DISILLUSIONED
DECADES
Ireland
1966–87
GILL & MACMILLAN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Preface
Chapter 1: The Past Twenty Years
Chapter 2: Politics, 1969–79
Clientelism
Southern Parties
Northern Parties
North and South
The Arms Trial
The IRA
Fianna Fail Revives
Chapter 3: Politics, 1979–87
Fianna Fail in Turmoil
Charles Haughey
Haughey in Power
The ‘Heaves’
The Presidency
Chapter 4: Partners in Coalition
Fine Gael
FitzGerald as Leader
The Labour Party
Uneasy Partners
The Fate of the North
Chapter 5: The Church and the People
Holding the Line
Morality Plays
In the Classroom
Third World Radicals
A Nun’s Story
Modern Pastors
Chapter 6: The Church and State
The Contraceptive Question
Referendum on Abortion
Pluralist Vision
Divorce Rejected
Chapter 7: Blinkered Industry
Workers Unite
Inept Enterprise
In the Air, On the Air
Private Sector
Agriculture
Forestry
Fisheries
Natural Gas
Oil
Mining
Chapter 8: Down on the Farm
New Money, Old Ways
The Poor Mouth
The TB Scandal
On a London Bus
Chapter 9: Foreign Affairs
Neutrality
Keeping the Peace
American Emotions
Establishment Friends
A House Divided
Chapter 10: Artistic Voices
Abbey Theatre
National Gallery of Ireland
National Concert Hall
Concerned Writers
Rock, Trad and Film
Chapter 11: Crucible
Discrimination
The Faces of Unionism
‘Our Country Also’
Constitutional Nationalism
The SDLP
A Revolutionary in the Making
Chapter 12: The North in Flames
Eruption
The Provos Emerge
From the Maze to Chelsea
Chapter 13: Alternative Battlefield
Special Category
On the Blanket
Feakle and After
Hunger Strike
A New Sinn Fein
Civil Rights Now
Legal Injustice
If it were Hong Kong?
Statistical Appendix
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Author
About Gill & Macmillan
Preface
MY book Ireland Since the Rising, published in 1966, was the first attempt to chart the progress of the country during its first turbulent fifty years of statehood. I concluded with the following:
‘It is already clear that Ireland’s future involves a closer relationship with Britain and with Europe. In the past, Ireland’s greatest problem was that she lay too close to England for comfort or independence, yet was too far away for England completely to assimilate her. Today, however, she is near enough for friendship.
‘Fifty years after the Rising, mindful of what the men of 1916 died for, Ireland is striving to make herself a country which the men of today and their children will be proud to live in: a land, not of revolution, but of evolution. Bail o Dhia ar an obair — God bless the work!’
Today, with Ireland a world trouble spot and her identity picked out in the subconscious of television viewers and newspaper readers by such words as ‘hunger strikes’, ‘IRA’, ‘Paisley’, ‘murder’, those words of mine would appear to many to be quaintly inappropriate. Yet my vision was not entirely flawed. A good deal of what I foresaw did come true, but overall much else went sadly wrong.
Firstly, of course, on the world scale was that villain beloved of economists, ‘the oil shock’, and its terrible spouse ‘recession’. These worked their evil alchemy in Ireland as elsewhere. But in Ireland they intertwined with specifically Irish phenomena which exacerbated the situation beyond anyone’s anticipation. To give but one example, at the time of writing, there are more people unemployed (240,000) than work in manufacturing industry or as farmers. Forty per cent of the Irish population depends to some extent on social welfare.
The truth is that contemporary Irish society is an outcrop of two forms of colonialism. One, which can be seen quite obviously working its bloody way through Northern Ireland, is British colonialism. At the time of writing the death toll of over 2,400 is the equivalent in American population terms of 350,000 dead, a colossal impact on a small country. The other, less obvious but all-pervasive nevertheless, is the colonialism of religion: to a degree that of the Protestant churches, especially in the North, but more potently that of the Roman Catholic Church.
These influences had an impact on all that has happened in Ireland since I laid down my pen in the closing weeks of 1965. Now, as I resume in 1987, let us examine how native and international forces combined to produce the Ireland of today.
TPC
Dublin, 31 July 1987
1
The Past Twenty Years
IN the mid-1960s nobody in Ireland looked much beneath the surface. Sean Lemass retired in 1966, having succeeded the aging Eamon de Valera in 1959 as Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fail. His time as head of government had covered seven of the most productive years in Irish political history. He introduced new men, fresh ideas — and hope. A belief took hold, however briefly, that things could get better, not worse.
The brash young ‘men in the mohair suits’, as I christened them at the time, caught the mood of the country exactly. The single element most lacking in Ireland throughout the fifties had been confidence. The new men of Fianna Fail had an oversupply of this commodity. Nobody questioned their corner-cutting and wheeler-dealing too much because, along with the changes which they were effecting — or seemed to be effecting — in the political sphere, vast external changes were coming to bear in Ireland. The Second Vatican Council was in many people’s eyes literally a God-send, and the charismatic personality of Pope John XXIII had a great influence in Ireland. Along with Pope John came the liberalising effect of television, the paperback revolution and the amelioration of the disgraceful censorship which had banned every decent living writer, particularly Irish writers, so that prior to the mid-sixties the lists of banned books were in fact an excellent guide to contemporary literature.
