if not for the grim backdrop of internment, the PIRA campaign and the political stalemate at Stormont.226
However, all the good diplomacy undertaken between Dublin and London, during the latter months of 1971, was shattered by the events in Derry on 30 January 1972. Following a civil rights march from Creggan to the Bogside of Derry, soldiers of the British Parachute Regiment killed fourteen unarmed civilians and seriously injured many more in what was to become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. The Saville Inquiry in 2010 found no evidence that any of those who died during the protests on ‘Bloody Sunday’ were carrying weapons or explosives.227 The shootings caused widespread outrage and nationalist revulsion throughout Ireland and unleashed a wave of anti-partitionist and anti-British emotion not witnessed since the summer of 1969.
The most significant political consequence of Bloody Sunday was the British government’s dramatic change in policy. Direct rule, not the propping up of the Stormont regime, was London’s preferred option. Heath intended to take full control over the security and criminal justice in Northern Ireland. Faulkner was dismayed and threatened to resign, however, Heath was in no mood for compromise and on 30 March 1972 introduced direct rule. William Whitelaw was appointed as secretary of state for Northern Ireland. The suspension of Stormont transformed the political landscape in Northern Ireland.228 The British outlined a policy of ‘reconciliation’ with all parties across the political spectrum in Northern Ireland.229 The British initiative also permitted a thawing of relations between Dublin and London and the Irish ambassador, Donal O’Sullivan resumed his post in London.
However, not for the first or the last time, the PIRA thwarted political progress. On 21 July 1972, the movement committed one of the worst atrocities of the Northern Ireland conflict. On ‘Bloody Friday’ the PIRA killed eleven people and injured a further 130 in a carefully co-ordinated series of bombs in Belfast.230 Such atrocities proved a brutal reminder that the conflict in Northern Ireland had bypassed both governments. Thereafter, the situation in Northern Ireland settled into a military and political stalemate. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) escalated their respective campaigns of terror, while the PIRA failed to force the withdrawal of the British forces from Northern Ireland.
At the 1973 Irish general election Fianna Fáil found itself voted out of office for the first time since 1957. Although the party secured more than 22,000 additional votes compared to the 1969 election, it secured six fewer seats. Ironically, two of the sacked Fianna Fáil ministers, Blaney and Haughey, headed their polls with 8,368 and 12,901 votes respectively. The result brought Fianna Fáil’s sixteen years in government to an abrupt end. Fine Gael and the Labour Party, who had been pursuing independent opposition policies since 1957, suddenly agreed on 6 February to an electoral pact and fought the election as an alternative coalition government. This pact proved somewhat appealing to the electorate and in late February, a ‘National Coalition’ under Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave was formed.
The run up to the general election once again exposed the divisions within Fianna Fáil. The election was the first since the Arms Crisis and at least one founding member, Frank Aiken, felt the ‘wrong sort of people were gaining ground’ – the ‘wrong sort of people’ being Haughey. Aiken informed Lynch that if Haughey was ratified as a Fianna Fáil candidate to run in the 1973 general election, he would resign from the party. Aiken also protested that he would write a letter to the papers explaining the precise reason for his resignation. Lynch asked de Valera to intervene on his behalf, which he duly agreed to do. However, Aiken would not budge.231
On 12 February, Aiken learned that Haughey had been ratified. Aiken immediately withdrew his nomination. It was only after Lynch mobilised the services of Seán MacEntee, George Colley, Paddy Smith and his close friend Joe Farrell, that Aiken agreed not to publicly accord his reasons for retiring from public life. He would not, however, waver from his decision to bow out of Irish public life. The following evening, 13 February 1973, Lynch announced that with great regret the former tánaiste and minister for external affairs was retiring from politics on ‘doctors’ orders’. Outraged by Lynch bringing Haughey back to the opposition frontbench in January 1975, Aiken was never to attend another Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis or party event in the last ten years of his life. It was a sad end to a long and distinguished political career.232
The next chapter in Haughey’s involvement with Northern Ireland, albeit indirectly, was in response to the Sunningdale Agreement, signed on behalf of the British and Irish governments and the designated parties involved in the Northern Ireland Executive on 9 December 1973. Paragraph five of the Agreement acknowledged that the Irish government ‘fully accepted and solemnly declared that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland desired a change in that status’. For its part, the British government recognised that if in ‘the future the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish’.233 As part of the Agreement it was announced that a power-sharing administration for Northern Ireland, comprising the Ulster Unionist Party, the SDLP and the Alliance Party, would be established. To facilitate Dublin’s calls for an ‘Irish dimension’ in the affairs of Northern Ireland, the accord also contained a clause to set up a so-called ‘Council for Ireland’.234
The Fianna Fáil leadership, under Lynch, endorsed the Agreement.235 Speaking in the Dáil at this time, Lynch welcomed the power-sharing ‘partnership’, linking it to the Council of Ireland as first envisaged under the Government of Ireland Act of 1920.236 However, not everyone within Fianna Fáil supported the Agreement. Privately, Haughey ‘strongly’ opposed its implementation.237 He felt that the Fianna Fáil’s commitment for the attainment of a united Ireland had been diluted by the party’s support for the Agreement. As Martin Mansergh subsequently argued, Haughey ‘detested’ the Sunningdale Agreement ‘as compromising the republican position’.238 Haughey was particularly uneasy regarding the language used in paragraph five of the communiqué, issued on behalf of the British and Irish governments in the aftermath of the Sunningdale Agreement. He believed that by signing up to this Agreement the Irish government had indirectly committed itself to agree to recognise the de jure existence of Northern Ireland, thus reneging on its support for Article 2 of the Irish Constitution. Despite making his protests known in private, he refrained from publicly condemning the Agreement, aware that such a stance might see him expelled from the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party. For the meantime, at least, he remained tight lipped.239
In 1975, in view of the abject performance of Fianna Fáil and widespread demands for his restoration, Lynch reluctantly reinstated Haughey to the party frontbench. Gibbons, Haughey’s arch nemesis from the Arms Crisis, warned Lynch that Haughey would eventually destroy the party.240 Both George Colley and Seán MacEntee likewise strongly counselled Lynch against this move, but Lynch gave in under considerable pressure.241 Haughey’s return also set off alarm bells in London. Although politically Haughey was described as being ‘in another league’ compared to his rivals in Fianna Fáil, the British Embassy in Dublin was convinced that his sole remaining ambition was to oust Lynch and secure ‘power’.242 Despite grumblings of discontent among Haughey’s parliamentary colleagues and British officials, rank-and-file Fianna Fáil supporters were ecstatic on learning of his return. At the 1975 Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis in February the new opposition spokesperson on health received a two-minute standing ovation during his contribution to proceedings.243
It was no coincidence that Haughey’s return to the Fianna Fáil frontbench coincided with a dramatic change in the party’s official stance on Northern Ireland. By late 1975 sharp differences emerged within Fianna Fáil over Lynch’s Northern Ireland policy. In early October of that year and without Lynch’s consent, Fianna Fáil’s spokesman for foreign affairs, Michael O’Kennedy, called on London to make a ‘commitment to implement an ordered withdrawal from her involvement in the Six-Counties of Northern Ireland’. Described in British circles as a ‘liability’ when it came to Northern Ireland,244 O’Kennedy declared that the British government should ‘encourage the unity of Ireland by agreement … and in a harmonious relationship between the
