NORTHERN IRELAND: Crisis of Confidence: Anglo-Irish Relations in the Early Troubles 1966 - 1974,by Anthony Craig Irish Academic Press 214pp £24.95
DON’T BE PUT off by the academic trappings and pedestrian title: this is a fascinating book for anyone seeking to probe more deeply into the reasons why the Northern crisis erupted. How did we go from the idealism of student marchers singing We Shall Overcome to the horrors of Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday and all the other atrocities that followed?
Northern Ireland was established in 1921, but by the early 1960s the British home office had only one official dealing with its affairs. Even this was on a part-time basis, as the same official was responsible for other weighty matters such as British Standard Time, dog licences and London taxis.
Despite all the rhetoric about a united Ireland, Dublin also paid little attention to the North until Taoiseach Seán Lemass’s groundbreaking visit to his Belfast counterpart, Capt Terence O’Neill, at Stormont on January 14th, 1965. Although Jack Lynch had further meetings with O’Neill, the author claims he “had far less interest in Belfast than did his predecessor”.
In his first despatch in 1967, the new British ambassador Sir Andrew Gilchrist wrote of his impression that “the Queen’s representative is a very welcome guest in this country”. The two states were making parallel attempts to join the European Economic Community, as it was then known, and Dublin supplied the British with confidential minutes of discussions it had with the European Commission, as well as notes of meetings with European prime ministers in 1966-7.
This friendly atmosphere began to deteriorate after the inept and misguided police attack on civil-rights demonstrators in Derry on October 5th, 1968. Harold Wilson met Lynch later that month, and the taoiseach told a press conference afterwards that the prime minister had identified partition as the “root cause” of the problem.
The British regarded this as a breach of confidence, and relations were damaged at a critical time. No doubt Lynch was seeking to protect himself against any suggestion he had gone soft on traditional republican aims.
The story is well known of how Lynch was initially bypassed in the machinations surrounding the Arms Crisis but eventually asserted his authority by sacking his overzealous ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney. But Haughey had a deeper agenda: the author quotes a report by Ambassador Gilchrist of an October 1969 meeting at Kinsealy, Haughey’s home in north Co Dublin, with the then minister for finance, organised by the writer and former British intelligence officer Constantine Fitzgibbon. Haughey hinted at a secret deal between, essentially, himself and London, for a federal united Ireland that would be part of the Commonwealth and where Britain or Nato could have military bases if required. Gilchrist protested that secrecy could not be maintained: “Haughey was puzzled by this but felt there might be a way round.”
The introduction of internment in August 1971 was a disaster, not least because of its one-sided application, and the author records that the much-criticised British home secretary Reginald Maudling felt members of the majority community in the North should also be picked up, only to be informed, presumably with a straight face, by the security forces that there was no evidence of organised loyalist terrorism – despite the fact that the Ulster Volunteer Force, in its modern incarnation, had been active since 1966.
This led to the even greater disaster of Bloody Sunday, in January 1972, and the deaths of 14 civilians at the hands of the British army.
Writing ahead of the Saville Report, the author, a young academic from Derry, strongly rejects the contention that either Edward Heath, the British prime minister, or Brian Faulkner, the Stormont premier, “planned to make an example out of the Derry march”. He suggests instead that it was “the inevitable culmination of giving ever more control over security in Northern Ireland to the British Army”.
Direct rule from London followed two months later, and although Faulkner wrote afterwards that he was “shaken and horrified” we are told that Lynch was well informed in advance, “from a still-unidentified source inside the British Government”. It is intriguing to note that the flow of intelligence across the Irish Sea was not all one-way traffic.
There are other nuggets of information, such as the revelations that Heath “laughed his head off” with admiration when Lynch sacked the RTÉ Authority over Kevin O’Kelly’s interview with the IRA leader Seán Mac Stiofáin and that Lynch boasted to the British ambassador in 1972 of how he had “shunted” the troublesome chief justice Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh off to the European Court of Justice. But we also get a wider perspective on various episodes in the British-Irish relationship, including the Wyman-Crinnion affair, when the British inadvertently exposed the identities of two of its agents in Ireland; the lead-in to the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement of December 1973; the question of possible Irish military intervention in the event of a Doomsday situation; and Harold Wilson’s outline plans for a British withdrawal, which caused grave disquiet in Dublin.
There is much else to ponder in this important work, which was completed at Hertford College, Oxford, on a scholarship from the Irish Government. The author is not slow to pronounce judgment on events, and his opinions may be disputed by those who actually lived through them, but he has done his homework very thoroughly, and this book deserves a place on the shelves of anyone who is seriously interested in the past, present and future of this island.
Deaglán de Bréadún is an Irish TimesPolitical Correspondent and author of The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, published by the Collins Press
