Introduction.

Charles Haughey of Fianna Fáil and Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael took very different approaches when dealing with Britain’s covert intelligence services and the more questionable diplomats assigned to the Dublin embassy. While FitzGerald was happy to dance with Her Majesty’s emissaries and spooks, Haughey recoiled.

This contrast was never more apparent than when Austin Currie informed Haughey that Brian Lenihan intended to attend the British-Irish Association (BIA). Haughey responded strongly, denouncing the BIA as ‘a front for MI5’.

FitzGerald, by contrast, was a founding member of the BIA.

Haughey and FitzGerald developed two differing styles to deal with Britain. Haughey played hardball while Fitzgerald tried to ingratiate himself with London.

The Phoenix magazine dubbed FitzGerald ‘Sir Garret’ for these preferences. At the same time, Haughey became known as ‘Squire Hockey’, a dig at the British establishment’s inability to pronounce his name correctly and Haughey’s embrace of the high life.

The pair also differed in how they dealt with the press. While Haughey was the first minister known to have retained a public relations firm, he soon tired of appeasing the media and chose a confrontational approach instead. FitzGerald deployed all his charm and was hugely successful in getting them to eat from the palm of his hand.

In or about 1986, The Irish Times received a verbal alert from one of its staff members that Fitzgerald, who was then serving as Taoiseach, was dining with a known member of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), an illegal paramilitary organisation, at FitzGerald’s home. A photographer could have been dispatched to record the event as it was still taking place.

The reporter was told by his line editor, ‘We do not want to know‘.

Nothing appeared in the paper. The reporter who provided the alert told me,

‘If it had been Charles Haughey [with the INLA man], the story would have appeared on the front page the next day‘.

Senior Garda figures and officials at the Department of Justice knew about FitzGerald’s behaviour during the Dunne kidnapping, as did others. However, not a word of the scandal reached the pages of a newspaper, or if it did, it was spiked.

Charles Haughey’s father was also a key operative in the plot. He smuggled guns into the North pursuant to Collins’ operation.

1. Teacher’s pet.

An early example of FitzGerald’s penchant for ingratiation can be found in a short article he wrote for a book called ‘Must Try Harder’, where he recounted how:

‘When I was in my second year at school I decided to show my appreciation of our Irish teacher, Tadhg Ó Murchú, whom I and the rest of the class felt to be a good teacher and a very warm personality.’

FitzGerald decided to prepare some toffee for him. ‘Unfortunately, I nearly always under-cooked the toffee, which ended up in more or less liquid form.’ He put it in a small tin with clear instructions to open it the right side up.

All went well at first:

‘He received the toffee with great pleasure, but when I came into class the next day I found he was less pleased. He had failed to read my instructions (perhaps because they were written in English!) and had opened the tin the wrong side up, with the result that the contents had emptied themselves on to his carpet!

It is hard to imagine that this was how Haughey operated at school. As a child and young teenager, he earned a reputation among his peers as a ‘tough nut’ who was well able to take care of himself. This toughness carved him out as a successful GAA footballer (although not as successful as his brother Jock, who won an All-Ireland medal for Dublin).

FitzGerald carried this obsequious approach into his dealings with Whitehall and Britain’s shadowy intelligence community. The tactic paid off: while MI6 and the Information Research Department (IRD) spent decades vilifying Haughey, they never attacked FitzGerald. (Details of Haughey’s battles with MI6 are contained in my book, ‘An Enemy of the Crown’.)

2. The sons of revolutionaries

What both men had in common was that they were born into revolutionary families with strong personal connections to Michael Collins.

Garret FitzGerald was the son of Mable McConville and Desmond FitzGerald, himself the son of Irish immigrants who were resident in London.

Desmond, an aspiring poet, moved to Ireland and became a supporter of Sinn Féin. Garret’s mother was the daughter of an upper-class Belfast Presbyterian freemason. FitzGerald described him in his first autobiography, ‘All in a Life’, as,

‘a high-ranking Freemason and the representative in the UK of the Grand Lodge of Alabama’.

The Freemason was outraged when he heard Mabel was involved with Desmond and recalled her to Belfast. But she returned to Dublin, where they eventually married.

The couple had four sons. Garret, the youngest, was born in 1926. Both Mabel and Desmond took part in the 1916 Rising and were in the GPO to hear Pearse read the Proclamation. Afterwards, Desmond was arrested and taken to Britain, chained to Eamon de Valera.

3. Desmond FitzGerald sought POW Status.

De Valera and Desmond FitzGerald spent the next few years behind bars in Brixton, Dartmoor and Lewes prisons, along with 122 other IRA men. De Valera was the prison O/C. In May 1917, while in Lewes, they refused to perform prison work or associate with ‘ordinary’ prisoners. They demanded POW status. Some went on a hunger strike.  Eventually, the British Government gave in and released them.

Garret FitzGerald is among those who have distorted these facts. During the 1980 H-Block hunger strike, which he opposed, he claimed that neither his father nor his comrades had ever sought political or elitist status.

4. Minister for External Affairs.

Desmond FitzGerald became William T. Cosgrave’s Minister for External Affairs in the first Free State Government.

Garret was therefore brought up in a political home. When the late H. Montgomery Hyde, author, former Unionist MP, and long-time member of the British Secret Service, visited the FitzGeralds in Dublin, he met the young Garret and predicted that he would one day rise to lead his father’s party.

Garret also felt his future would be significant and kept his papers for posterity from the age of six.

5. Seán and Sarah Haughey.

Charles Haughey’s parents, Seán and Sarah (nee McWilliams), were born and reared almost next door to one another on small farms in the adjacent townlands of Knockaneil and Stranagone, near Swatragh, a few miles from Maghera town in Derry.

Haughey Senior, who was born in 1897, joined the Irish Volunteers in 1917. He rose to become the Second in Command, and later Officer in Command, of the South Derry Battalion of the Irish Volunteers during the War of Independence. At the start of the conflict, he carried out raids on the homes of Loyalists and several retired British army officers.

His military file marked him out as one of the most energetic IRA members in South Derry. In one attack on 5 June 1921, a Royal Irish Constabulary sergeant called Michael Burke was killed while others were seriously wounded in a late-night ambush of the barracks at Swatragh.

As a result of his activities, Seán Haughey had to go on the run. According to his superior, Major Dan McKenna, he would have been killed had he been caught:

‘His enemies were of the opinion, and indeed not without reason, that he was the cause of all their woes in his area.’

