respective visits to Belfast was to reopen a debate on the commencement of cross-border trade between North and South, in the light of the end to the IRA border campaign.
In February, within days of the IRA announcing an end to their campaign, Lynch spoke at a debate on North–South relations at Queen’s University Belfast. He expressed the Irish government’s desire to establish an all-Ireland free trade area for goods of Irish and Northern Ireland origins.124 It was a policy publicly advocated by Lemass since becoming leader of Fianna Fáil in 1959.125 Later that year in November, Haughey spoke at a debate organised under the auspices of the New Ireland Society, again at Queen’s University Belfast. Proposing the motion that ‘minorities have nothing to fear in a united Ireland’, Haughey said that Protestants had nothing to fear if Ireland was united as the ‘Constitution of the Irish Republic guaranteed freedom of religion to every citizen’.126 Haughey was following Lemass’s policy that the religious division between the two communities would need to be tackled before Protestants would agree to enter a united Ireland based on a federal model. Significantly, both speeches failed to mention the delicate issue of the recognition of Northern Ireland. Instead, Fianna Fáil ministers fostered the idea that economic co-operation should be independent of recognition.127
By early 1963 it was apparent that the sending of Fianna Fáil ministers to Northern Ireland had proved ineffective. Lemass realised