The country began to look more prosperous as hire purchase sent TVs, washing machines, electric cookers and new additions of all sorts winging their way into many Irish homes. The educational system was radically overhauled so that ‘free’ education (barring payment for books, uniforms, etc.) was brought within the reach of all. As a consequence opportunities multiplied also, including political opportunities.
In the sixties and early seventies, upward, outward and onward seemed to be the direction in which the wagon was rolling. This impression was greatly heightened by the impact of two notable print journalists, Douglas Gageby and John Healy, and one outstanding broadcaster, Gay Byrne.
Byrne’s contribution to Irish society is nearly immeasurable. His long-running weekly TV programme, the ‘Late, Late Show’, has, since the early sixties, enabled widespread discussion to take place on topics which, without his courage and professionalism, would otherwise have been swept under the carpet. He continues the process with a daily hour and three-quarters radio programme, a routine that would kill a lesser man.
Douglas Gageby, Editor of The Irish Times, opened the columns of that once rather staid and unionist-oriented journal to all the new influences playing about the country at the time, with the result that readership soared and one writer in particular came into his own. This was John Healy who, under the pseudonym of ‘Backbencher’, established a new genre of Irish political journalism. His mixture of gossip and purple prose, interspersed with his own authentic vision and leaks from some of the new men of Fianna Fail who realised how useful he could be, meant that his column became an opinion forum. It could not be ignored by the decision-taking ‘New Irelanders’ springing up in the wake of Lemass’s initiative.
Inside the party the old faithful, including sometimes Lemass himself, might rage at ‘government by leak’ but outside the influence of Healy and his sources increased. Lemass concentrated more and more on trying to build up industry and on doing the groundwork for EEC entry which in the sixties, prior to General de Gaulle’s ‘Non’, seemed an imminent possibility. Even after the EEC door was temporarily closed the main thrust of Irish governmental policy was to prepare the country for eventual entry, which occurred in January 1973. This left various ministers to build up habits of independence which ultimately nearly wrecked Fianna Fail. Ministerial autonomy began to be emulated further down the line by powerful bureaucrats in the civil service and state company network, with sometimes disastrous results. Easy-going attitudes, combined with lax political over-seeing in areas where state supervision was supposed to ensure that semi-autonomous schemes and enterprises funded by the taxpayer would work for the public good, resulted in some awful waste (See Chapter 7).
The principal financial architects of contemporary Ireland were two former civil servants in the Department of Finance, Patrick Lynch and T. K. Whitaker, whose joint influence on Irish budgetary and governmental strategy for almost two decades, starting in the 1950s, was enormous. Whitaker, with Lynch’s help, took the country into an expansionary turn with the First Programme for Economic Development, which was formally adopted as government policy in 1958. In his public and private life Whitaker personifies the more attractive side of the Irish Catholic ethos. A keen golfer and family man, this scholarship boy, educated by the Christian Brothers, obtained a Masters’ Degree in Economics from London University for which he had to study in his spare time. He speaks several languages and has served as secretary of the Department of Finance, governor of the Central Bank, chancellor of the National University and chairman or director of several boards and conferences.
When Whitaker speaks out against financial policy he therefore carries, or should carry, something of the weight of the Pope criticising the state of Roman Catholicism. And speak out he has done very trenchantly, both in his role as a senator and elsewhere. The pith of his criticism is contained in a collection of his writings, Interests, published by the Institute of Public Administration in 1983.
Whitaker comments: ‘The tendency for “getting and spending” by government to bulk ever larger in national activity has been common to many western countries over this sixty-year span but nowhere, I believe, to a more marked degree than in Ireland’. He cites the statistics here to prove his point. This table tells a horrific story of drift and fecklessness. It illustrates how the defects in Irish political philosophy mounted up in national terms — the bottom line of vote-buying, Irish style.
The 1972 budget set a trend that was to be maintained throughout the decade. Although output costs were a prime source of both unemployment and weak export performance, the Fianna Fail government flinched from restraint and went instead for a growth-based solution relying on a rising tide that would allegedly lift all boats. Taxation was not increased but social welfare payments were. Events were to prove that the only flow that would ensue was that from the opening of the flood gates of inflation. The 1970 national pay agreement had conceded a rise of 17.9 per cent for an average male worker; the 1972 agreement gave 21 per cent over eighteen months, with 29.4 per cent following in 1974 and 16.5 per cent in 1975. This, combined with the effect of the rise in agricultural prices which followed EEC entry, and the oil shock, had the annual rate of inflation at 21 per cent by 1975.
