Hawks, doves and the Arms Crisis of 1970
Author Michael Heney’s bestselling book is not as insightful – or as fresh – as some fulsome reviewers seem to think, says 50 YEARS ON, ARMS CRISIS STILL STIRS CONTROVERSY
‘Sending weapons to defence committees could trigger a conflict’
‘Captain Kelly came across to journalists as a man ready to break regulations’
MICHAEL Heney’s bestselling book,
The Arms Crisis of 1970, has received rave reviews, but this will not be one of them.
Some plugs for his book, like the ones from his doctorate supervisor Diarmaid Ferriter and his RTE colleague David Davin-Power, lacked due distance.
But why did so many others, some of whom clearly had not read the book, take up such supportive positions?
Above all, why so much interest in events that took place over 50 years ago when two government ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, as well as Captain James Kelly, a serving Irish Army officer, were charged with conspiracy to import arms?
The answer, then and now, is that the Arms Crisis is a metaphor for whether you’re a hawk or a dove on Northern Ireland — an issue still alive in Fianna Fail.
Let me start by saying Heney’s book is not as fresh as some fulsome reviewers seem to think. Justin O’Brien’s
Arms Trial, published in 2000, is still relevant and readable.
O’Brien was no more starry-eyed about Jack Lynch than Heney. But he paints on a wide canvas, whereas Heney digs deep into archives to prove one major point — that Charles Haughey’s attempted import of arms was authorised.
Back in 2000, O’Brien correctly claimed his book “examines the role of Captain Kelly in infiltrating the IRA and the manner in which the IRA leadership in Dublin was sidelined and eventually cast aside in favour of the Provisional IRA”.
But Heney seems to have small interest in the wider politics of crucial episodes such as the October 4, 1969 meeting of the Northern Citizens’ Defence Committees, in Bailieborough, Co Cavan, where Captain Kelly first mooted arming the northern IRA.
Cathal Goulding, chief of staff of the IRA, who attended the Bailieborough meeting to suss out Kelly’s plans, kept his own counsel, but was privately dismayed by Kelly’s project. He knew many present opposed his own project of keeping the IRA to a peaceful civil rights path. Later, as he feared, some of them formed the Provisional IRA.
Unlike Justin O’Brien, Heney seems to have no scepticism about the sinister political motives of the southern cabal (including many businessmen close to Haughey) who were directing Captain Kelly to split the IRA, and who even envisaged invading Northern Ireland.
Instead, Heney conducts a detailed archival trawl to turn up a smoking gun that will allow him to arraign Jack Lynch, exonerate Haughey and heroise Captain Kelly. But Heney assembles facts from the archive, only to build a bigger beehive for the same bees that buzzed in his bonnet nearly 20 years ago.
Because back in 2001, in a Prime Time film for RTE, Heney reached the same conclusions he repeats in this book — that Jack Lynch lied and Charles Haughey and Captain Kelly were wronged. This, he argues, set out to amplify, rather than advance, his 2001 film position for this new study.
Reviewing the documentary for the Sunday Times in April 2001, I had the same criticism of Heney’s film then as I do of his book now: “We were given no political context. Captain Kelly and Colonel Hefferon were presented to us as two men doing their duty, who were stitched up by sinister forces in the Department of Justice. But did they exceed their ‘duty’?”
Let me now consider the core argument of Heney’s book on which his entire thesis rests, and which, if wrong, undermines his entire book.
Basically, Heney believes Haughey, Blaney and Captain
Kelly were wronged because Jack Lynch lied in denying his government had been involved with what Heney refers to as a “semi-official, well-intentioned but risky fore-planning, intended to avert a pending bloodbath across the border”. (p187)
First, let’s set the scene. In October 1969 and again in March 1970, the government made money available for the relief of distress in Northern Ireland which was to be disbursed by Haughey, Minister for Finance.
Instead Haughey and Blaney, via Captain Kelly, seemingly spent the money on arming what would become the Provisional IRA by illegally importing arms.
Bizarrely, Heney implies that Haughey had actually been given the authority to do all the things he did, basically because he was never expressly forbidden from trying to import guns for the IRA.
