Continuity, Change and Crisis in Contemporary Ireland

Brian Girvin, Gary Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138971769
• eBook ISBN: 9781317966135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The focus of this book is to analyse from a number of perspectives the politics of change in Ireland north and south since 1969. The emergence of the troubles in Northern Ireland, the final push to gain entry to the EEC, changing social mores and severe economic difficulties all begin to appear on the horizon at this stage. While considerable change and, indeed, moments of extreme crisis, have taken place in areas such as Northern Ireland, the economy, moral politics, and Ireland's attitude towards the European Union, continuity has also been a significant hallmark of Irish politics since 1969.

This volume offers important perspectives and opens up new debates in explaining the phenomena of continuity, change and crisis in contemporary Ireland. New evidence on the origins of the troubles in Northern Ireland, the Arms Crisis, Ireland's relationship with Europe, the process of social partnership, and the politics of morality all offer important fresh insights into how contemporary Ireland has functioned. Featuring a number of high profile scholars and uniquely dealing with both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, this volume argues that the intriguing feature of recent Irish history is not the absence of change but the extent to which change has been mediated by the existing political cultures, national traditions and long-standing institutions of both north and south.

This book was based on a special issue of Irish Political Studies.

‘A Greek Authoritarian Phase’? The Irish Army and the Irish Crisis, 1969–70

EUNAN O’HALPIN
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Introduction

In May 1970 Sir Andrew Gilchrist, recently retired as British ambassador to Ireland, passed on a document to the head of the Foreign Office. It spoke of the possibility, following the momentous developments in Irish politics of May 1970 generally known as the ‘Arms Crisis’, that Ireland might be facing a fate similar to that experienced in Greece since 1967; that is the replacement of civilian democratic government by the military.¹ In 1944–45 Gilchrist had served in the irregular warfare agency SOE (Special Operations Executive), organising guerrilla forces to fight the Japanese in Thailand, and his penultimate foreign posting was as ambassador to Indonesia during a period of great instability, during which his hosts were involved in an undeclared border war with British forces in Borneo, and culminating in a bloody coup in 1965. He had also been a keen observer both of the republican movement and of the Irish left during his time in Dublin.² By temperament he was cheerful and not inclined to panic, and at times his flippancy grated on the nerves of more ponderous colleagues in the Foreign Office. Sir Denis Greenhill, permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office (and a man experienced in intelligence matters who had refused the headship of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) two years earlier), was not very impressed: ‘you only need one ambassador in a small country like Ireland’. (Gilchrist was oblivious to the reception which his material received, and in retirement he continued to poke his oar into Irish matters whenever he got the chance.)³

Was Greenhill’s scepticism justified? This article discusses the military and security capacities and intentions of the Irish state in relation to the emerging Northern Ireland crisis in 1969 and 1970. Drawing on British and Irish official records, it also explores British assessments of the military intentions and capabilities of the Irish state. The evidence is overwhelming that there were no Irish plans, capacity or aspirations for aggressive operations within Northern Ireland in 1969 or 1970. It also argues that there was no prospect whatsoever of an Irish military coup followed by ‘a Greek authoritarian phase’ in the aftermath of the Arms Crisis. As the Greek example showed, military coups require organisation, well placed individuals controlling key units and functions, disloyalty, means, and above all a leader and senior conspirators: all of these were in very short supply in Ireland in 1970.

The Arms Crisis saw the arrest, trial and acquittal of one army intelligence officer Captain James Kelly, one northern IRA man John Kelly, the recently dismissed minister for finance Charles Haughey, the recently dismissed minister for agriculture Neil Blaney and Albert Luykx, a Belgian businessman long resident in Ireland, on charges of the illegal importation of weapons for use by nationalists in Northern Ireland. The ineffectual minister for justice Michéal O Moráin was also forced to resign. For a time it seemed as though Taoiseach Jack Lynch might be toppled by dissenters within Fianna Fáil angered at his timorous handling of the Northern Ireland issue. Kevin Boland, a senior figure in the party, resigned as minister for local government in protest and, after failing to engineer a grassroots revolt against Lynch, left Fianna Fáil to found his own political party, Aóntacht Éireann (O’Brien, 2002: 52). Ronan Fanning has termed the crisis a ‘cataclysm’ for Irish politics and for Anglo-Irish relations; the outcome of the trial which followed also rendered analysis of events in Ireland in 1969–70, and what was and what was not Irish government policy in a highly charged and confusing period, particularly problematic for scholars (Fanning, 2001: 85). This is especially so because one of those acquitted, the late Captain Kelly, became a successful serial litigant (Kelly, 1971, 1999; O’Brien, 2002).