Government Expenditure and Borrowing
A coalition government of Labour and Fine Gael, which had come to power in 1973, were slow to recognise danger. Indeed they initially exacerbated it with a period of inactivity which government insiders say was largely due to preoccupation with the Sunningdale negotiations and their sequel. (See Chapter 2). Then, faced with a yawning deficit in the current account, the policy of drift was replaced by one of borrowing as the government again flinched from either cutting expenditure or raising taxes. In 1974 people simply were neither disposed nor conditioned to believe that the huge energy cost increases signified a permanent change in expectations and, with the taste of recently acquired prosperity in the mouth, the nation embarked on a ‘spend now, pay later’ policy. Though the next two years saw more moderate pay settlements and industrial production went up by 10 per cent in 1976, the nation fell with whoops of joy on a positively immoral give-away election manifesto from Fianna Fail in 1977.
Once in power again, Fianna Fail introduced tax cuts and public expenditure rose — although, as the figures for industrial production indicate, the country was pulling away so strongly from the oil shock that it did not require any budgetary stimulation. Public borrowing went up to 13 per cent of GNP and both the politicians and the people allowed feet to float so far from the ground that in June 1978 a White Paper was issued, and accepted without arousing either noticeable scepticism or derision, which envisaged full, repeat full, employment (100 per cent) in the eighties. In fact, the eighties were to see 18 per cent unemployment — which would be over 30 per cent were it not for forced emigration — and a climate of opinion well illustrated by one managing director who said to me, as I was researching this book: ‘You know, with the taxes, the unions, the economy, everything, I’ve gone through a complete change. I used to be proud that I employed four hundred, five hundred men and looked forward to the day when I’d employ seven hundred, a thousand maybe. Now my whole idea is how many can I get rid of. Redundancy’s the name of the game’.
That is a typical Irish manager’s attitude today. The idea of employment creation in the public sector is as dead as Sean Lemass himself.
Why did no one shout stop? The fact is that the general appearance of the country gave every indication that government policy was correct, and that the new decision-takers knew what they were doing. Between the years 1962 and 1982 Irish industrial growth was, on average, the best in the European Community. The IDA (Industrial Development Authority), which had been set up as far back as 1955 with a view to attracting foreign investment to Ireland, was highly successful in achieving this aim in the euphoric sixties. There was a general move away from protectionism, and the dismantling of barriers to free trade. But appearances were deceptive.
The international business consultancy firm, Telesis, was commissioned by the government in 1982 to examine Irish industrial promotion. The team which visited Ireland appeared to have absorbed the Irish spirit of blarney, the art of managing to convey bad news as though it were good. Telesis praised the IDA as ‘the most dynamic, most active, most efficient and most effective organisation of its kind in the world’, but went on to lambast wide areas of IDA policy. The report found that too much was being offered to attract foreign firms, and not enough to boost native exporters. Allowing for business vicissitudes such as job losses and closures, the report found that of jobs approved in government-sanctioned projects during 1972–8, only 20 per cent were actually in place at the end of the period. One would have thought that the country’s political watchdogs would have monitored this state of affairs but, as Telesis rightly pointed out, governmental controls on such matters existed in name only.
The ‘job approvals’ routine, for instance, says something about the largely cosmetic nature of much Irish governmental activity. It is common for a minister to attend a sod-cutting ceremony at which much publicity is generated by talk of ‘jobs approved now’ and ‘it is hoped that the project will ultimately provide’ so many jobs. Telesis drily commented that while Irish industrial policy ‘aimed to create jobs’, ‘it expends too much energy on creating job approvals’. In a thunderous burst of stating the obvious, Telesis pointed out: ‘The two are not synonymous’. No indeed. But in the increasingly PR-led world of Irish public life, where image was all and the symbol of progress was the glossy Annual Report (dominated by pictures of the Chairman, the whole produced in glorious technicolour by an ad agency, and usually unwrapped at a liquid press lunch designed to entertain rather than to inform) it was very often made to appear that jobs and approvals were one and the same.
Another rarely discussed but more serious criticism of the IDA’s activities, or rather of the political watchdogs’ failure to regulate them properly, is that so much of what the IDA has achieved falls as a direct burden on the taxpayer, whose pockets are lightened to provide the wherewithal to create Brigadoon-like ‘job approvals’ but who reaps little benefit from the profits. These are repatriated to whatever country or flag of convenience the parent companies operate under. One billion pounds Irish left the country in 1984 this way. This, of course, is also a question mark over the much vaunted ‘growth in exports’. Should the expatriation of the fruits of so much Irish initiative, work, resources and services out of the country be considered as ‘exports’ or as ‘haemorrhage’? The ‘Black Hole’ has now grown so deep, partly as a result of mounting taxation, that almost £1½ billion, not only in profits but also in smuggled savings and purchases in Northern Ireland, flowed outward in 1986. And it was January 1987 before the IDA announced that it was tightening up its grant package so as to relate payment to performance.
