Fáil Northern Ireland policy. By this juncture, in the words of Ronan Fanning, Blaney and Haughey had come to despise the moderation of Lynch’s Northern Ireland policy.11 Haughey, supported by Blaney and minister for local government, Kevin Boland, demanded that the Irish army be sent into Derry or Newry or both to offer, at the very least, support to the beleaguered Catholic populations.12 Haughey maintained that the use of physical force, in the appropriate circumstances, had always represented official Fianna Fáil policy and that the outbreak of the violence was an opportunity to undermine partition and force Britain to concede to a united Ireland.13 Haughey argued that an incursion by the Irish army into Northern Ireland would, at the very least, create an international incident and thus provoke the intervention of a United Nations peacekeeping force.14
Tempers were fraught; even known moderate ministers, such as minister for transport Brian Lenihan and minister for defence Jim Gibbons, were ‘very excited’.15 Lynch was under huge pressure as he desperately tried to advocate that only peaceful actions could secure Irish unity. The absence of both Patrick Hillery and minister for justice Michael Moran did little to help Lynch’s position. Hillery’s absence, in particular, a rational and moderate figure within the government and a close ally of the taoiseach, gave more leeway to the Blaney/Haughey caucus in the cabinet (Hillery was on a painting holiday on Achill Island off Co. Mayo, with John Healy of the Irish Times and did not receive notification of the hastily arranged cabinet meeting until the afternoon of 13 August).16
Lynch’s lack of perceived republican credentials played an important part in understanding his battles to retain authority among his ministerial colleagues in relation to Northern Ireland policy. As Pádraig Faulkner, a member of Lynch’s consecutive Fianna Fáil cabinets from 1969 to 1973, explained: Lynch ‘was the first Fianna Fáil leader not to have had any involvement, personal or family, with the struggle for Irish independence or with the Civil War. In the eyes of some party supporters ... the lack of a Republican pedigree was a problem’.17 This was certainly the case in the eyes of Blaney and Haughey, with both men retaining a visceral dislike of Lynch. They viewed the taoiseach as a weak and inexperienced interim leader of Fianna Fáil, who would sooner rather than later be forced to the political side-lines.
As the raucous cabinet meeting drew to a close, the Blaney/Haughey request to send the Irish army into Northern Ireland was rejected by the pragmatists, led by Lynch. Instead, the cabinet agreed on three policies. First, that an official approach should be made to the British government on behalf of the Irish government to express Dublin’s grave concern in relation to the sectarian unrest in Northern Ireland. Second, that the Irish government request the British government to ‘apply immediately to the UN for the urgent dispatch of a peace keeping force to the six counties of Northern Ireland’. And third, that later that evening the taoiseach deliver a statement on national television declaring Ireland’s right to reunification and denouncing the actions of the Ulster Unionist government and the RUC.18
As collectively agreed by the Irish cabinet earlier that day, later that evening Lynch travelled to RTÉ studios in Donnybrook, Dublin, in advance of his scheduled address to the Irish nation, scheduled for 9 pm. On the taoiseach’s arrival Desmond Fisher, the senior journalist on duty, noticed how nervous Lynch looked. In an effort to ‘calm his nerves’, Fisher provided Lynch with a glass of whiskey. He recalled that Lynch’s prepared typed speech had alterations ‘scrawled all over it’. According to T. Ryle Dwyer, Lynch then asked Fisher what he thought would happen if he were to order the Irish army into Northern Ireland, as some of his advisors and ministers had counselled. Fisher replied: ‘I thought they would go about twenty miles into Down or Derry before they were massacred in a fight with the British.’ The taoiseach smiled ‘wanly’ at Fisher’s answer and said he had arrived at the same conclusion. By then the script was in such a mess that Fisher had it retyped in large type with double spacing to facilitate Lynch in his delivery.19