Captain Kelly, a junior intelligence officer, had been in Derry ostensibly on holiday on 12 August 1969 when serious rioting broke out during the Apprentice Boys parade, resulting in the three-day ‘Battle of the Bogside’ between nationalists and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). In the months that followed, Captain Kelly developed contact with various republicans and nationalists inside Northern Ireland. Apart from his commanding officer, the director of intelligence, a man close to retirement, no one in the army knew the extent of Captain Kelly’s activities. This contrasts with the work of other army and Garda officers detailed to collect information about conditions and generally to take the temperature in Northern Ireland. One of them observed that this was because, irrespective of their personal political views, they had simply followed orders and reported through the normal chain of command.⁴ Captain Kelly was given remarkable leeway and his main reporting relationships were to ministers Blaney and Haughey. As well as distributing money – whether for relief purposes or for arms – he made arrangements, some of which fell through because of surprising ignorance about the formalities of weapons shipments, for the purchase and secret importation of arms from Europe. Captain Kelly was not acting alone; rather, the issue is to what extent the ministers from whom this inept staff officer took his orders acted with the authority and knowledge of the government as a whole. On this there is clear evidence that they did not, although Captain Kelly may well have believed that they did. The arms importation scheme went against the entire thrust of government policy as articulated by the Taoiseach and as represented by the minister for external affairs. It came to light through Garda intelligence which revealed contacts between Captain Kelly and the IRA in October 1969, in which Kelly was reported to be offering money for the purchase of weapons to be used in Northern Ireland. In essence Captain Kelly appeared to be egging the IRA and northern nationalists into preparing for armed action not simply to defend their communities against pogroms of the kind visited on nationalist areas in Belfast in September 1969, but to break British rule in Ireland (Arnold, 2001: 149; O’Brien, 2002). The activities in 1969–70 of this would-be Lawrence of Arabia, and the related question of whether the army posed a threat to either Irish state, must be viewed and assessed in terms of the historic role and overall condition of the Irish defence forces.

Was there ever an Irish Military Threat to Northern Ireland or to Civilian Rule in Independent Ireland?

Unlike many European states where democratic political development after the First World War was inhibited, in Sebastian Balfour’s phrase, by an ‘interventionist … military elite’, once the 1924 mutiny was peacefully overcome the Irish army, or what remained of it, steered clear of politics (Balfour, 2005: 3). An attempt by the former chief of staff turned head of the Garda Siochána Eóin O’Duffy to organise a coup, should Fianna Fail win power in 1932, probably represented the last attempt to bring the army back into politics. We should also note what appear to be the pro-German intrigues of General Hugo MacNeill in 1940–41, information on which became known to London in 1943 (O’Halpin, 2008a: 217–218).⁵ The emergence of a professional, apolitical army which stayed in barracks unless ordered was a considerable, perhaps underrated element in the infrastructure of Irish democracy (Kissane, 2002: 25). This was despite the persistence within the army of political favouritism as a determinant in senior promotions; it was also despite the partition of the island of Ireland, and the consequent political isolation of a significant minority nationalist population under a suspicious Unionist administration in Northern Ireland.

The state’s minimalist approach to defence has always been predicated on three factors: financial considerations; fear that an over-powerful army might turn its guns northwards for want of anyone else to fight, or might seek to involve itself in politics again as it had in 1924; and public antipathy towards any form of compulsory military service under any circumstances. This contrasts with the new states which emerged from the collapse of the old order in Europe after the First World War, and the Scandinavian neutrals and Switzerland, all of which had compulsory military service for male citizens and, consequently, functioning systems of reserves and publics broadly aware of military realities. The highly respected General Dan McKenna, chief of staff during the Emergency (the Second World War period, 1939–45), argued that without compulsory service it would be impossible to develop and maintain armed forces capable of fulfilling their external defence mandate (cited in O’Halpin, 1999: 285; for divergent scholarship see Girvin, 2006; O’Halpin, 2008a; Wills, 2007).

Since 1922, the possibility that the new Irish state would seek to use force to end partition had occasionally cropped up in Whitehall. This was understandable in the first years after partition, since the early months of 1922 had seen efforts by Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy to coordinate Irish military operations along the border with IRA activities inside Northern Ireland. The main aim of this abortive scheme was, however, not military conquest but the application of pressure on the Northern Irish authorities to provide greater security from sectarian attack for the nationalist minority, particularly in Belfast. Collins and Mulcahy, conscious of the emerging treaty split within the separatist movement which was shortly to culminate in civil war, also hoped to retain some control of the Northern IRA. For some years thereafter the British army in Northern Ireland maintained a small intelligence service which spied on the new Irish state, focusing on Irish military intentions. The Irish army mutiny of March 1924 caused some unease in Belfast, because the mutineers couched their protests partly in terms of the unfinished national business of reclaiming Northern Ireland, but that crisis soon passed. The Belfast-based intelligence service was disbanded early in 1926, soon after the hurried Anglo-Irish agreement of December 1925 which confirmed the existing Irish border (O’Halpin, 2008a: 134–135).