In the sixties, scarcely a day passed without the news of yet another American factory coming to Ireland, and by the time the seventies drew to a close it was not unusual to hear people referring to the Irish ‘silicon valley’, so much were we all led to believe that we were exporting high technology. There was to be a rude awakening. In fact, under the surface gloss, employment did not rise at all between 1972 and 1982. Instead, the crash of bankruptcies grew ever louder in the land. A new class of gombeen-man arose. Belonging to the best clubs and holidaying abroad at least twice a year, these new plunderers included bankers, accountants and stockbrokers who performed prodigies of liquidation, accumulating paper profits as one old family company after another went to the wall.
Hostility grew between management and labour, accentuated by the growth of the class who talked managerial newspeak to each other — ‘function’, ‘added value’, ‘take on the unions’ — corresponding to the other side’s, ‘if those bastards want to fight, we’ll give it to them’, ‘ah sure ‘twill do,’ ‘the job’ll last longer than the money’. Smokestack industries crumbled, agribusiness lay unexploited. As recession spread, many of the multi-nationals clipped off the toenails of their worldwide enterprises, their Irish subsidiaries. The clipping could, and often did, account for hundreds of jobs on the ground in Ireland.
Because of Roman Catholic teaching on birth control, the numbers of young people grew well beyond the European average as a proportion of the whole population. Demographers say that it will level off sometime after the year 2,000 but concede that the numbers in the 15–29 age-group will continue to grow at least to the mid-1990s. These young people face a clash of cultures: ‘Dallas’ on the television, father on the dole. Jobs are hard to come by and some people question whether the school and third level training systems do anything more than fit the youngsters for a world of employment which does not exist.
As the so-called ‘good’ businessman in these years was very evidently the one who could get the most from all concerned, from worker, customer, government, whomsoever, and give the least in return so as to maximise the profits, the ‘good’ trade unionist in turn became the one who could give the least and get the most in return for his services. The more favoured device for this was the grossly misnamed ‘productivity agreements’, whereby incentive schemes — again a laughable misnomer — were introduced widely throughout Irish industry in the seventies. The object was to increase the output in return for more money. The result in fact was to make the average job slower and dearer. In the public service, even the most dedicated trade unionist would admit privately that manning levels were some 30 per cent over what was required, and industrialists would claim that the figure could be over 50 per cent.
By 1986 the total National Debt was estimated at £21,000m. or 120 per cent of GNP. Of this debt, 47 per cent was in foreign borrowings (Sunday Press 17.8.86).
Extraordinary changes occurred in Irish population and employment trends between 1966 and the time of writing. The population went up steadily by almost 25 per cent to 3,535,000; the numbers employed in agriculture fell by half, whereas those employed in the public sector increased by nearly 100 per cent. Overall unemployment went up nearly five hundred per cent and emigration reared its ugly head again, probably as many as 100,000 leaving the country in 1986. So many left as tourists, particularly for the USA, that it is hard to put an exact figure on this recurring scourge. Readers with a taste for statistics can peruse the tables from which these figures were extracted later. (See here). I simply wish to underline the special problems posed for a well-intentioned, kindly but rather disorganised, small, agriculturally-based society faced with high transportation costs, the need to import raw materials and at the same time trying to cope with the effects of the micro-chip on numbers employed on the factory floor, and of Catholic teaching on birth control on numbers created in the bedrooms. Furthermore, one should bear in mind Noises Off: the threat posed by the Northern situation, falling agricultural prospects and rising oil prices. All combined to force people into cities, heightening the problems of both unemployment and urbanisation (Dublin has a heroin problem equivalent to New York’s in percentage terms) while worsening both the ratio of producers to dependants, and the lot of the tax-payer.
2
Politics, 1969–79
Clientelism; Southern Parties; Northern Parties; North and South; The Arms Trial; The IRA; Fianna Fail Revives
THE distinguishing characteristics of Irish political life are better examined in rural Ireland, particularly west of the Shannon, that great river that bisects Ireland between east and west.
Clientelism
West of the Shannon the land is generally poor. In places like Connemara, Donegal, Leitrim or Roscommon, against a historical backdrop of rack-renting poverty, a TD (Teachta Dala, a deputy or member of parliament) is expected to provide his constituents with a variety of services which have no place in classical political theory.
‘Blue Cards’ which ensure free medical treatment (often for people well above the income level entitling them to such benefit), the dole, home improvement grants and farm subsidies of all sorts (even if they are not remotely merited) feature strongly in the concerns of a rural member of the Irish parliament.
Apart from such rarified matters as securing a contract for the more wealthy constituents, services such as having summonses quashed for after-hours drinking, or putting subsidised ‘red diesel’ tractor fuel in private cars, or poaching or trespass or assault or tax evasion, are considered the proper duties of a country TD.
This attitude permeates all sections of the administration, from the most junior garda (policeman), who each week watches Sean or Pat ‘sign on’ at the police station to qualify for unemployment benefit in the full knowledge that both Sean and Pat are in fact working, to the most senior minister in Dublin. In fact, a minister is expected not to show higher standards in such’ matters, but rather, because of his greater power, a higher return in ‘perks’ for those who have voted for him.