Sarah, who was born in 1901, also played an active role in the campaign as a volunteer with Cumann na mBan. She remained a member until 1923.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on 21 December 1921 and ratified the following January. Yet hostilities persisted in the North.

The UVF began to regroup under Lieutenant-Colonel F. H. Crawford.

Thirty-one people were killed in Belfast between 12 and 16 February 1922.

On 19 March 1922, 200 IRA men surrounded the town of Maghera, County Derry, cutting off the telephones before seizing the Royal Irish Constabulary barracks from which they removed 17 rifles, 5,000 rounds of ammunition and a sergeant as a hostage. The IRA campaign continued the next day with the destruction of mills, sawmills, stables and outhouses in County Derry. Burntollet Bridge (which would become infamous in 1968) was blown up.

On 30 March, Michael Collins, representing the Provisional Government in Dublin, and Sir James Craig, signed an agreement. Collins wanted to neutralise the security forces in the North as a threat to the Catholics. In return for a cessation of IRA activity, it was agreed that Catholics could and should join the Special Constabulary and assume responsibility for policing nationalist areas. In mixed regions, an equal force of Catholic and Protestant officers would be deployed. Meanwhile, all searches would be conducted by mixed units with British soldiers in attendance. The Specials were to wear uniforms with identification numbers and surrender their arms once they had finished their duties so that they could be kept in barracks.

On 31 March, Royal assent was given to the Free State Bill, which became the Free State’s new constitution.

The ceasefire Collins and Craig negotiated proved a failure. On 2 April 500 Specials swooped across County Derry and Tyrone, scooping up 300 men for questioning, but only four were found to be in the IRA. The rest escaped to County Donegal.

By now, the IRA was on the verge of a split into pro- and anti-treaty factions. The 8,500 volunteers who lived in the new state in the North were virtually all anti-treaty. Michael Collins was prepared to supply them with arms for a number of reasons, one of which was that it offered him a possible way to unify the IRA, something that was a priority for him.

6. Séan Haughey played a key role in Michael Collins’ most sensitive and secret cross-border operation after the ceasefire

Seán Haughey became involved in what was perhaps the most sensitive and secret covert operation Michael Collins ever mounted: to provide Catholics living across the new border with weapons to defend themselves from the forces of the new state.

Hundreds of Catholics (and many Protestants) were killed during sectarian riots that had erupted in July 1920. Between 1920 and 1922,  267 Catholics perished,  while 2,000 more would be wounded; another 30,000 people were evicted from their homes and driven from their jobs, especially at Belfast’s shipyards. Collins arranged for guns, at least some of which were supplied by the IRA in Cork, to be smuggled across the Border. Collins was keen not to use any of the weapons he had obtained from the British which could easily be traced back to forces under his control.

One ploy was to trade some of the British-supplied guns with the anti-Treaty IRA for weapons acquired during the War of Independence and send the latter to the North.

Another IRA man, Thomas Kelly, collected a consignment of 200 Lee-Enfield rifles and ammunition from Eoin O’Duffy. In an affidavit, Kelly swore many years later, he revealed that the

The attempts by Collins to procure arms involved General Richard Mulcahy, Minister for Defence in the pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaelheal government.

‘Early last year, during the pogrom in the North and when our men in the Northern divisions were making every effort to deal with the situation, the demand for arms increased and every weapon we could lay our hands on was sent to one of our Northern divisions. Arms were taken from Southern units and sent up North and later we supplied them with some arms from the regular army. The position became very difficult and, after many meetings with our Northern officers, it was decided that we would procure a quantity of arms under cover to be sent in to the six counties.

8. The role played by Frank FitzGerald, arms dealer.

Frank FitzGerald was the brother of Desmond FitzGerald, who had become Minister of External Affairs in the Dublin Government. Mulcahy also revealed that

‘I went into the matter of procuring a quantity of revolvers and rifles with Mr Frank FitzGerald, who had been procuring materials for us for a long time …. ‘

Frank FitzGerald was a businessman and arms dealer. He had supplied arms and bomb-making chemicals to the IRA during the War of Independence and the Truce, via a series of essentially paper companies, of which he was the proprietor. One of his contacts was Joseph F. White, another London-Irish businessman who had also supplied guns to the IRA.

In April 1922, FitzGerald introduced White to Sean Golden, the Deputy Director of Purchases of the Free State army. The meeting took place in London. The parties discussed what John Byrne described as ‘a formidable list of armaments Golden was interested in buying’. They concentrated on rifles and revolvers.

White later told the Committee of Public Accounts that Frank FitzGerald had informed him that

‘it was desired to obtain a large number (of rifles) secretly for use against Ulster …. “

By mid-June 1922, White and FitzGerald had received offers of 2,500 .45 revolvers, 10,000 Lee Enfield .303 rifles and five Hotchkiss guns – heavy, machine guns which fired one Ib shells. The Hotchkiss guns had come from a British naval vessel which was being converted to civilian use.

General MacMahon approved the contract. Frank FitzGerald was furnished an advance of £10,000 out of army funds. The revolvers were due for delivery at the end of June 1922. However, the attack on the anti-Treaty forces occupying the Four Courts on 28 June 1922 ignited the Civil War, disrupting the plan.

As John Byrne pointed out:

‘MacMahon told FitzGerald to hold things up for the time being because the Free State authorities couldn’t be sure the guns wouldn’t get into the wrong (i.e. anti-Treaty) hands. He didn’t stop the scheme, however, and negotiations with arms dealers in London went on during July while the Civil War raged in Ireland.‘

Arrangements to buy the 10,000 rifles were concluded, and a deposit of £2,250 was paid on August 2.

As Byrne suggests:

‘This may have been connected with a meeting between Collins and Mulcahy and Northern IRA leaders, which was held in Dublin on the same day and at which it was arranged that a large number of Northern IRA men would come South to the Curragh camp. They were to be trained and armed there, ready to resume their activities in the North at some future date.

The timing of all this was significant. It showed that there was quite a high level of cooperation on the question of the North between sections of the pro- and anti-Treaty forces until literally the eve of the attack on the Four Courts. And it demonstrated that the Free State army’s high command was still involved with the clandestine activities of the Northern IRA for some months after the Civil War had begun.