The years following the mutiny saw the progressive emaciation of the new Irish defence forces, and by 1939 there were just 7,000 men under arms, spread across a large number of barracks and posts handed over by the British in 1922 and with virtually no modern equipment. Reserves existed almost entirely on paper. The creation of the part-time Volunteer Force in 1933 did see an initial upsurge of popular interest, but this force was established as much to reduce the flow of recruits to the IRA as to provide a coherent reserve for the army; it was starved of weapons and equipment, and its military value was almost nil.

Amongst the first generation of professional officers there was, however, one small clique which believed that Irish unity could be achieved by force. In the mid-1930s these debated means by which a successful unification campaign might be mounted. This folly prompted Major (later Colonel) Dan Bryan to write a powerful analysis of ‘Fundamental factors affecting Irish defence’. This stressed Irish military weakness, the strategic significance to Britain of Ireland’s position in the Atlantic, the fact of the British military presence in Northern Ireland and in the treaty ports, and the likelihood that foreign powers would attempt to use Ireland as a base from which to mount intelligence and other operations inimical to British interests, most likely in conjunction with the republican movement. Bryan’s paper became the basis of a memorandum circulated to ministers in 1936, the only considered analysis of Irish defence policy and capabilities to reach the cabinet for many years (O’Halpin, 1999: 136).

The Irish army was hurriedly expanded during the Emergency, only to be reduced almost to nothing as soon as the geopolitical crisis had passed. This probably came as a minor relief in London, where apprehension about the possibility of Irish military action to end partition had had a half-life since 1922. In 1944 two senior intelligence officials, Guy Liddell of the security service MI5 and Jane Archer of SIS, agreed that it would be folly now for Britain to supply field guns and other arms to the Irish. The threat of German invasion had completely disappeared, and ‘we felt that there was a risk that at some future date things might boil up again in Ireland’. Liddell wrote that after the war, such weapons ‘would … probably … be used against us in a battle between north and south’.⁶

These officers had exceptionally detailed knowledge of Irish affairs and considerable understanding of Irish neutrality, so their judgement cannot be dismissed simply as alarmist. Their fears seemed well grounded in 1948, when de Valera’s Fianna Fáil party was ousted from office by a coalition of five parties which had in common only a determination to bring an end to 16 years of unbroken rule by de Valera. Liddell was concerned by the presence of Seán MacBride, the former IRA chief and wartime confidante of the German representative in Dublin, as minister for external affairs in the new John A. Costello-led government. MacBride famously demanded to be shown a list of British agents in his department, and attempted without success to elicit information from the army about British forces in Northern Ireland. He also later claimed to have been the target of a British assassination plot shortly after his appointment (O’Halpin, 1999: 291; MacBride, 1987: 94). MacBride was, nevertheless, in a stridently pro-Western phase. Although he virtually single-handedly ensured that Ireland refused to join the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he explained this decision solely in terms of partition. He made considerable efforts to find an alternative means of enhancing Irish security from external aggression and specifically from the perils of communism, suggesting to a British diplomat in 1948 that while Ireland ‘would undertake no military commitments if she came into the United Nations, she would do so’ if ‘she’ joined the mooted Council of Europe. Two years later MacBride secretly proposed a mutual defence pact to the United States (O’Halpin, 1999: 261–262; Kennedy & O’Halpin, 2000: 31). Such pro-Western sentiments, and particularly Irish pursuit of a defence relationship with America, provided London with reassurance, if any were needed, that the Irish were not planning a march north.

Nevertheless the unexpected Irish decision to declare a republic and to leave the Commonwealth, dramatically announced by Costello during a visit to Ottawa in October 1948, rang some alarm bells although the Taoiseach assured...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abstracts
• Continuity, Change and Crisis in Ireland: An Introduction and Discussion
• 1 ‘A Greek Authoritarian Phase’? The Irish Army and the Irish Crisis, 1969–70
• 2 The British State and the Rise of the IRA, 1969–71: The View from the Conway Hotel
• 3 Mobilisation, State Crisis and Counter-Mobilisation: Ulster Unionist Politics and the Outbreak of the Troubles
• 4 ‘Is it a New Allowance?’ Irish Entry to the EEC and Popular Opinion
• 5 Contraception, Moral Panic and Social Change in Ireland, 1969–79
• 6 Fianna Fáil, the Trade Union Movement and the Politics of Macroeconomic Crises, 1970–82
• 7 The Politics of Economic Adjustment in a Liberal Market Economy: The Social Compensation Hypothesis Revisited
• 8 Managing Change: Party Competition in the New Ireland
• 9 Continuity, Change and Crisis in Ireland: An Afterword
• Index