Another side effect of the political culture is the undue politicisation surrounding some police force appointments. One of the scandals which helped to discredit the Haughey administration of 1979–81 surrounded an attempt to transfer Garda Sergeant Tully in County Roscommon. It was widely believed that the transfer of this efficient and conscientious policeman stemmed from precisely those causes — he had frequently proved himself honourably immune to the blandishments of ‘red diesel culture’.
Fianna Fail in particular has had a two-fold reason for keeping rural culture flourishing. As the party most committed — under de Valera, at all events — to keeping the Irish language and culture alive, the west of Ireland, the poorest and most Gaelic part of the country, was a logical philosophical target for assistance, being the perceived reservoir of traditional Irish and Catholic culture. Also, to stay in power Fianna Fail required the rural vote generally, and the western vote in particular. Actually, today the main thrust of language revival is to be found in the cities; concerned parents have come together to found Gael Scoileanna schools wherein children are taught through Irish. These schools have an excellent reputation and their numbers are growing each year, but the number of people who actually use Irish as a first language in day-to-day communication is diminishing. Only about 30,000 to 50,000 people throughout the Gaeltacht areas now use Irish as their principal means of communication.
The classic exponent of rural clientelist culture is the ex-policeman and former Minister for Justice, Sean Doherty, who resigned from Fianna Fail for his role in the illegal bugging of journalists’ telephones in February 1983, was re-admitted in December the following year and proved himself in successive general elections to be the most popular politician in his west of the Shannon Roscommon constituency.1 Interviewed on the RTE programme ‘This Week’ on suggestions that he had interfered with the work of gardai, Mr Doherty gave the following widely quoted replies:
‘I have not at any time stated that I would deny making representations on behalf of my constituents to the gardai or, indeed, to any public service body. It is my duty as a Dail deputy to communicate the views of my constituents to any particular area that I am requested to do so. I have done that in the past and I will do it in the future and I make no apologies for doing it.
‘The fact that I became Minister for Justice or Minister of State as I was in the past, doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to be silent when it comes to my constituents. If that were the situation they would have themselves with a Minister for Justice and lose themselves a TD. I am primarily a TD where my constituents are concerned — at a greater level I am Minister for Justice in the context of the national interest’.
He agreed that he had made phone calls to individual gardai at garda stations: ‘I have communicated to the gardai as I have to many other public service bodies on many occasions insofar as the views of my constituents need to be expressed to them. I make no apology for having done that and I will do it again’.
‘When I represent my constituents it’s at the bottom and that’s in my constituency and I represent them as Sean Doherty, Dail deputy.’
However, the rural vote is the one most susceptible to corrosion by emigration. Hence, as an American political scientist2 has observed: ‘Fianna Fail’s response was to lengthen and retard the demise of this traditional political sector. The expansion of Ireland’s social welfare programme under Fianna Fail has included a number of direct and indirect subsidies to the poorer countrymen, aimed at keeping them on the land’.
This inculcates a cavalier attitude to spending the taxpayers’ money, and it tends to make the party responsive to the wishes of the conservative rural periphery on moral questions like divorce and contraception. In an era of universal education policy problems can easily arise for the party, since an attitude that goes down well in Connemara can cost votes in suburbia, and vice versa. During the abortion referendum Roscommon, the constituency of the redoubtable Sean Doherty, voted 83.79 per cent for the pro-life amendment of the constitution, 16.21 per cent against. In the urban east, Dun Laoghaire went 57.97 per cent against to only 42.03 per cent for — half the Roscommon poll.
An experienced deputy who has succeeded in getting taxpayers’ money spent on building tarmacadamed drive-ways around constituents’ houses to curry favour at election time,3 and who has also succeeded in getting the county council to build a house for an unmarried mother, is far more likely to be criticised for ‘encouraging them’ over the latter initiative than over the former, which is perceived as nothing more than an ingenious exercise by patronage at government expense. The farming community by and large does not pay income tax and the black economy flourishes amid Ireland’s ‘forty shades of green’. Hence the fierce loyalty to Fianna Fail one encounters in places like Connemara, where it so often made survival possible by meeting unorthodox expectations.
Southern Parties
A distinguishing factor of Irish political parties is the fact that most in some way originated as a form of reaction to the British presence on the island. They either came out of the physical force tradition or had to make contact with that tradition as part of their normal function.
In the Republic both Fianna Fail, the largest party in the country, and Fine Gael are the outcome of the bitter family row that was the Irish civil war. This sprang up within the original Sinn Fein party over the Treaty terms that ended the Anglo-Irish war and established the independent Irish state.
The Labour Party stands partially free from, partially enmeshed in, the physical force tradition because James Connolly, who co-founded the party with James Larkin, was subsequently executed for the part he and his Citizen Army (formed from the ranks of Labour) played in the 1916 Rising. Throughout most of the century the conditions for socialism were unfavourable. As a result of the flood tide of nationalism which Connolly helped to unleash, the Labour Party did not contest the 1918 election in which Sinn Fein rose to power; neither did it figure in the war which followed. Subsequent Labour leaders in the Larkinite tradition were never able to bring Labour to power except as the junior partner in coalition, given the infrastructures and power bases set up by the revolution which Connolly helped to put in train.