FitzGerald promptly denied all responsibility, claiming he was only storing the guns for White. He then asked White to take responsibility because,

‘his brother being a member of the (Dublin) Government, the connection between the two would cause very serious complications with the British Government … ‘

White was interviewed by Colonel Carter, the head of the British Special Branch, and claimed he had intended to sell the guns to Spain. He wasn’t charged, but Scotland Yard kept the guns.

12. FitzGerald makes demands

Meanwhile, the Free State authorities were having their own troubles with FitzGerald. He was demanding payment for the 2,500 revolvers and 25 tons of chemicals, which were part of the original deal, even though he had not delivered them, and the Free State army no longer wanted them.

As Byrne pointed out:

‘Whatever pressure FitzGerald put on was effective because on October 19 1923, Mulcahy and General MacMahon, who was now Chief of Staff of the Free State army, had a hurried meeting with the President of the Executive Council, W.T. Cosgrave.

‘The saga wasn’t over yet. In February 1924 FitzGerald telegraphed Cosgrave and Mulcahy to say that the revolvers had been seized by the arms dealers, Soley & Co., in lieu of money he owed them and that he was being served with bankruptcy papers. He demanded the balance of the price originally agreed for the entire arms transaction. The bankruptcy story transpired later to have been a ruse.

‘It was an awkward moment for the Cosgrave Government. They were involved in delicate negotiations with the British over the commission to review the boundary between the Free State and the North. They may have been worried that a bankruptcy case would bring the whole arms affair out in the open. Cosgrave urged an immediate settlement.

‘Department of Finance officials went to London and agreed to take over FitzGerald’s debts to Soley & Co. (£3,260) and to pay FitzGerald the balance of the original sum agreed (£1,400). FitzGerald got the revolvers back from Soley & Co., but then refused to part with them or the remaining chemicals unless he got an additional £700 from Dublin. The Department of Finance official refused to hand over the £1,400 and returned to Dublin. At this stage the Free State authorities had paid FitzGerald £18,305 out of a total claim of £19,704 but had only received goods to the (nominal) value of £7,069. FitzGerald now held goods to the nominal value of £10,385, which the Free State had paid for. (FitzGerald had also paid Soley & Co. £2,250 as a deposit on the 10,000 rifles. Soley & Co. claimed they had paid this over to the British army’s Disposals Board but the latter denied ever receiving it.)

White had pointed all this out to the Free State authorities in numerous letters, but had got no response. He now alleged that this was due to FitzGerald’s influence in Dublin, where, as well as having a brother in the Cabinet, he was very friendly with Mulcahy and Ernest Blythe, the Minister of Finance. FitzGerald himself refused to appear before the committee, as did Mulcahy, who had resigned from the Cabinet in the spring of 1924.

The Public Accounts Committee commented in April 1925 that the prices charged for the chemicals had been too high and that FitzGerald’s profit on the Hotchkiss guns was ‘greatly excessive’ (it was not clear whether the Free State authorities ever got these guns). The committee returned to the theme in March 1926, after a more detailed investigation, and said:

‘Every item in this account and almost every incident in connection with the transactions calls for adverse comment … ‘

They noted in particular the Army’s failure to act after White drew their attention to FitzGerald’s profit margins and the Department of Finance’s readiness to meet his claims without taking any measures to ensure he would deliver the goods. Johnson felt that the whole affair was being covered up. He had great difficulty in getting Government agreement to a Dail debate on the committee’s report and, when they did agree, the debate was fixed for the day before the Dail recessed in July 1925, when many TDs were only anxious to get home. Johnson described the whole business as most unsatisfactory and said:

He said Desmond FitzGerald should have resigned from the Government.

Ernest Blythe, the Minister of Finance, denied that personal considerations had influenced the Government. He said nothing about the allegations of overcharging and excessive profits, or why the Government had met FitzGerald’s claims so readily.

Johnson had discreetly avoided mentioning that the arms were destined for the North.

Blythe was discreet too, but indicated that he had opposed the Collins-Mulcahy policy of arming the Northern IRA. He tried to distance the Cosgrave Government from the events of 1922, saying:

‘Many people were confused after the Treaty (and) were forced to do things that I think they would now say … ought not to have been done.’

Having hinted at the murky and potentially embarrassing nature of the affair, he urged that there was no longer any point in going into the details of it. His approach was effective. No one else raised the question. Desmond FitzGerald said nothing.

Johnson remained indignant about the affair, and the following report by the Public Accounts Committee provided further details of the transaction, including the intended destination of the arms. There was no response from the Government.

14. Fianna Fail enter the Dail.

As Byrne further pointed our:

‘The last word on the question came after the Fianna Fail Deputies entered the Dail in 1927. They confirmed that supplies of arms had been promised for the North. Frank Carney TD, who had been chief supplies officer at the Free State army headquarters in Portobello barracks, said that, two or three days before the attack on the Four Courts, he had fitted out a flying column of 40 men from the South Down/South Armagh area. They had been waiting for the London guns before returning to fight in the North when the Civil War began. Carney himself resigned from the Free State army when the Civil War began and later joined Fianna Fail.

‘The Fianna Fail speakers were cynical about the episode and claimed that the promise of guns had been used to keep the Northern IRA and their Southern sympathisers quiet until the Civil War was under way and then the whole scheme had been dropped. None of them raised the question of FitzGerald’s profits and the alleged cover-up by the Free State authorities.’

15. Garret FitzGerald’s account in ‘All in a Life’.

In his autobiography, ‘All in a Life’, FitzGerald provided his recollection of these events thus:

My father’s older brother, France (sic), an indefatigable dancer, ran a chemical works in Stratford, near his home in West Ham. During the Truce that preceded the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 he got into trouble collecting arms from barracks in London with the help of a drunken sergeant; he apparently tried his luck in one barracks too many. He cannot have spent too long in custody, since an early 1922, after the Treaty but before the Civil War, he became involved in providing arms and explosives to Michael Collins-the transaction that five years later was the subject of prolonged attention by the Public Accounts Committee of the new Irish Parliament. In 1941 he died following a gas explosion at his factory, resulting from an air raid, and my father, with the help of my brother Pierce, who was an accountant, had to make a number of visits to Stratford during the remainder of the war to keep the factory going, producing chemicals for the war effort-a curious circumstance in which to return to the native East London after so many different careers as poet, nationalist revolution, propagandist, Government Minister, and philosopher. (All in a Life page 4)

16. Commandant Haughey.

He retired in March 1928 with a modest pension. He received glowing references from his superiors and colleagues. Major McKenna said of him that he had ‘done his utmost to make British law impossible in his area‘.

