WHY HAUGHEY?
The IRD deemed Haughey a ‘potential problem’ for at least three reasons. Firstly, there were his suspected links to the Provisional IRA. Secondly, his threat to Jack Lynch’s leadership of Fianna Fáil. At the time, Lynch was in London’s good books as he was co-operating with the joint application by the UK and Ireland to join the EEC.
Thirdly, there was a fear that if Harold Wilson returned to power and Haughey was taoiseach, they would hammer out a deal to reunify the country. That did not appeal to the right-wing hardline unionists at the castle.
Wilson, as leader of the British opposition, had met Jack Lynch in Dublin in November 1971. According to Wilson’s press secretary, Joe Haines: At lunch with Mr Lynch, Harold Wilson aired some of the propositions he was later in the month to include in a fifteen-point plan for solving the problem of Northern Ireland:
Ireland to rejoin the Commonwealth (a nonsense from which I was unable to budge him in an argument which the night before had gone on until nearly 3 a.m. in the hotel) and Irish unity, fifteen years after agreement upon it … The fascinating moment at the Taoiseach’s lunch came when Harold Wilson put forward the plan for turning the dream of unity into reality. I had thought they would jump for joy. But their reaction was more akin to falling through the floor.
Haughey, however, was deemed far more likely to embrace Wilson’s vision. On 4 October 1969, Haughey had informed Ambassador Gilchrist that there was nothing he would not sacrifice to achieve a United Ireland, including Ireland rejoining the Commonwealth. Gilchrist had advised the FCO of this and stressed that, ‘Mr Haughey’s passion for Irish unity [was] greater than that of Jack Lynch and Patrick Hillery’.
All of this put Haughey firmly in the IRD’s crosshairs.
‘When it came to Mr. Haughey, the tactic was a constant drip of negative information. The idea was that people would eventually conclude that some of the dirt had to be true. This type of lowlevel offensive was seen as more likely to be effective than a focus on one major revelation. The
IRD collected all sorts of trivia about Mr. Haughey from everywhere. They tried to stick it to him. The Dublin embassy was feeding the IRD with material on him too which wound its way to the North.’ During the Arms Crisis, Haughey had been hospitalised after a horse-riding accident. Wallace recalls that in 1972 the IRD studied rumours that Haughey had been hit over the head with a hurling stick ‘by the husband of a woman’ with whom he was allegedly having an affair. Wallace says the hurling stick rumour was ‘deployed later as part of a plan to draw public attention to Haughey’s alleged “lack of morality”’.
Another story doing the rounds was that Haughey had been involved in a ‘punch-up with Eamonn Andrews over an insult given to the latter’s wife’, something that ‘made good beer talk in the bars and lounges of Dublin’.
Andrews was the host of the immensely popular This Is Your Life show.