Book lifts shutters on the 1970 Arms Crisis

Sir — If I were a teacher assessing Eoghan Harris’s review of my book (The Arms Crisis of 1970 — The Plot That Never Was), I would advise the student to pay more attention in class.

His piece is a loosely phrased polemic, while the book he derides is a work of careful scholarship, the product ultimately of years of full-time academic research. Readers need to check its new data for themselves, as Harris, unfortunately, is a poor guide. He misrepresents the February 6 directive. He misrepresents the government’s decision to allocate money as aid to Northern nationalists, given with no strings attached. He misrepresents Haughey’s fateful phone call to Peter Berry. He misrepresents Neil Blaney. His slandering of James Kelly is something I thought we had outgrown. He has no understanding of the courageous Michael Hefferon. And above all, he virtually ignores James Gibbons, the minister for defence.

Although my book has much shocking new data on Lynch, including his serial deceptions, it is actually mainly about Gibbons and his duplicity. If your critic has actually read the damning chapter entitled ‘Gibbons’s Deceits’, he disguises it well. And why does he ignore the arms trials? The book has ground-breaking evidence suggesting these should never have been, while showing that Gibbons was improperly protected from prosecution by Lynch’s attorney-general.

Here are several fundamentals from the book that Harris fails to acknowledge.

On the gun-running project: it was not originated by either Haughey or Blaney; strictly speaking, it was only indirectly an Irish government project. The February 6, 1970 directive did not directly authorise an arms importation, but it stated clearly that the government had an ‘‘agreed’’ policy of providing arms to Northerners. These were not for any ‘‘insane invasion’’, as Harris asserts, but to protect nationalist ‘‘kith and kin’’, in extremis.

Haughey’s fateful phone call to Peter Berry was not the act of a guilty man, since it lacked what lawyers call a mens rea. The idea that Haughey would ring such a senior public servant, whom he knew well, to facilitate a supposedly illegal plot to arm the IRA, is a joke. All of this, and much more, Harris ignores or distorts.

For 50 years people have not been told the truth about 196970. My book lifts the shutters, which is why it is a bestseller; sadly, Eoghan Harris would prefer the blinds to be locked down and bolted.

Michael Heney,

Author of The Arms Crisis of 1970 — The Plot That Never Was