After he retired, the family moved to Sutton, County Dublin, before moving again to Dunshauglin, Co Meath, where they took up farming on a 100-acre holding. All told, the couple had seven children: Maureen, Seán, Charles, Eithne, Bridie, Padraig, and Eoghan.

Haughey Senior developed multiple sclerosis in 1933. He believed that it was caused by the hardships he endured in the IRA and National Army. He became entitled to a disability pension.

He was forced to sell his farm. In 1933, he moved his family to a small two-storey house at 12 Belton Park Road, Donnycarney, in Dublin. By 1935, he was unable to walk. After this, the family had to struggle on in modest circumstances.

His son Eoghan (brother of Charles) told a documentary-maker in 2005 that, ‘My father was an invalid as long as I can remember.‘

Despite these setbacks, Mrs Haughey not only raised her family but also found time to carry out charity work in her parish with the Third Order of St Francis.

17. Encounters with the B-Specials and the Maghera riots of 1938.

All the while, as the children grew up, they received regular visits from relatives and friends from the North, bringing news and stories about what was going on across the Border. In the other direction, the young Charles Haughey spent extended summer holidays in Swatragh, staying with his mother’s parents at Stranagone, about half a mile up the mountain road leading from Swatragh.

The holidays took a lot of weight off his father’s shoulders. His uncle Owen McWilliams was a key figure in young Haughey’s development. According to his first cousin, Professor Monica McWilliams, her father volunteered to help rear Charles and his brothers, who would come to the North every single summer. After his father died, this continued and alleviated the financial pressure on his mother. Owen was a cattle dealer who took Charles and Seán with him to the local fairs.

The boys ‘became little cattle dealers and little farmers and his helpers every summer until he got married’. They visited such places as Maghera, Kilrea, Tobermore, Desertmartin, Cooktown, Dungiven and Toomebridge. Decades later, Haughey would entertain the Derry minor football team after they had played in an All-Ireland final in Croke Park. Several of the team were impressed by his knowledge of the South Derry countryside.

There was an idyllic aspect to the summer holidays he spent in Swatragh, but there was also some darkness. 

Violence was still prevalent in the North. In 1935, sectarian rioting had cost eleven deaths and 574 injuries in Belfast.

In 1938, after a visit to the cinema at Maghera, Haughey, his brother Seán and uncle Owen emerged from the building to witness a riot during which Loyalists were firing rifles at unarmed Catholics. The event forged a lasting impression on him. It was, he felt, a visceral taste of what life was like for some Catholics in Ulster; an insight that was shared by very few, if any, of his contemporaries in Dublin, especially the middle-class children he would soon encounter at University College Dublin (UCD).

The young Haughey experienced further sectarian division in the community during these holidays. He and his cousins were sometimes stopped by the B Specials, something he found unpleasant, sinister and often intimidating. These patrols usually intercepted them at night as they were returning to Stranagone. The patrols were made up of men from the neighbouring areas who were known to them, but never friendly; all were drawn from the Protestant community. They were quick to display their authority. Haughey felt there was an element of ‘croppies lie down’ about their behaviour.

One of the reasons Seán Haughey had left Derry originally was because he felt he had become a marked man. His home had been raided ten times in one year. Seán Haughey’s father (i.e. Charles Haughey’s grandfather) had to emigrate to the US. He took one of Sean’s sisters with him.

As Charles Haughey would put it, during all this time he ‘gained at first hand an insight into the manner in which at that time rural communities were firmly divided along sectarian lines’.

By 1941, his father had become so incapacitated that he was only able to mark an ‘X’ on a statement about his illness.

Moreover, he argued the patriotism the FCA inspired in young men, offered an alternative to the IRA:

‘A lot of young men who find themselves caught up in movements without realising fully what is involved in the ultimate, would never get into these difficulties if the career of a member of the FCA were made more attractive and interesting.’

Sorohan went on to carry out intelligence work for the IRA including

‘taking photographs of Special Branch officers. I have piles of pictures at home’. Decades later he pondered what he might do with them, once suggesting rather mysteriously to this author, that he might ‘donate them to the Special Branch for their archives’.

If Haughey had joined the IRA, this perhaps might have been the type of work he would have been asked to undertake.

23. Haughey crushes the IRA.

In April 1955, Haughey’s old friend from UCD, Seamus Sorohan, addressed an Easter rally in Galway, at which he called on young men to volunteer for the IRA and be trained in the use of arms to achieve the complete freedom of the Nation. He was followed by Joe Crystal, another IRA volunteer, who told the crowd that the Republican movement would soon be making ‘the Six Counties so hot that England won’t be able to hold them’. The Border Campaign began shortly thereafter.

Fianna Fáil won the election. De Valera became Taoiseach again. He moved quickly to suppress the IRA. Sitting in his prison cell in England, an IRA prisoner, Sean MacStíofáin, was convinced the new Fianna Fáil  administration would come down hard on the IRA:

‘We knew, even from the Scrubs hundreds of miles away, what de Valera’s return meant for our comrades in Ireland. The persecution of Republicans would now begin in earnest and collaboration with the British forces would be stepped up.’[1] Seán Mac Stíofáin, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Gordon Cremonisi, London, 1975), p. 81.

Sean Lemass succeeded de Valera as Taoiseach on 23 June 1959. He resolved to end the IRA’s Border Campaign

‘by making its futility obvious rather than making martyrs of those who practiced it’.

After the IRA announced the end of its campaign, Haughey made a statement during which he recognised the desire in the country to end Partition but condemned what he described as the IRA’s ‘foolish resort to violence’ in furtherance of that aim. Berry deemed the IRA’s collapse as ‘a great personal triumph’ for the young minister. To his intense satisfaction, Haughey had managed to defeat the IRA without turning the volunteers into martyrs, just as Lemass had dictated.

24. Rapprochement with Northern Ireland. Lemass, Lynch and Haughey take steps to normalise relations with the Stormont government.

