the only policy open to us, which gives reasonable hope of success, is the use of force.’35
In the context of understanding the genesis of Haughey’s attitude to Northern Ireland, the Ó Cléirigh memorandum on partition offers fascinating evidence. Significantly, it advised that the Irish government, in conjunction with the Irish army, should enact a campaign of guerrilla warfare in Northern Ireland. It envisaged that this campaign would concentrate its resources on one or two areas in Northern Ireland with Catholic majorities (probably situated in Co. Derry and Co. Armagh).36 As is analysed in Chapter One, Haughey’s role in the production of this memorandum provides compelling, if not conclusive, evidence that by at least the mid-1950s, he harboured a deeply held ideological commitment to securing a united Ireland.
However, by the birth of the ‘swinging’ 1960s, a metamorphose in Haughey’s attitude to Northern Ireland seemingly occurred. With his appointment in 1961 as minister for justice in Seán Lemass’s Fianna Fáil government, Haughey quickly assumed a reputation as a fierce opponent of physical force republicanism, helping to crush the IRA’s border campaign (1956–62) in February 1962. A rising star within Fianna Fáil and widely mooted as a future party leader, he endorsed Lemass’s conciliatory, non-violent, approach towards Ulster Unionism, based on economic co-operation between Dublin and Belfast. Although during this period Haughey often referred to the deep resentment felt by the people in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland because of the maintenance of partition, he condemned as ‘foolish’ any attempts to secure a united Ireland by force.37
At first glance, it therefore seemed that on entering his early forties Haughey had abandoned his youthful anti-partitionist republicanism. Yet, as was the nature of Haughey’s political life sometimes the reality of the situation was not as one first expected. In fact, it is argued that Haughey’s support for the Lemass-led government’s conciliatory Northern Ireland policy during the 1960s, should not suggest that his deep-rooted commitment for the attainment of a united Ireland had waned. On the contrary, as an ambitious minister ascending the Fianna Fáil ladder, Haughey decided to bide his time, to hide from public glare his fundamental opposition to the Northern Ireland state. It was not until the outbreak of the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1969 that Haughey’s anti-partitionism was reignited.
Chapter Two explores the defining moment in Haughey’s political career: his role in the so-called ‘Arms Crisis’ from 1969 to 1970. As is argued, this was a pivotal event, not only for Haughey personally, but also for the Fianna Fáil organisation at large, which almost imploded during this debacle. In the words of Tom Garvin during these turbulent years Fianna Fáil ‘went through the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown’.38 What of Haughey’s role during the Arms Crisis? Although nearly half a century has passed a lively, indeed at times acrimonious, debate continues to engulf the discourse surrounding the part played by him in this affair. Whilst Haughey’s motivations will forever remain unclear, the fact is that in his capacity as minister for finance, and chairman of an Irish government sponsored sub-committee with control of a ‘special Northern Ireland relief fund’, he played a crucial role in helping to supply Northern Irish nationalists with guns and ammunition.39
This chapter provides compelling, if not conclusive, evidence that Haughey was fully aware that senior figures within the Irish state, including members of Irish Military Intelligence (IMI), were involved in attempts to import weapons into Ireland. Indeed, it is argued that Haughey was at the centre of these activities. To put it crudely his fingerprints are all over the Arms Crisis. Not only that, it is also claimed that Haughey, albeit indirectly, played a role in helping to establish the nascent Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). While it may never have been his intention to bring the PIRA into being, 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.
In the words of Vincent Browne, Haughey’s behaviour and actions during the course of this affair was ‘almost entirely reprehensible’. Haughey ‘arrogantly took it upon himself’, Browne acidly wrote, to supply guns to certain sections of the Catholic minority ‘without any explicit government sanction’.40 While the various attempts to import guns and ammunitions into Ireland ultimately failed, Haughey’s involvement with this covert activity forever tarnished his political credibility. The net result of Haughey’s actions would lead to his sacking as a government minister in May 1970 and see him face criminal prosecutions for allegedly using government monies to import arms.
Haughey’s credibility and political career were in tatters. Relegated to the Fianna Fáil backbenches in disgrace, it seemed as though he was destined to remain in the political doldrums. If nothing else, however, Haughey was a fighter. He quickly dusted himself off. During the early 1970s he travelled around the Fianna Fáil constituencies doing favours and winning friends. In the words of the British Embassy in Dublin, during his time in the political abyss, Haughey slowly ‘managed to rehabilitate himself’.41 His hard work eventually bore fruit and in 1975 Fianna Fáil leader Jack Lynch reluctantly restored Haughey to the frontbench as the party’s spokesperson for health. Many of the old guard within Fianna Fáil were aghast by Lynch’s decision. Jim Gibbons, Haughey’s arch nemesis during the Arms Crisis days, foretold that Haughey would destroy Fianna Fáil.42
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 this period, sharp differences emerged within Fianna Fáil over Lynch’s Northern Ireland policy. To Lynch’s dismay, Fianna Fáil’s spokesman for foreign affairs, Michael O’Kennedy, requested that the British government make a commitment ‘to implement an ordered withdrawal from her involvement in the six-counties of Northern Ireland’.43 O’Kennedy’s remarks had the full backing of Haughey.44 By using O’Kennedy as a ‘stalking horse’, to quote a confidential source from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Haughey was attempting to undermine Lynch’s conciliatory approach to Northern Ireland and more generally his leadership.45 Under pressure from the hawkish elements within his own parliamentary party, Lynch was forced to accept this statement as the party’s official policy-line for the remainder of his period as Fianna Fáil leader.
Haughey’s political rehabilitation was completed following Fianna Fáil’s stunning general election victory in 1977. On forming a new government, Haughey was appointed minister for health and social welfare, a position that the incumbent taoiseach hoped would absorb his minister’s energies and distract him from his obvious political ambitions. Lynch was mistaken. Seven years on from the humiliation surrounding his ministerial sacking, Haughey was presented with the opportunity to resurrect his naked ambition to secure the leadership of his beloved Fianna Fáil. In December 1979 to the surprise and utter dismay of the majority of his cabinet colleagues, Haughey was elected Fianna Fáil leader and taoiseach. It remains the most remarkable comeback ever witnessed in Irish politics. The Haughey-era had thus begun.
Almost immediately, as is analysed in Chapter Three, Haughey sought to dismantle his predecessor’s Northern Ireland policy. He abandoned Fianna Fáil’s traditional support for an ‘internal’ solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland as a prerequisite to a united Ireland. From the new taoiseach’s perspective, Northern Ireland had failed as a credible entity, therefore a new departure, focused on a Dublin–London axis, was immediately required.46 This stance set the benchmark for Haughey’s approach to Northern Ireland for the remainder of his political career.
Haughey’s most substantial contribution to the Northern Ireland question occurred during his first reign as taoiseach from December 1979 to Fianna Fáil election defeat in June 1981. It is for this reason that Chapters Four, Five and Six, respectively, focus on these defining years in the development of Haughey’s public and private stance on Northern Ireland, and more generally Anglo-Irish relations. This study centres on two main and interrelated topics during this period. Firstly, the genesis and evolution of Haughey’s complicated relationship with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher is examined. And secondly, his