Ironically, as firstly increasing urbanisation and stronger trade unionism and then increasing alienation brought on by recession and unemployment produced conditions more favourable to the left, it was the party which had most recently put down the gun and departed the physical force tradition that appeared poised to take over from Labour. The Workers’ Party was an off-shoot of that wing of the IRA which, since the ending of the 1956–62 border campaign, had been edging towards constitutional socialism — although some members have shown no overwhelming doctrinal attitude against the occasional funding by bank robbery, particularly in Northern Ireland. The IRA, both left and right, hold strongly to that not insubstantial body of Irish opinion which believes in a theory of banking based on withdrawals rather than deposits.
Initially known as Sinn Fein, the Workers’ Party, this party had its origins in the IRA split of January 1970. The section that wished to pursue the left-wing course espoused by Roy Johnston and his supporters within the movement, such as Tomas MacGiolla, Cathal Goulding and Sean Garland, regarded itself as the Official IRA. Its political wing was accordingly considered to be Official Sinn Fein.
Johnston was an unusual figure to find in IRA circles. A computer scientist at Trinity College, Dublin, who was also a Marxist, he had gained such an ascendancy over the then IRA leadership that he was appointed as a kind of educational commissar with the title of ‘Education Officer’. Under his tutelage the movement had become involved in strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations over riparian rights and had been virtually demilitarised. When Protestant mobs invaded the traditional IRA strongholds of Belfast, there were no IRA ‘defenders’ to withstand them and the letters IRA appeared on gable walls in the Falls district in the form ‘Irish Ran Away’. But even after this reverse the Johnstonites voted a few months later, in December 1969, to contest elections and enter parliament if elected, thereby ending the traditional policy of abstention. This decision gave a final impetus to the recreation of a full, traditional, physical force republican movement. The Provisional Caretaker Executive of Sinn Fein was the title adopted by those who left the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in the Intercontinental Hotel at Ballsbridge in protest against the policy of the ‘Officials’. They went instead to the Kevin Barry Memorial Hall (called after an executed hero of the Anglo-Irish War) to enroll in the new movement.
The Officials’ teething period was not confined to Provisionals-versus-Officials dissension. It also had to contend with considerable public apathy at the 1973 general election; ten candidates offered themselves, none was elected and only one saved his deposit. However, the Officials must have preferred apathy to what happened next. Following a further split within the Official wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party was set up in December 1974, having attracted Bernadette Devlin, now Bernadette McAliskey, to its banner. Following some bloody encounters between former Officials and an unsuccessful attempt on his life, the IRSP leader, Seamus Costello, was shot dead in October 1977 and the IRSP went into decline. Bernadette McAliskey was among those who left the party.
In January 1977 the Officials added the ‘Workers’ Party’ description to their title, although in the election that year the voters showed little interest. Lost deposits were again the order of the day. In 1981, however, Joe Sherlock of Cork East was elected and was joined in the Dail in February 1982 by two more Workers’ Party TDs, Patrick Gallagher and Proinsias de Rossa. The party in fact held the balance of power between the coalition and Fianna Fail, for whom it voted, thus bringing down the coalition. It was repaid in votes, though not seats, in the November 1982 elections, where it lost Sherlock but returned the party’s President Tomas MacGiolla, along with de Rossa, gaining an almost 50 per cent increase in its Dublin vote.
At the time of writing, the Workers’ Party is the Irish version of Eurocommunism. The most powerful figure in the party is the General Secretary, not its parliamentarians whose Dail salaries go to the party. The party in turn pays them an allowance based on the going rate for an industrial worker. The party’s newspaper has a circulation of some forty thousand copies. It runs social clubs and a printing press and its publishing company Repsol owns the franchise for the distribution of Soviet Union publications in Ireland. At a Soviet Embassy social function I noticed that the Workers’ Party guests were the most fêted by embassy staff.
The party is much more tightly controlled than its main rival on the left, the Labour Party, and its Central Executive Council holds sway over the organisation both north and south of the border (prior to the Ard Fheis of 1982 the Workers’ Party in the North was known as The Workers’ Party Republican Clubs). Members are thoroughly screened before being admitted and have to have attended new member classes, understand party policy and give a ‘commitment to work for it’ before joining. Anyone with a good income is expected to contribute to the party. The CEC runs advice centres and maintains a very high profile for such a relatively small party both in the constituencies and in the Dail. Its deputies, particularly de Rossa, have been amongst the most active in Leinster House.
The party does not like to be reminded of its IRA days.
Northern Parties
In Northern Ireland itself both major unionist groupings, the Official Unionist Party and the Democratic Unionist Party led by the Reverend Ian Paisley, owe their existence to their commitment in varying degrees of stridency to maintaining the British link, by force if necessary. Privately both parties express their disgust at Britain’s lack of resolution in maintaining her side of the alliance, i.e. getting on top of the IRA.