Charles Haughey has been inaccurately portrayed as a politician who had little or no interest in the North before the outbreak of the Troubles.  In his book The Party, published in 1986, the former political editor of The Irish Times, Dick Walsh, who was a friend and speech writer for Cathal Goulding of the Official IRA, contended that

‘Haughey, however, was one of those who, in [Conor Cruise] O’Brien’s words, had not hitherto been suspected of more than conventional republicanism. .. was noted by a close parliamentary colleague as “never having uttered a peep at all about the North – at any party meeting or anywhere else”.’ Back. (See page 101.)

This portrayal, although almost universally accepted as gospel by the Dublin media, has little to commend it as accurate. On the contrary, Haughey, along with Taoiseach Sean Lemass and his then-cabinet colleague Jack Lynch, made great strides in opening relations with Stormont in the 1960s.

In 1962, Lemass dispatched Haughey and Lynch to Belfast to explore the possibility of free trade with the North. The choice of Lynch, who was then Minister for Industry and Commerce, was obvious; Haughey, less so, as he was Minister for Justice, a department not involved in trade. However, his credentials as a moderniser, foe of the IRA whose Border Campaign he had extinguished when he had been Minister for Justice, and his social contact with Stormont Minister (and future Prime Minister) Brian Faulkner must have informed the decision to include him. Haughey had befriended Faulkner through horse riding.

The efforts of Lynch and Haughey helped pave the way for Lemass’ historic meeting with the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Captain Terence O’Neill, which took place on 14 January 1965, at Stormont House. That development caught the public completely by surprise. Lemass did not even tell his wife where he was going on the morning of his visit; his driver was informed only after he had picked him up. Haughey later disclosed that Lemass had informed the Cabinet about it, but they hadn’t debated the matter, an indication of the support Lemass enjoyed for the initiative. The meeting was the first of two historic encounters between the premiers.

Lemass did not want Ireland to remain an agriculturally-based society. He refused to believe that Ireland was incapable of developing an industrial base because of a shortage of mineral resources. At this time, Lemass was promoting a policy of ‘fields to factories’ with the enthusiastic support of Haughey. On the other hand, many in Sinn Féin and the IRA, led by figures such as Rúraí Ó Brádaigh, felt these ideas were distracting the Nation from what they believed it should have been focused on: an end to Partition. O Brádaigh thought that the IRA was the polar opposite of the political modernisers, as exemplified by Lemass and Haughey.

It was O’Neill who had extended the invitation to Lemass. After the Taoiseach emerged from his car, he was greeted by O’Neill but maintained silence. He came out of himself during lunch with O’Neill and some of the Cabinet, including Brian Faulkner, who was Minister for Commerce. When Faulkner was interviewed by Jonathan Bardon for BBC Radio Ulster in 1976, he recalled that:

‘The first thing Lemass said to me was “I hear you had a great day with the Westmeaths [i.e. the Westmeath hunt] a few weeks ago.”

‘That’s right indeed, I didn’t realise you knew.’

Faulkner then began to reminisce about several hunt meetings he had attended with Haughey, which kept the conversation flowing. Faulkner was no stranger to the South. He had been educated at St Columba’s College in Dublin, where he had befriended Catholic students, one of whom, Michael Yates, went on to become a Fianna Fáil senator. After St Columba’s, Faulkner spent a year in Trinity College Dublin before returning home during World War II to help his father run his clothes factories, including one in County Donegal. He had also holidayed in the Republic, where he came to know Liam Cosgrave, another equestrian. He was also a frequent visitor to the annual Horse Show at the RDS in Dublin, where he often met Haughey. Faulkner’s wife had also attended Trinity College.

Unlike many of the grandees at Stormont, Faulkner did not have an aristocratic pedigree, something which provoked scorn from some of those in the Unionist Party who deemed themselves above him. He had developed his interest in horses from his father, James, who had worked as a part-time groom as a boy at one of the polo grounds in Belfast, where he earned rides by brushing down the horses of the gentry. Faulkner’s passion for horses prompted accusations that he had risen above his station. Interestingly, this was similar to the type of criticism heaped upon Haughey in the South. Both men also saw themselves as modernisers. These similarities might have provided a fruitful basis for a deepening of the rapprochement between the North and the South, but for the advent of the Troubles. However, Faulkner’s relationship with Liam Cosgrave did benefit the Northern Ireland Power-Sharing Executive, which came into being after the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973.

26. FitzGerald’s maiden speech in the Dail. (1969)

FitzGerald’s political career was marked by personal attacks on other deputies from the safety of the Dáil chamber, where defamation laws do not apply. He launched his first attack during his maiden speech in 1969. He said that he did

‘not wish in (his) first utterances in the House, or indeed, in any utterances in the house to concentrate is remarks on personalities but would prefer to deal with issues.’

However, he then attacked several personalities. There was an interesting exchange between him and Charles Haughey. FitzGerald criticised the ‘mistake’ in the ‘retention of Deputy Moran as Minister for Justice.’ FitzGerald said: ‘It is a tradition that the Minister for Justice is a person of high repute and one who retains [a] high standard.‘

Haughey, who had been Minister for Justice, took this as a compliment and butted in with ‘Thank you, Deputy.’ FitzGerald, who had not obviously intended to compliment Haughey, replied: ‘I said it has been a tradition. I did not say when the tradition ceased.‘

The words of his maiden speech were a sign of things to come. Over the next two decades, FitzGerald’s remarks in the Dail would often concentrate on personalities.

FitzGerald’s attitude towards the Unionists, especially their political leaders, has been inconsistent. In 1969, he accused them of being ‘bigots’. By the early 1980s, he had adopted a pro-Unionist stance and attacked Charles Haughey for opening negotiations with the British Government over the heads of the Unionists.

By the mid-1980s, when he had become Taoiseach again, he performed another U-turn and began doing precisely what he had criticised Haughey for: negotiating with the British over the Unionists’ heads. Bearing all this in mind, it is interesting to see what he said about them in 1969. In October 1969 he told the Dail that the

‘Northern problem… happened because of the existence of an intransigent minority who, generation after generation, had been indoctrinated by their bosses about the dangers of Rome rule. It is because that situation existed, kept alive by the Ascendancy for its own purposes so that it could continue to exploit those workers, that partition came into being. It came into being because there existed in Northern Ireland this intransigent minority of people, an industrial proletariat exploited by their bosses who knew well how to use effectively Marx’s dictum that “religion is the opium of the people” – certainly there have never been any better people at doling out the opium than the bigots of the Unionist Party during the last century in Northern Ireland.‘

28. NATO & Rejoining the British Commonwealth

FitzGerald supported Britain during World War II and favoured Irish membership in the Commonwealth. Haughey, meanwhile, famously burned a Union Jack outside Trinity College on VE Day.

