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at government buildings, in which Lynch supplied him with ‘files on the two’ ministers, Aiken demanded that the whip be withdrawn from Haughey and Blaney.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
