of Northern Ireland, Haughey was ‘in personal control’.21 Officials would be consulted if necessary, but otherwise they should know their place.
Haughey’s general leadership style reflected his determination to retain personal control over Fianna Fáil’s Northern Ireland policy. In the words of Ronan Fanning, Haughey had an ‘autocratic ministerial style’.22 He had a habit of shadowing his ministers from various departments, always eager to have a say in policy decisions.23 David Neligan, a senior mandarin in the Department of Foreign Affairs during the 1980s subsequently noted that Haughey ‘disparaged mercilessly some of his own ministerial colleagues …’.24 No doubt, one of the main reasons why he appointed Brian Lenihan as minister for foreign affairs in his first cabinet was because he could control and manipulate his colleague; Lenihan was known to be ‘frightened’ of Haughey.25 Yet, the paradox of Haughey’s character and his appetite for work, as pointed out by Justin O’Brien, was that ‘the very skills that differentiated him also nurtured the seeds for his downfall’. In the end Haughey was incapable of ‘delegating power, interfered in the work of ministers and stored up resentment’.26
In The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote of the qualities needed to become a successful leader: ‘a prince is successful when he fits his mode of proceeding to the times, and is unsuccessful when his mode of proceeding is no longer in tune with them.’27 When it came to the emotive subject of Northern Ireland, Haughey always tried, to varying degrees of success, to take the temperature of Fianna Fáil rank-and-file supporters. This was certainly evident during his involvement in the Arms Crisis and more generally during his presidency of Fianna Fáil. In reality, he was a product of his time, a politician full of contradictions.
In this respect, Haughey might, therefore, be labelled as Ireland’s version of American president Richard ‘Tricky Dicky’ Nixon. Once banished to the political side-lines following allegations of helping to import guns into Ireland during the early 1970s, Haughey made an extraordinary comeback, rising to become leader of Ireland’s largest political party Fianna Fáil in 1979. However, like his American counterpart Nixon, Haughey’s years in government were dogged with controversy and scandal, until finally he was forced out of office in 1992, hounded by allegations of political duplicity.
In the final analysis, Haughey’s reputation will forever be tainted by accusations of corruption and financial irregularities. This was a man who over the course of his political career received payments approximating to more than eleven million in the form of so-called ‘political gifts’ and donations.28 The extent of Haughey’s unearned income was staggering. While he may not have been ‘corrupt’ in the strictest sense of the word, his actions were certainly shameful. Here was a man, taoiseach of his country on three separate occasions, who sought to avoid paying tax by holding substantial sums of monies in offshore Ansbacher accounts.29 In the last assessment the sheer scale and extent of payments that Haughey received can only be described as having ‘devalued the quality of national democracy’, to quote the findings of the Moriarty Tribunal.30 The tribunal’s revelations were indeed astounding. Haughey’s image was in tatters.
Chapter outline
As an introductory note, readers should be aware that this study is a chronological analysis of Haughey’s attitude to the Northern Ireland question. Chapter One examines the background to our subject’s attitude to Northern Ireland, tracing his family connection to Ulster, through to his period as a minister in consecutive Fianna Fáil governments during the early to mid-1960s. From an early age Haughey was immersed in Northern Ireland political and social discourse. His parents Seán and Sarah Haughey were both from the republican area of Swatragh Co. Derry. As a child, Haughey regularly visited Swatragh, spending time with relatives. In later life he recounted with pride that ‘my father and mother were born here…my people have lived here for a very long time’.31
During the 1930s, his family home in Donnycarney, Co. Dublin was a talking shop, with Northern Ireland politics the focus of much debate. Haughey’s visits to Northern Ireland and the stories that he heard from his parents had a deep psychological impact on his outlook towards the partition of his country and more generally his attitude to Anglo-Irish relations. As he noted in 1986: ‘I can never arrive [at the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland] without experiencing deep feelings of anger and resentment … The border is nonsense.’32
As Haughey entered his late teenage years these childhood experiences naturally impacted on the development of his political thinking. In fact, his association with Northern Ireland during the formative years of his life was a blend of republican radicalism, Anglophobia and later ministerial pragmatism. As Chapter One explains, as an impressionable nineteen-year-old commerce student at University College Dublin (UCD), Haughey played a prominent role in the burning of a Union Jack outside the gates of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) on VE Day, 8 May 1945. With a group of UCD students he reportedly helped to organise a march to TCD, with some of his supporters allegedly ‘bearing Nazi swastika flags’.33 This infamous incident was the first, but by no means last, public demonstration of Haughey’s instinctive anti-British feelings.
By the mid-1950s, as Haughey entered his early thirties, there was little indication that his youthful republicanism had waned. In 1955, in his capacity as honorary secretary of his local Fianna Fáil party branch, the Tomas Ó Cléirigh cumann, Dublin North-East, Haughey sent a memorandum on partition to the Fianna Fáil national executive. A six-page typed document, the Ó Cléirigh memorandum on partition offered an aggressive case as to why Fianna Fáil should use physical force to secure Irish unity34. As it noted: ‘We believe it is the duty of the Fianna Fáil Organisation to provide the leadership in the ultimate quest to secure a united Ireland. Therefore, 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