FitzGerald was pro-NATO; Haughey saw joining NATO as an opportunity to remove Britain’s presence from Northern Ireland.

In 1969, Haughey—then Minister for Finance—sought to open dialogue with the British government of Harold Wilson through Ambassador Andrew Gilchrist. On 4 October 1969, Gilchrist reported to London that Haughey had met him at his home, Abbeville, to argue that reunification of the island was the best solution to the overall problem. Haughey impressed upon Gilchrist that he was willing to sacrifice anything to achieve a united Ireland. He even expressed support for rejoining the Commonwealth and for granting the Royal Navy and NATO access to Irish military bases.

FitzGerald viewed the Commonwealth favourably on its merits. As a young man, he had been frustrated by John A. Costello’s first Inter-Party Government (1948–1951), led by Fine Gael, because it opted to leave the Commonwealth. So annoyed was he that he initially refused to join Fine Gael and even voted for Fianna Fáil before eventually returning to Fine Gael. In his first autobiography,  ‘All In A Life’, he recounted his disappointment with Costello:

‘My unhappiness was intensified when, a few months after the 1948 election, the Taoiseach announced the Government’s intention to declare a republic. At that time this clearly meant leaving the Commonwealth, for the evolution of which into a body of sovereign, independent states John Costello, as Attorney General, with people like my father, Paddy McGilligan, and Kevin O’Higgins, had worked so successfully in the years before 1932. Moreover, in the months that followed that announcement the Government also decided not to join NATO.’

He and his brother Fergus

‘responded by initiating a pro-Alliance correspondence in the Irish Independent, which eventually ran to over eighty letters.’

29. Arms Crisis

Jack Lynch dismissed Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney from his cabinet in May 1970 after allegations were made that they had attempted to import arms illegally for the IRA.

People who followed politics were shocked at Haughey’s dismissal, as he was not seen as a hardliner over the North, let alone a supporter of the IRA. His time as Minister for Justice was recalled, especially the steps he had taken to quell the Border Campaign in the early 1960s. He was also well recognised as a supporter of rapprochement and was friendly with Brian Faulkner, a Stormont government minister and a future Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. Up to this point, his reputation was that of a highly competent and imaginative government minister who had focused on modernising the state, in particular the economy. The public was less shocked by Blaney, who was seen as a hardliner from a border constituency.

The story of the Arms Crisis is a perfectly simple one. It only becomes complicated when the lies, smears, fantasies and myths that engulfed it are treated as true.

When the vines of deceit that wrapped themselves around the story are stripped away, what really happened in 1969 and 1970 becomes clear: James Gibbons, the Minister for Defence, 1969-70, oversaw an operation to import arms which were to be stored in the Republic under Irish Army lock and key. Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney were deeply involved. Blaney was probably the main protagonist in the affair. Jack Lynch knew about it, as did George Colley and other government ministers.

The weapons – which never reached Ireland – were intended to be distributed to vulnerable Catholic communities in Northern Ireland, but only in the improbable event of a ‘doomsday’ situation such as a pogrom.

Since no ‘doomsday’ scenario in fact occurred, the weapons would have done little more than gather dust in the Republic and might have become no more than a minor footnote in recent history. All that changed when news of the importation attempt leaked out, and all political hell broke loose.

All the trace elements of the Arms Crisis myth can be found in a devious story published in the pro-Paisley newspaper, The Protestant Telegraph, in 1969.

A group of extreme Loyalist zealots, including ‘Dr’ Ian Paisley, his associate William McGrath, and Paisley’s one-time bodyguard, John McKeague, and one of McKeague’s friends, Alan Campbell, ratcheted up sectarian hatred in the 1960s in tandem with other like-minded bigots. McGrath was a paedophile who would be convicted of child rape in December 1981. The RUC referred to him as ‘The Beast’. McKeague was worse; not only was he a child rapist, but his depravity extended further – he became a UVF/Red Hand Commando serial killer and torturer. He would be murdered in February 1982 after he threatened to reveal what he knew about the Kincora Boys Home scandal when it looked like the RUC CID was on the verge of arresting him for rape. Alan Campbell was one of the three men who led the notorious Shankill Defence Association alongside McKeague. Campbell was also the RUC’s chief suspect in the abduction and murder of a ten-year-old boy in 1973 in Belfast.

Back in April of 1969, McGrath, McKeague, Paisley and other anti-Catholic fanatics mounted a ‘false flag’ bomb campaign in the North, i.e. one they perpetrated but blamed on the IRA and Jack Lynch’s government. The most notorious bomb of the campaign was the one which exploded in the Silent Valley and cut off the water supply to parts of Belfast. At the time, the IRA barely functioned and had no intention of launching any military campaign against the Northern Ireland State.

The allegation that the April 1969 bombs were part of an IRA campaign was circulated in the pro-Paisley newspaper, The Protestant Telegraph. It declared deceitfully that a source ‘close to [Stormont] Government circles’ had informed the paper that a purported ‘secret dossier’ on the Castlereagh electricity sub-station explosion contained:

‘startling documentation and facts. Original reports suggested that the IRA could have been responsible, but in Parliament no such definite statement would be made…We are told that the Ministry of Home Affairs is examining reports which implicate the Eire Government in the £2 million act of sabotage — By actively precipitating a crisis in Ulster, the Eire Government can make capital, win or lose. The facts, we hope, will be made public, thereby exposing the chicanery of the Dublin regime’.

These lies would be laughable, but for the vitriol they helped whip up in extreme Loyalist circles.

McGrath was the main promoter of the lie. He used the then deputy editor of the Protestant Telegraph, David Browne, as his conduit to plant the story in the paper. Browne had been present at a meeting in McGrath’s house at Greenwood Avenue on the Upper Newtownards Road, a few hours after one of the April 1969 bombs had exploded. Addressing the gathering, McGrath had told his gullible audience that the attack had been carried out by a special unit attached to the Irish Army, nominating an individual called ‘Major Farrell’ as its leader. Farrell was a figment of his imagination. According to him, this invented character’s mission was to destabilise the North as a precursor to an invasion by the Republic. Browne later became editor of the newspaper. [Chris Moore, ‘The Kincora Scandal’, p 61/4].