The moderate Alliance Party, caught not alone in the vortex of unionism but of republicanism also, finds that the only meeting at the middle of the road which exists in Northern Ireland between the forces of nationalism and unionism is that which occurs when members of either side cross over to avoid sniper fire of the political or other sort.
The moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party was founded to work for reform within the system, not principally for a United Ireland. It grew out of the civil rights movement which sprang up in the late sixties to counteract the injustices towards Catholics which the unionists had been allowed to get away with by Britain ever since the state came into existence in the early twenties. Currently, even though it has benefited from the Hillsborough Agreement, it finds itself as much under threat from Sinn Fein as Labour comes under threat in the Republic from the Workers’ Party. This is because British governments consistently bow to unionist pressure not to concede nationalist demands, and support a system of ‘justice’ that sees nothing wrong in relying on ‘Supergrasses’. Increasingly, after the hunger strike of 1981, much nationalist opinion hardened to the belief that Britain responds only to force. Despite Hillsborough, the same belief exists in moderate political circles in the Republic also: not a cheerful prospect but one which, borne in mind, will help illuminate the more detailed examination of the Irish political parties.
North and South
The years 1966 to 1970 marked the end of the period since the, foundation of the two states, north and south of the border, in which the politics of the one could be generally considered independently of the other. During the Jubilee of the 1916 Rising in 1966 nobody paid much attention to the fact that a young Catholic barman had been murdered in Belfast and that an organisation called the Ulster Volunteer Force was apparently responsible for the killing. But the death of John Scullion would be remembered afterwards as the starting point in a recrudescence of the Ulster Protestant opposition to Catholic nationalism.
In the south, the leitmotif of 1966 was of ageing 1916 warriors — Eamon de Valera, Sean MacEntee and others — being repeatedly photographed outside the GPO in Dublin where the rebellion had begun. This set the tone for a veritable orgy of commemorative tableaux all over the Republic and among nationalists in Northern Ireland. At the end of that fairly prosperous year, when Lemass retired, Fianna Fail chose Jack Lynch to succeed him as a compromise between the main rivals for the leadership, George Colley and Charles Haughey, Lemass’ son-in-law. No one at the time had the slightest inkling of the forces which this rivalry would unleash long afterwards.
People talked about the rising tide of farmer protests or, in the typically Irish preoccupation with international affairs, avidly discussed the Vietnam War and the conflict between liberals and conservatives which had broken out in the Roman Catholic Church as a result of Pope John’s Vatican Council. One was either exhilarated or bored witless by the incessant discussions encountered throughout the country, and particularly in the ‘intellectual’ circles of Dublin, amongst people who had excitedly discovered Vatican II via authors like ‘Xavier Rynne’, Michael Novak and Malachi Martin, or who had read theologians such as Rahner or Schillebeeckx. People mentioned ‘John Charles’, the ultramontane Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin, as frequently as Washingtonians would refer to President Reagan in our day. He was seen in those far-off days of ecumenical innocence as a far greater obstacle to progress than any other figure then existing north or south of the border.
Less than two years after Lemass left office an event of profound significance occurred, which showed the virulence of the Northern issue on Irish television screens for the first time and should have alerted the country to what was to come. This was the batoning of civil rights protesters on the streets of Derry by the Royal Ulster Constabulary on 5 October 1968. While this event enormously heightened an awareness of Northern Ireland in the south, attention was being more concentrated on the new men whom Lemass had brought forward and on the changes they were making. Lemass urged his top civil servants and state company heads to take on extra staff — viewing their operations as a means to increase employment. What was one era’s ‘job-creation’ would be another’s ‘over-manning’.
The new ideas gripping the country found expression not alone in the established political power base of Fianna Fail, and to a lesser degree in its main rival Fine Gael, but also on the left, where a post-war generation of university-educated socialists began to dream of moving the country in their own direction via the Labour Party. Labour attracted a number of TV personalities whom the new medium propelled from the living rooms to the hustings, and these drew with them personalities from journalism and universities who would not normally have trodden a leftward path.
As this broadly familiar west European development was taking place, in Northern Ireland the colonial past suddenly placed its grisly fingers around the throat of Kathleen Ni Houlihan and squeezed hard. Serious violence erupted in 1969. The civil rights movement, led by young educated Catholics who had benefited from the British wartime Education Acts, had been so much publicised by the media that after the 1968 batonings many wishful thinkers in Dublin thought that the movement on its own would be able to bring about major change in Northern Ireland. In the event Protestant extremists — of whom the principal public figure was, and still is, the Reverend Ian Paisley — demonstrated against the Civil Rights Association (CRA) marchers, using the utterly misleading slogan ‘CRA = IRA’. The result was that by August 1969 a position of such intensity was reached that British troops were forced on to the streets to quell rioting in Derry and Belfast.
