play a marginal role during this enveloping crisis. In particular, because of his inability to influence British government thinking during the second Republican hunger strike campaign, Haughey found himself in the one position he despised most: politically impotent. On each occasion that he attempted to intervene directly with Thatcher and her officials in an effort to find a negotiated settlement to the hunger strike campaign, the door was shut in his face.52 As a result, Haughey cut a very depressing figure during this period, banished to the political side-lines as the Thatcher government dealt directly with the Republican movement over the heads of the Irish government.
Haughey’s anxiety and frustration was compounded by the Irish government’s support for Thatcher’s refusal to grant the so-called ‘five demands’ to the Republican prisoners.53 His willingness to endorse the Thatcher government on this highly emotive issue, together with his inability to influence the British prime minister’s thinking, left him open to accusations of political indecisiveness and certainly damaged his reputation as a firebrand nationalist. The Republican leadership, under Sinn Féin vice-president Gerry Adams, was particularly astute at propagating the message that Haughey had ‘sold out’ on his republican principles, having become ‘a collaborator’ with Thatcher’s government, to quote Owen Carron.54
The subject of the Falklands War in 1982 is central to Chapter Seven. This crisis was a defining moment for Haughey and Anglo-Irish relations. It explains how and why he made a ‘mess’, to quote Desmond O’Malley, of Anglo-Irish diplomatic relations during the crisis and the political fallout between Dublin and London thereafter.55 The taoiseach’s display of so-called ‘macho nationalism’56 during this period demonstrated the opportunistic nature of his political thinking, revealing the ruthless, even sly, side of his character. Haughey saw the Falklands crisis as the key moment to get his own back on Thatcher because of her unwillingness to allow him play any meaningful role during the second Republican hunger strike. Yet, the result of his stance during the affair, chiefly his decision that the Irish government withdraw support for the British government’s sponsored sanctions against Argentina, resulted in a dramatic deterioration in Anglo-Irish relations.
The fall-out had immediate consequences for Haughey’s plan of convincing the British government to permit Dublin a legitimate role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. During his remaining time in government, Thatcher refused to formally meet Haughey to discuss Northern Ireland, never mind consider permitting the Irish government a functional role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. As a result, Haughey decided to help kick-start a bold new initiative in relation to Northern Ireland. His inability to convince the British government to support his calls for an ‘Irish dimension’ resulted in the taoiseach deciding to drop a central plank of his Northern Ireland policy, in the immediate period, at least. Instead of promoting direct dialogue between the two sovereign governments in Dublin and London to find a negotiated settlement to the Northern Ireland conflict, Haughey proposed his own version of the Social Democratic and Labour Party’s (SDLP) so-called ‘Council for a New Ireland’. His involvement with the Ireland Forum from 1983 to 1984 is the underlying theme of Chapter Eight.
The New Ireland Forum was formally opened by taoiseach Garret FitzGerald at a public session of the gathering in May 1983. The forum comprised the four major Nationalist political parties on the island of Ireland: Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party and the SDLP (this ensured that the forum represented more than 70 per cent of the population of Ireland). The central purpose of the forum’s working ‘was to devise ideas through which lasting peace and stability could be achieved in Ireland through the democratic process’.57 Over eleven months the forum met approximately ninety-six times, publishing its final report in May 1984. This chapter examines the workings of the forum, not merely from the perspective of Fianna Fáil, but it also analyses both FitzGerald’s and the British government’s attitude to this body.
Haughey was a regular contributor to the forum’s proceedings and his message was routinely the same: Northern Ireland was a failed entity, politically and economically. Therefore only a settlement, based on his calls for a unitary state, negotiated on behalf of the British and Irish government, could deliver lasting peace to Northern Ireland, he argued.58 To the frustration of FitzGerald and many others on the forum, Haughey refused to consider the two alternative models proposed by the final report as a solution to the Northern Ireland conflict, namely, a confederal/federal model or British–Irish joint authority over Northern Ireland. Although he was not ‘against’ the proposals, he said that the simple fact remained that a unitary state was the only viable option.59
Chapter Nine, the concluding chapter of this study, opens with an analysis of Haughey’s initial opposition and later support for the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. Throughout Fianna Fáil’s period in opposition from December 1982 to March 1987, Haughey played a peripheral role in the Irish government’s Northern Ireland policy and more generally in Anglo-Irish relations. Instead, to his frustration it was left to his political nemesis, Garret FitzGerald, to develop and nurture Irish government policy on Northern Ireland, under the auspices of the so-called ‘Armstrong–Nally Framework Talks’.60 These series of talks, comprising British and Irish senior civil servants, played an instrumental part in facilitating the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. At the heart of the Agreement was a commitment by the British and Irish governments to reject political violence, that Irish unity could only be achieved by peaceful means and to acknowledge the principle of consent. From Dublin’s perspective the significance of the accord rested on the British government’s recognition – for the first time since the enactment of partition – that the Irish government had a ‘consultative’ role to play in the affairs of Northern Ireland, as a defender of the interests of the nationalist minority.61
Haughey’s response to the Agreement has puzzled many commentators to this day. To the amazement of most informed people, including many senior figures within Fianna Fáil, he immediately opposed the Agreement. Even before the Agreement was signed, Haughey sent Brian Lenihan to the United States to lobby against it. Under Haughey’s instructions, Fianna Fáil voted against the Agreement when it was debated in the Dáil on 21 November 1985, where it was endorsed by eighty-eight to seventy-five.62 In the days and weeks following the signing of the Agreement, he went on a propaganda crusade, articulating the perceived disastrous consequences that the Agreement would have for Anglo-Irish relations and the prospects for securing a united Ireland. He disingenuously argued that the Agreement constituted a ‘major setback’ for Irish unity.63
However, when Fianna Fáil entered government in 1987, Haughey gave his public blessing to the Agreement, albeit somewhat begrudgingly. Addressing the party faithful at the 1988 Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis, the incumbent taoiseach acknowledged his government was obliged to recognise the accord as it was an ‘international agreement entered into between two sovereign governments, which cannot be abrogated unilaterally’.64 In truth, while Haughey reluctantly accepted the Agreement, he never saw it as an adequate formula. For the remainder of his time in political office, Haughey’s preoccupation focused on securing agreement from the British government for the holding of multi-party talks among the political parties on either side of the Irish border, under the auspices of the two sovereign governments, to consider the constitutional relationship between Belfast, Dublin and London.
The concluding sub-section of Chapter Nine delves into Haughey’s important, but hitherto neglected, contribution to the early stages of the Northern Ireland peace process. Firstly, in his clandestine dealings with the Sinn Féin leadership during the 1980s and secondly, when assessing his relationship with Thatcher’s successor as British prime minister John Major, during the early 1990s. It is certainly one of the greatest ironies of Haughey’s political career that given his involvement in helping to facilitate the emergence of the nascent PIRA in 1969 (albeit indirectly) that he had a prominent hand to play in taking the gun out of Irish politics. His role is all the more ironic, not to mention peculiar, considering that he strongly opposed the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Despite attempts by many of Haughey’s detractors to airbrush out his contribution to the origins of the Northern Ireland peace process, the fact remains that it was him, not Garret FitzGerald during the mid-1980s or indeed his successor as Fianna Fáil leader and taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, during the mid-1990s,65 who should be credited as the ‘grandfather’ of the Northern Ireland peace