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 involvement with the Republican hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981. It is argued that the two Anglo-Irish summit meetings held between Haughey and Thatcher in May and December 1980, particularly the latter, had long-lasting consequences for British–Irish relations and more specifically the Irish government’s involvement in Northern Ireland affairs.
Chapter Four reveals that initially Haughey and Thatcher got on with one another. Lord Charles David Powell, a former key foreign policy advisor to the British prime minister, recounted some years later that after the first Anglo-Irish summit meeting between the two prime ministers in May 1980 ‘there was a glint’ in Haughey’s eye, which Thatcher had ‘found attractive’.47 This honeymoon period, however, did not last long. Haughey’s overselling of the second Anglo-Irish summit meeting in December of 1980 infuriated Thatcher. She was particularly upset by Haughey’s claim that in the context of the ‘totality of relationships’ between the British and Irish governments, that Northern Ireland’s constitutional future was to be renegotiated on behalf of Dublin and London. Thereafter, Thatcher never again trusted Haughey.48 As Thatcher’s chief press secretary, Bernard Ingham, later recalled: Haughey ‘thought he could twist her [Thatcher] around his little finger – he learned, no way!’49
In a more positive light, the Anglo-Irish summit meeting of December 1980, as explored in Chapter Five, undoubtedly heralded a new era in Anglo-Irish relations. Although Thatcher refused Haughey’s request for the holding of an Anglo-Irish conference to consider Northern Ireland’s constitutional future, the goalposts in British–Irish relations undoubtedly shifted. Over the ensuing years, senior Whitehall officials, including Sir Robert Armstrong (created Lord Armstrong of Ilminster in 1988), Thatcher’s cabinet secretary, recognised the Irish government’s ‘legitimate’ right to be consulted on the affairs of Northern Ireland, irrespective of Thatcher’s personal protests. Due to Haughey’s continued co-operation on cross-border security and intelligence and Thatcher’s commitment to foster the ‘unique relationship’ between the two countries, British officials argued that it was now time to realise that the solution to the Northern Ireland conflict ‘… is not to be found exclusively within a narrow Northern Ireland framework’, to quote a Foreign and Commonwealth Office memorandum, dated November 1980.50
This recognition by London of Dublin’s legitimate right to play a formal role in helping to find a workable solution to the Northern Ireland conflict was facilitated through the establishment of a series of British–Irish joint study groups in 1981, which first convened under the auspices of a supervisory steering group, comprised of senior British and Irish civil servants in London on 30 January 1981.51 The commissioning of the British–Irish joint-studies, together with the establishment of the Anglo-Irish intergovernmental council in 1982, played an important role in paving the way for the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and for the genesis of the Northern Ireland peace process during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Haughey’s association with the Republican hunger strikes, the first in 1980 and the second