The ‘new men’ of Fianna Fail constituted a major problem for Jack Lynch when he took over leadership of the party and the country in 1966. These colourful, corner-cutting characters may have ‘pulled strokes’, to use their own terminology (Donogh O’Malley said openly of political patronage, ‘Of course we look after our own’), but they did change things for the better. O’Malley transformed the Irish educational system. Charles Haughey was one of the most effective and innovative ministers in the history of the Irish state in portfolios as challenging and diverse as Justice, Agriculture and Finance.
Neil Blaney, a bruiser at home in a smoke-filled backroom, looked after his own in his native Donegal where even today, as an independent, his machine is still a byword for effectiveness. Nationally he was a superb party organiser. Brian Lenihan, roly-poly and flippant in a way that belied his ability, also got things done, revolutionising the censorship laws, for instance, and bringing some badly needed improvements to the fishing industry. The doctor from Clare, Patrick Hillery, was quieter and less freewheeling, but he set in train the educational reforms which O’Malley saw through. George Colley, a former schoolmate of Haughey’s, represented the style of the older wing of Fianna Fail. He was Haughey’s principal rival when Lemass stepped down and was to speak openly about changes in Fianna Fail which brought about ‘low standards in high places’. Though clearly his heart was in the right place, his tongue sometimes was not. When the tide of feminism first began lapping around Ireland’s political shores he dismissed the claims of the Women’s Movement as being nothing more than the preoccupation of ‘well-heeled, articulate women’, creating an uproar.
Lynch took over a party in which the new Fianna Fail and the old-style party were moulded together like one of those Chinese dishes in which pieces of duck and prawn are covered in glaze. When the Northern Ireland troubles finally erupted uncontrollably less than three years after he assumed the leadership, the glaze of expediency melted in the fires of burning nationalist homes in Belfast, combined with a high degree of personal rivalry and ambition in the party, and fish and flesh began to come apart.
On the one hand, the Republic joined the EEC. Cattle prices rose. Trade union activity fattened pay packets, businessmen prospered and the sixties’ euphoria persisted. The major controversy of those years centred around the disclosure that the O’Malley philosophy of mutual support had been institutionalised into a body known as Taca (Gift), made up of a group of businessmen committed to giving money to Fianna Fail. Much criticism burst around Jack Lynch’s head as a result, but it was as the gentle rain from heaven compared to what occurred when Fianna Fail republicanism began to sizzle in the Northern heat.
The Pavlovian reaction of the extremist Protestants of Northern Ireland to the civil rights marches and the perceived ‘gains’ of the nationalists was such that rioting and pogroms which broke out in Belfast and Derry seemed to be of a scale and intensity which made civil war throughout the whole island inevitable. In the nation generally there was a whiff of grapeshot in the air. Refugees were pouring south. Television and the newspapers were filled with graphic accounts of burnings and shootings.
Under pressure from the hawks in the Cabinet, notably Blaney and Kevin Boland, on 13 August 1969, Lynch went on radio and TV to make a ringing declaration that: ‘the Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured’. During the broadcast he asked for a UN peace keeping force to be sent in, called on the British to stop the ‘police attacks on the people of Derry’ and announced that units of the Irish Army were being moved to the border to provide ‘field hospitals’ for people who did not wish to be treated in Northern Ireland institutions.
However, the doves ultimately won out and Lynch was able to pull back (relievedly) from his TV position. The hawks flew on. In the north the ‘field hospitals’ were regarded as the harbingers of an invasion and the tension rose even higher. Two days later the British Minister of State at the Foreign Office told Dr Hillery that the UN request was not on and Hillery unsuccessfully appealed in person to the UN on 19 August. Because of the Lynch/Hillery initiative (largely cosmetic, given the fact that Britain, which claimed that the matter was a domestic affair, has a right of veto in the Security Council) or because of the actual rioting, or the spectacle of Bernadette Devlin on TV breaking up bricks to throw at the Derry police, the British Army was sent into Belfast and Derry and the troubles temporarily subsided.
The Arms Trial
August 1969 was indeed a wicked month in Ireland, particularly in the North, where amongst Catholics in the traditional ghetto districts the political reality was the fear of assassination. Because of these fears messages went out north, south, east and west seeking weapons for defence. Very respectable people from all walks in Northern Ireland, particularly in Belfast, banded themselves together in defence committees and came south looking for weapons from the government of the day. As one of these emissaries, John Kelly, said later4, these were not courtesy calls: ‘I want to be very emphatic here, that we were coming from all parts of the Six Counties not to indulge in tea parties, not to be entertained, but to elicit in so far as we could what was the opinion of the government in relation to the Six Counties . . . We did not ask for blankets or feeding bottles. We asked for guns and no one from Taoiseach Lynch down refused that request or told us that this was contrary to government policy . . .’
The point about that statement is that he made it in the dock, after a number of prominent figures, including Charles Haughey had been charged (ultimately unsuccessfully, as it proved) with gun-running. Kelly afterwards got six months in the Special Criminal Court for IRA membership.