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