A little over a year later, McGrath and Paisley woke up to learn that Jack Lynch had fired Neil Blaney and Charles Haughey from his cabinet for allegedly trying to import arms illegally. This development played directly into their paranoid view of events in Ireland.

Significantly, Lynch protected Gibbons, his Minister for Defence, who had been directing the effort to import arms through the operational activities of Captain James Kelly of Military Intelligence, G2. There are many reasons why Lynch did this. The bottom line is that he did not tell the truth about what had happened and his role in it.

Over the next few months, the Dáil would be misled repeatedly by Lynch, documents would disappear, forgeries would come into existence, witness statements would be altered, and perjury would flow from Gibbons in the witness box. Yet, despite this elaborate confection of deceit, the jury was not fooled, and Captain Kelly, Haughey and the other Arms Trial defendants were all acquitted.

The Arms Crisis and its sequels, the two Arms Trials, added apparent substance to McGrath’s sulphuric myth that Fianna Fáil was acting in league with the IRA.

31. Foot in mouth: Private Eye gets everything wrong.

The IRA split into the Official and Provisional factions in December 1969, with a similar division in Sinn Féin in January 1970.

Official Sinn Féin agents began to feed their version of the Arms Crisis to Paul Foot, a left-wing activist who wrote for Private Eye magazine in London, after the outbreak of the Arms Crisis in May 1970.

Dick Walsh was probably the conduit for the Official IRA propaganda, which was furnished to Foot. Walsh had worked in Britain in the 1960s.

The Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team was also in receipt of similar propaganda. They also received the information from the Officials.

Walsh produced a book on the Arms Crisis (in Irish) in 1970.

Private Eye was also one of the favourite publications into which Sir Maurice Oldfield of MI6 poured black propaganda. Oldfield spent a decade misleading the press, via black propaganda, about the Arms Crisis.

The result was a staggering mishmash of lies, speculation and fantasy. This is a shame for Foot, who would later emerge as one of Britain’s most able campaigning journalists. His Private Eye reports are a serious – albeit exceptional and rare – blot on his notebook. Foot should not have trusted his Irish socialist brethren so readily.

The Arms Crisis erupted after Liam Cosgrave received an anonymous note in the middle of the night from Garda Patrick Crinnion. Cosgrave obtained further details from Philip McMahon, a former head of the Garda Special Branch.

Ambassador John Peck did not tell Liam Cosgrave about the attempt, as alleged by Foot. This took the heat off Crinnion and McMahon.

At least Foot’s coverage did not lack for drama:

‘On 14th April, the British ambassador [John Peck] called on Lynch and informed him that British intelligence had knowledge that a shipment of arms was due to be run into Dublin on 20th April [1970]. That night 11 Army officers including Paddy ‘Jock’ Haughey, the brother of Charles Haughey, were arrested and taken to Dublin Castle. When Charlie Haughey heard of his brother’s arrest he drove furiously to the Castle to demand his brother’s release. The next morning it was announced that he had been taken to hospital following a riding accident, and Haughey himself has insisted that this is the real explanation. What no one has yet explained is how Haughey’s bodyguard came to be injured and admitted to the same hospital at the same time’.

Nearly every word in the foregoing paragraph is misleading: not a single army officer was arrested; Jock Haughey was not an Army officer; he was never arrested, and his brother did not go near Dublin Castle to rescue him. Haughey’s ‘bodyguard’ was in fact a Garda special branch driver and would never have engaged in a fist fight with his colleagues at the office of Chief Superintendent John Fleming’s at the HQ of the Special Branch at Dublin Castle. And in any event, when arrests were eventually made, the prisoners were taken to the Bridewell, not Dublin Castle.

The Eye story also gave birth to one of the most fantastic myths of the Arms Crisis: that Haughey and others had advocated an invasion of the North, which, of course, is a part of the UK. In other words, Haughey wanted to risk war with a nuclear power with a massive air force, army and navy. According to Foot,

‘The key to the whole crisis originates in the crucial Cabinet meeting in August (1969) when the Irish Cabinet divided 5-7 on the motion to invade Northern Ireland (see Issue 203). When this happened, five ministers, Blaney, Haughey, Boland, Flanagan and O’Móráin threatened to resign, and appeal to the party and country against Lynch (see issue 203)’.

No such vote was ever taken.

Kevin Boland and Des O’Malley (present in his capacity as chief whip) are adamant that no such proposal was ever mooted. Yet, The Eye asserted confidently:

The Eye then returned to its coverage of the NI sub-committee. It is a fact that it met once, after which Blaney and Haughey failed to attend the next meeting, and Faulkner and Brennan lost interest. Yet, according to The Eye, the committee was very active indeed:

‘With the aid of Peter Berry, secretary to the Department of Justice, a special section of the special Branch called MWO was set up, ostensibly to protect the lives of ministers – in fact, to spy on them. This organisation worked in very close cooperation with British MI6 who moved five senior agents to Dublin for this purpose. With the aid of MI6, the Customs House in Dublin, head office of the Irish Department of Local Government and headquarters of the Northern sub – committee of the Cabinet was ‘bugged’‘.

Since the sub-committee did not meet and did not have an office, it would have been impossible to bug it, no matter how many MI6 agents Berry had allegedly let loose in Dublin.

There is more: no purge of the Army took place. Yet, according to Foot:

According to Foot’s far-fetched account, Haughey had massive support in the Army for his various machinations. This nearly led – if we are to believe the absurd Eye yarn – to a shoot-out between the Army and Special Branch:

‘When this was reported to Lynch he called in the chief of staff of the Army whom he had earlier consulted about the allegiance of the Army. At this meeting, it was reported that a senior GHQ officer told Lynch that if the arrests and interrogation of Army officers was continued it would impose ‘an intolerable strain’ on the allegiance of army officers. This is believed to be a reference to the red-alert stand by that night of all units of the 6th Brigade. It is believed that only a phone call from one of the dismissed ministers stopped this unit from visiting Dublin to have words with the special Branch units who arrested the Army officers’.

Incredibly, there was no 6th Brigade in the Irish Army. There might have been six brigadiers, but no 6th Brigade. Unfortunately, this means we must add a fantasy army to Foot’s errors.

