Stephen Kelly

A Failed Political Entity'


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year. As noted above, in January 1955 (the same month he was appointed to the standing-committee on partition matters) Haughey had sent the Ó Cléirigh memorandum on partition to the Fianna Fáil national executive. Although it is difficult to decipher, the circumstantial evidence would suggest that on reading the Ó Cléirigh memorandum on partition Lemass, alarmed by its content, decided to appoint Haughey to the standing-committee in order to ‘educate’ his son-in-law on the futility of violence in the attainment of a united Ireland. Indeed, before the inaugural meeting of the standing-committee on partition-matters, Lemass ordered that each member receive a copy of the Ó Cléirigh memorandum.91

      Between the first meeting of the standing-committee in early February 1955 and the second gathering in early April, detailed research was carried out by the committee members concerning Fianna Fáil’s Northern Ireland policy.92 Stemming directly from the two meetings, a thought-provoking memorandum was produced by Lemass and his colleagues. The memorandum recorded that committee members, including Haughey, fully endorsed the proposals contained within and instructed the Fianna Fáil national executive to ‘issue a statement on Partition on the following lines or alternatively to incorporate such a statement in any publication dealing with Fianna Fáil’s policy and programme’.93

      The memorandum proposed eight practical policies that Fianna Fáil should follow vis-à-vis Northern Ireland. The points represented a victory of pragmatism over dogma. It categorically ruled out the use of force, instead insisting that only peaceful means could deliver the Holy Grail of Irish unity. At the heart of the memorandum was the thesis that only through a process of co-operation and mutual respect between Belfast and Dublin could the long-term attainment of a united Ireland be achieved. The memorandum’s preamble declared:

      It was the purpose of Fianna Fáil to advocate and apply the following policy towards the realisation of the primary aim of the national effort as set out above

      1.To maintain and strengthen wherever possible, all links with the Six-County majority, especially economic and cultural links, to encourage contacts between the people of both areas in every field, and to demonstrate that widespread goodwill for the Six-County majority can be fostered by such contacts;

      2.To discourage and prevent any course of action which would have the effect of embittering relations between the people of both areas, or making fruitful economic and cultural contacts more difficult;

      3.To keep constant in mind, in relation to all aspects of Twenty-Six County internal policy and administration, the prospect of the termination of partition and so to direct them as to avoid or minimise the practical problems that may arise when partition is ended;

      4.To eliminate as far as possible all impediments to the free movement of goods, persons, and traffic across the Border and particularly to alter the Customs Law so as to permit of the entry into the Twenty-Six-counties free of Customs duty and subject to no more onerous conditions than apply to Twenty-Six County products, all goods of bona fide Six-County origins;

      5.To encourage the establishment of joint authorities to manage affairs of common interest, including transport, electricity generations and distributions, sea lights and marks, drainage programmes and tourist development;

      6.To co-ordinate with the Six-County authorities in arrangements for Civil Defence, including movement of population from threatened areas in time of war;

      7.To arrange, if possible, with the Six-County authorities for joint commercial and tourist publicity abroad, and to invite periodic consultation of all such matters of common interest;

      8.To urge on the people of the Twenty-Six-counties the desirability of giving to the Six-County majority of such assurances as to their political and religious rights in a United Ireland as may reasonably be required, and as to the maintenance of local autonomy in respect of such matters as may be desired by them.94

      Points one to three were consistent with current Fianna Fáil thinking on Northern Ireland and maintained that the ‘concurrence of wills’ philosophy was the only viable method available to the party to secure Irish unity; that Dublin must work in tangent with London and Belfast, via economic, cultural, political and social contacts, if partition was to be successfully ended.95 Points four to seven originated from Lemass’s personal views on the economic practicalities between North and South. Specifically, he believed that Fianna Fáil must agree to the lifting of tariffs between Dublin and Belfast, thus creating a free trade area on the island of Ireland.96

      Lastly, point eight dealt with the thorny subject of making changes to the Irish Constitution in order to help accommodate Ulster unionists into a united Ireland, based on a federal agreement, namely, that a review of Article 44 of the Irish Constitution should be undertaken – this dealt with ‘the special position of the Catholic Church’. Additionally, the committee recommended that Articles 2 and 3, which claimed territorial jurisdiction over the whole of the island of Ireland, might be amended. Lemass was one of a few within Fianna Fáil to appreciate that the combination of Catholic social values and the territorial claim to the whole of the island, as enshrined in the 1937 Irish Constitution, had cemented the alienation of Ulster unionists over the previous two decades, thus entrenching partition.97

      On 6 April 1955, Lemass sent de Valera the standing-committee’s memorandum and proposed that the national executive should endorse the recommendations as official Fianna Fáil Northern Ireland policy.98 Within twenty-four hours, however, de Valera rejected his lieutenant’s recommendation. In a letter to Lemass, dated 7 April, de Valera said that ‘whilst I agree a great deal of it does not seem to be open to serious objection, some of the steps suggested are not so, and are of more than doubtful value’. De Valera explained that the memorandum ‘... would certainly give rise to very serious controversy’ and would possibly add further confusion amongst ‘the nationalists of the Six-Counties’. He, therefore, informed Lemass that its contents must be ‘kept as a private norm. Publicity might in fact defeat the purpose of the scheme’.99

      De Valera’s rejection of the memorandum was not altogether surprising. While he favoured a federal solution to help bring an end to partition he would have never signed up to the standing-committee’s recommendation that Fianna Fáil consider revising Articles 2 and 3. After all, de Valera was the main instigator of the 1937 Irish Constitution, which had in effect withdrawn the de facto recognition of the 1925 boundary agreement between the Dublin and Belfast governments, by asserting the thirty-two county national claim. More immediate concerns may have also instructed de Valera’s thinking. Following a recent spate of IRA violence, publication of the proposals would have left Fianna Fáil open to further criticism that it had abandoned its traditional republican pledge to secure a united Ireland.

      Despite de Valera’s rejection of the proposals, the seeds of change had been sown. Lemass was to later acknowledge that the craft of policy development was a slow process that was ‘never born complete with arms and eyes and legs overnight. It’s something that grows over a long time’.100 In fact, the proposals contained within points four to eight, for instance, were ten years ahead of their time and were remarkably similar to the policies that Lemass advocated when he became Fianna Fáil leader and taoiseach in 1959; a subject considered in further detail towards the end of this chapter.

      There is no archival information available to ascertain Haughey’s attitude to the memorandum or indeed his general involvement on the standing-committee on partition matters. The fact that Lemass acknowledged that the memorandum had the support of all committee members suggests that Haughey towed the committee-line and gave his backing to the standing-committee’s recommendations. In reality, even if he did not agree with all of the proposals, he had little room to manoeuvre. Although by this period Haughey held a local corporation seat in Dublin, he was a marginal figure within the Fianna Fáil organisation at large. His contribution to the standing-committee, one can therefore argue, would have been curtailed by Lemass and the other elder statesmen such as Aiken, MacEntee and Moylan. In fact, by the time Haughey secured his first ministerial portfolio as minister for justice in 1961, he was widely believed to be a firm supporter of Taoiseach Lemass’s consolatory, economically inspired, Northern Ireland policy.

      ‘Nothing to fear in a united Ireland’: Lemass, Haughey and Northern Ireland, 1959–66

      Haughey’s