In a Jesuitical hair-split, Heney asks coyly: “Was it ever specified by either the government or the Oireachtas that the money was to be used only for humanitarian purposes?” (p84)
The notion that the Dail might vote funds for weapons
without specifying what they were for, and without a debate, is nonsensical. Everyone who knew Northern Ireland saw that sending weapons to the defence committees could backfire, and trigger a wider sectarian conflict.
Let’s do a forensic examination of Heney’s main smoking gun — the Army directive of February 6, 1970. Heney claims the directive meant that Jack Lynch’s government had made a formal decision to arm Northern nationalists and even invade Northern Ireland. So let’s look at the actual directive by Jim Gibbons, minister for defence.
“At a meeting of the government held this morning, I was instructed to direct you to prepare the Army for incursions into Northern Ireland. The Taoiseach and other ministers have met delegations from the North. At these meetings urgent demands were made for respirators, weapons and ammunition, the provision of which the government agreed. Accordingly truck loads of these items will be put at readiness so that they may be available in a matter of hours.” (p102)
Heney believes the above Army directive gave unlimited financial authority to Haughey, including the purchase and import of arms.
He makes his position clear in the following sweeping reference to the conspiracy to import arms. “It was not unauthorised, and it was not rogue, nor was it a subversive plot engineered by scheming ministers contrary to the wishes of the Taoiseach.” (p101)
In rebuttal, I believe Heney is reading permissions into the directive that are simply not there. The directive merely shows Jack Lynch as Taoiseach, put the Army on standby, and directed them to prepare for a possible doomsday situation involving the attempted annihilation of the entire Catholic minority.
At most, the directive shows that Lynch contemplated what we might call a police action to stop a genocide, rather like Blair did in Kosovo in 1999. In that dire case, he was prepared to give Catholic nationalists Irish Army weapons, but not illegally imported weapons.
But it is bizarre of Heney to argue the directive allowed for Blaney’s insane project to invade Northern Ireland as well as the import of arms for that purpose — as Haughey and Blaney’s supporters claimed at the time — and as Heney does today.
In effect, Heney is claiming the Army directive retrospectively authorised all the activities of Haughey, Blaney and Captain Kelly. But there was a big difference between the government’s 1970 directive to the army and the hawks’ previous deadly plans to arm a faction of the IRA and force the Irish Army to cross the border.
Lynch made preparations with Irish guns to stop a possible genocide. But Blaney wanted to use foreign guns to
precipitate a crisis that could lead to genocide — which he insanely hoped would lead to not Irish unity.
Far from being the smoking gun that Heney is seeking, the army directive is a damp squib. In proof of this, let me cite the bi-partisan Dail Committee on Public Accounts 1970 into what happened to the huge sums of money voted for Northern distress in 1969 — much of which Captain Kelly had funnelled into the defence committees and ultimately to what became the Provisional IRA.
At the Dail inquiry, Garret FitzGerald forced Colonel Michael Hefferon, head of military intelligence, to admit the Army directive of February 6 was entirely hypothetical, and was subject to a further government decision to implement it before sending troops across the border.
Contrary to another of Heney’s claims, that the directive sanctioned the import of guns, when Colonel Hefferon was asked if the directive gave authority for the importation of arms, he said, correctly, “no, it didn’t”. (p363)
How on earth can Heney believe that procuring arms for nationalists in Northern Ireland was what the Lynch cabinet actually intended in 1969 when it first give Haughey the power to disburse the distress money?
Furthermore, if such adventurism was official government policy, why were so many of the financial records destroyed? And why did Haughey’s brother Jock, who was heavily involved in the conspiracy, refuse to give evidence before the Public Accounts Committee in 1971?
In sum: if, as Heney claims, Haughey’s attempt to import arms was legal because it was on foot of a government decision — why did he handle the distress funds so furtively? Why could Captain Kelly
explain later to the Dail Committee of Public Accounts where some of the money went?
Let us now take a closer look at Captain Kelly. Heney heroises him as an Irish Army officer who was wronged for doing his duty. But Kelly’s actions in 1969-70, as well as his subsequent political allegiances, argue he was as much a hawk as his mentor Neil Blaney.
Kelly’s hawkish politics are confirmed by his political allegiances after the Arms Trial. First he joined Kevin Boland’s Aontacht Eireann (Irish Unity). Then he joined Fianna Fail — saying he had to wait until Haughey took over. He then left Fianna Fail after arguing against the extradition of a republican.