Lynch’s speech was calculated to offer the illusion that the Fianna Fáil government was doing all it could to defend Northern Ireland Catholics. He did not mince his words. Not only did he attack the very legitimacy of the Northern Ireland state, but he demanded the ‘British government to enter into early negotiations with the Irish government to review the present constitutional position of the Six-Counties of Northern Ireland’. The Irish government, he said, could no longer ‘stand by’ and continue to tolerate the Northern Ireland government’s habitual persecution of the Northern Catholic minority. The ‘Stormont Government’, he deplored, ‘is no longer in control of the situation’ and the RUC could no longer be ‘accepted as an impartial police force’.20
Upon hearing Lynch’s address, Northern Ireland prime minister James Chichester-Clark was furious (Chichester-Clark was appointed Northern Ireland prime minister on 1 May 1969 following the resignation of Terence O’Neill). He labelled it a ‘clumsy and intolerable intrusion into our internal affairs’, and said, ‘I must hold Mr Lynch personally responsible for any worsening of feeling his inflammatory and ill-considered remarks may cause.’21 The British home secretary was, likewise, taken aback by Lynch’s strong words. ‘When I heard this late at night,’ James Callaghan was to later write, ‘it really seemed to be putting the fat in the fire. We had to consider the possibility that within the next twenty-four hours we might face possible civil war in the North and an invasion from the South. I frankly could not believe the second was possible.’22
On the morning of 14 August the British ambassador to Ireland, Andrew Gilchrist, sent a telegram to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, explaining Lynch’s dilemma. ‘Derry’, he reported, ‘came too soon’, for the worried taoiseach. ‘There is this to be said for Lynch,’ Gilchrist said, ‘he warned us that when the pressure grew too great he would be compelled to string along with the Nationalist/Sinn Féin/IRA line ...’.23 Hinting at the possible outbreak of violence in the Irish Republic, the British ambassador to Ireland pessimistically noted that ‘the Irish are a dangerously emotional people … if I were a fire insurance company I would not like to have the British Embassy on my books’.24
Gilchrist’s prediction with regard to the fate of the British Embassy in Dublin ironically proved correct. The following day, 15 August, the embassy building was stoned and the Union Jack flag ripped down from the pole outside the building and torn up by Irish protestors.25
At 11am, as Gilchrist was offering his observations on that state of Irish politics, the second Irish government meeting in as many days, commenced. To Lynch’s relief, Hillery had returned from his holidays on Achill Island and was present at this meeting. On arriving at the cabinet meeting Hillery was aghast to find that the Blaney/Haughey caucus were still calling for the Irish army to intervene in Northern Ireland, describing the meeting as ‘a ballad singing session’.26 Hillery subsequently noted: ‘Frankly, the army was not equipped or capable of doing what some people would like it to do. It is silly to think that the cartoonist in office saying that the army is fully equipped, would put up a better show than if not equipped at all [sic] …’ He sarcastically noted that the anti-partitionists within the cabinet, who included Haughey, ‘smothered in lashings of creamy patriotic ballads singing type of thing’, were all ‘talk’ and no action. ‘It would appear to me,’ he said, ‘that their hearts were not in it. It would appear to me that they want to take the right posture but get no scratches.’27
As at the cabinet meeting on 13 August, after heated discussions, the majority of ministers firmly opposed military intervention or covert support for political violence in Northern Ireland; they instead sought to place diplomacy at centre stage. In an attempt to placate the Blaney/Haughey argument that the Irish army should be sent into certain areas of Northern Ireland to protect the beleaguered Catholic minority, a decision was instead made to establish field hospitals along the border and to authorise the mobilisation of approximately 2,000 of the first-line reserve of the Irish defence forces.28 The decision was also taken that Hillery, in his capacity as minister for external affairs, would seek a meeting with the British secretary of state for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs or the secretary of state for the Home Office, as soon as possible.29
Following the conclusion of the Irish cabinet meeting, events in Northern Ireland dramatically altered. Under mounting pressure and faced with a depleted RUC force, the Northern Ireland authorities were forced to request the assistance of the British army