THE LATE president Patrick Hillery proposed that Army commando units be sent across the Border into Northern Ireland in the event of a doomsday situation.
He made his proposal at the time of the Arms Crisis in 1970 but was denounced as being too moderate by minister for defence James Gibbons, according to a new authorised biography by Trinity College academic John Walsh.
Dr Hillery, who was minister for external affairs at the time, proposed that the Army “be ready to implement a commando-type of exercise to save people in the Border areas while the British army were dealing with the rest”.
According to Patrick Hillery: A Life, published this week by New Island, his proposal led to a “semi-hysterical” debate at Cabinet and Gibbons declared: “You are accepting the Border.”
Hillery was opposed to supplying weapons to the nationalist minority in the North and was unaware at the time of any suggestion that government colleagues were engaged in such activities. He only discovered there was “a government within the government” when told by taoiseach Jack Lynch on April 30th, 1970, that senior ministers were involved in attempted gunrunning.
In recollections quoted in the book, Lynch is described as “very agitated”. He told Hillery the only minister he could trust was Erskine Childers, “and he is too naive to be any good to me”.
Hillery, who was on a visit to London, was asleep in the early hours of May 6th when two senior diplomats told him Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney had been sacked from the cabinet.
Word had come, not from the Taoiseach’s office, but from “a very supercilious individual” in the British embassy in Dublin who phoned Hillery’s private secretary.
Returning to Dublin he found that “the members of the government were gathered like the Apostles waiting for the Holy Ghost”.
The book also names Mr Haughey as the most likely source of persistent rumours in 1979 that Hillery, who had by now become president, had “entertained a mistress” at Áras an Uachtaráin. He called a press conference and issued a statement declaring the rumours were without foundation.