But Heney’s book, like his 2001 film, takes Captain Kelly’s defence of his actions at face value. “His account of how the gun-running project originated is the earliest on record and remained substantially unchallenged.” (p36)
Let me rebut that. If the Army directive meant Haughey’s actions were official policy — as Heney claims — why did Captain Kelly report to Niall Blaney, minister for agriculture, rather than the relevant minister for defence, Jim Gibbons?
Clearly Kelly did so because he knew Blaney was a hawk and Gibbons was a dove, a gentle man both politically and personally. Indeed, Kelly later admitted that his first contact with the defence minister, Jim Gibbons, was not until March 1970 — several months after he began disbursing money to Northern republicans.
Heney also admits that Kelly actually intended to resign from the Army from March 1970 so he could go to work
for the defence committees in Belfast to help them get weaponry. (p141)
Back in 1970, Captain Kelly came across to most political journalists as a man with a mission, ready to break regulations. To take one example: he admitted banking IRA money into official Department of Finance bank accounts at the direction of unnamed Northerners.
All the evidence suggests that Colonel Hefferon, the head of military intelligence, lost control of Captain Kelly, who was off the reservation and on a personal adventurist project. Why else were the Special Branch watching him secretly for months before the Arms Crisis blew up?
Back in 1970, Cathal Goulding, who got some money from Captain Kelly — which he spent on propaganda, not guns — told me Kelly was a true believer, in thrall to what Goulding sardonically called “Blaney’s Fusiliers”.
This brings me to Heney’s benign view of Blaney, by far the most extreme of the ministerial duo. Blaney’s attempts to split the IRA and favour the faction which became the Provisionals, was underlined by his inflammatory Letterkenny speech of December 1969, challenging Jack Lynch’s peaceful policy.
Heney tries to put a good gloss on Blaney’s war-mongering speech. To do so, he has to dance on the head of a pin: “Blaney at Letterkenny did not actually advocate force to end partition. He stressed the
right to use force, including for the ending of partition…” (p70)
Here Heney herniates himself on the fine distinction between saying ‘we should end partition by force now’, and ‘we have the right to end partition by force at a time of our choosing’. Both claims are so clearly predicated on the idea that violence is acceptable in principle that his hair splitting comes across as special pleading.
Heney should also have told us that when Blaney said “no one has the right to assert that force is irrevocably out”, he was attacking the peace positions of the leaders of the three main parties in the Dail?
In 1969, soon after the Troubles broke out, Jack Lynch said his government had no intention of invading Northern Ireland; Liam Cosgrave said unity could only be achieved peacefully; and Brendan Corish for Labour said simply “force is out”.
In conclusion, let me return to the fatal flaw at the core of Heney’s book — his belief that Haughey had been given such wide discretion by the government and the Dail on spending the distress money, that this also covered the import of arms.
But his tortuous argument that Haughey was acting legally when he tried to bring arms through Dublin Airport in April 1970, can’t get around the following fundamental fact.
Because if Haughey’s attempt to import arms through Dublin Airport was government policy, why was a civil servant — Peter Berry, secretary of the Department of Justice — able to tell Charles Haughey to get stuffed by informing him that any arms arriving at Dublin Airport would be seized?
Heney asks us to believe that Berry, a civil servant, could negate both a government decision to send weapons across the border, and a Dail decision to give Haughey the money to buy them! That’s some ask.
A final footnote. Michael Heney should have made better use of RTE’s archive, which includes a recording of Later
on2 presented by Frank Dunlop and Fergus Finlay.
I clearly recall one show featured Garret FitzGerald confronting Captain Kelly — who was visibly shaken when the former Taoiseach reminded him he had seen the intelligence reports of the Bailieborough meeting.
FitzGerald defended Lynch on the same programme. This was significant for two reasons. First, FitzGerald had been on the all-party Dail committee on the arms issue. Second, FitzGerald had no love for Fianna Fail: if he had a case against Lynch he would have used it.
There is no doubt that Jack Lynch dithered and delayed because he felt too weak to take on three powerful ministers. But when he finally acted, he did so decisively. In doing so, he saved us from ethnic conflict that could have engulfed the whole island. Michael Heney should have given him credit for that.