It gets yet even more fantastic:

‘At this stage it appeared that Lynch might retreat, but on 30th April [1970], the British Army mounted Operation ‘Mulberry’. Ostensibly this was to be a search of the Border counties for arms. But it was interpreted by the Irish general staff as the first stage of an operation to help disarm certain units of the Irish Army. Lynch was informed by the Irish general staff who insisted that Lynch take action one way or another to clarify his position. Coinciding with this, the British Ambassador and an un-named senior Irish civil servant (Peter Berry) met together and decided to put further pressure on Lynch. A copy of the report drawn up by Chief Supt Fleming of MWO was leaked to the Sunday Independent. On Tuesday, 5th May, the British Ambassador gave Liam Cosgrave, the leader of the opposition, a full account of what had happened and a copy of a British police report, plus photographs, showing that a relative of one of the dismissed ministers had visited the Continent in company with the man currently wanted for bank robbery in Ireland, and asked him to raise it in the Dail’.

Nothing remotely of this nature actually happened.

In the fantasy account in The Eye, Cosgrave accepted the British report from the ambassador and

‘agreed and, in fact, informed Lynch of his intentions. Within hours Lynch dismissed Haughey and Blaney’.

A follow-up report in The Eye on 5 June had Jack Lynch and Erskine Childers offering guns to the IRA, again, something that never happened. According to The Eye:

‘refused to give information as to their arms contacts (believed, in any event, to be negligible) but agreed to purchase arms for use in the North if money was made available. The government negotiators then demanded conditions from the I.R.A. if the money for arms was to be handed over. These included changes in the I.R.A. leadership and a moratorium on all militant republican activities in the South, such as squatting, anti-landlord demonstrations and the use of arms in the southern 26 counties’.

Yes, you read that correctly: the government, which included Jack Lynch, Erskine Childers, George Colley, Paddy Hillery and Des O’Malley (as chief whip and junior minister for defence), were demanding changes in personnel at the top of the IRA in return for arming them.

The Eye added that Lynch and his government’s

‘conditions were not met, and negotiations fizzled out. The impasse provided the opportunity for Mr Jack Lynch and his supporters in the Cabinet (George Colley, Erskine Childers etc) to disentangle themselves from the negotiations with the IRA which they had only agreed to stave off the threatened resignation of five Cabinet ministers (see Eye 202), and serious dissensions in the Army.’

32. Arms Trial.

Capt. Kelly, Charles Haughey, John Kelly and Albert Luykx went on trial in Dublin in October 1970 and were acquitted by the jury almost immediately.

One of the jurors later explained that Jim Gibbons’ perjury was the decisive factor in the prompt acquittal.

Michael Heney, the distinguished former RTE broadcaster, published ‘The Arms Crisis, the Plot That Never Was’ in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the crisis. It bulldozed the reputation of ‘Honest Jack’ Lynch. At one captivating point, Heney asserts that:

‘Overall, it is possible to identify at least thirty specific instances when Jack Lynch either made demonstrably false statements, was deliberately misleading or chose to side-step the facts. Most, but not all, of his misstatements were to Dáil Éireann. The examples spanned the period from 5 May 1970 to the moment when Lynch, recently retired from the office of Taoiseach, attempted on 25 November 1980 to defend himself against some of the more serious barbs directed against him by Peter Berry [formerly of the Department of Justice] in his posthumous Diaries.’

Heney’s book contains the material to justify this assertion.

Des Long is a founding member of the Provisional IRA. He served on the IRA’s Army Executive, 1969-89. He describes the allegation that Haughey ran guns to the IRA in a mini podcast on this website as a ‘fairy tale’. See: https://coverthistory.ie/2025/11/15/fairy-tale/

33. FitzGerald informs the embassy.

FitzGerald was prepared to inform on fellow politicians to gain Britain’s trust and favour. In 1970, he was appointed to the Public Accounts Committee, which was tasked with investigating how the Irish government had spent approximately £100,000 allocated in 1969 for the relief of distress in Northern Ireland. A portion of these funds had supported the Military Intelligence operation that precipitated the Arms Crisis.

Without informing his committee colleagues, FitzGerald kept the British Embassy apprised of some of the committee’s private deliberations. On 18 December 1970, after speaking with FitzGerald, Ambassador John Peck reported to London that FitzGerald

‘told us last night that the Committee intends to question all those involved in the arms trial and to publish the proceedings in full. Evidence will be taken from people in the North, whose identities will, however, be protected. He said that of the £100,000 or so expended, it appeared that perhaps half had been spent on genuine relief works.’

Peck added:

‘It looks increasingly as if the proceedings of the committee could be a re-run of the arms trial and be awkward for Messrs. Haughey and [Neil] Blaney.’

34. FitzGerald’s Cover-Up of MI6’s Role in the Arms Crisis

Patrick Crinnion of Garda Intelligence was convicted of espionage-related crimes in February 1973 alongside his MI6 handler John Wyman.

For more information about Patrick Crinnion, see Nest of Spies.

On 12 June 1973, Crinnion wrote to Garret FitzGerald and other ministers, asserting:

‘…I recklessly crusaded against the IRA and subversives without regard to the double-edged political weapon the IRA is, and my personal efforts resulted in a toll which included precipitating the Fianna Fáil Arms Crisis…’

Crinnion precipitated the crisis by delivering a note about the arms importation attempt to Liam Cosgrave, Leader of the Opposition.

FitzGerald chose to cover this up.

All that changed on the night of the vote when two bombs exploded, killing two CIE employees. Fine Gael panicked and rowed in behind Fianna Fail, and the Bill was saved.

FitzGerald had hoped to stop it – even though that inevitably meant Fianna Fail would win a historic fifth consecutive general election. Fine Gael offered Fianna Fáil no opposition; Fianna Fáil was weak and divided. More importantly, the Labour Party opposed Cosgrave’s eventual support for the Bill and wouldn’t have entered into a vote-transfer pact with Fine Gael.

By the following year, the Fine Gael split was mended, a pact was hammered out with Labour and a vote transfer deal was agreed. Fianna Fáil actually increased its vote share, but lost the election due to vote transfers between Fine Gael and Labour. FitzGerald persisted in his attempts to undermine Cosgrave with a vote of no confidence in Mr Cosgrave. A large majority defeated it.

FitzGerald later served in government both as a Minister and as Taoiseach, which not only upheld the Offences Against the State Act but also expanded it.

There is more to Mr Crozier than first meets the eye. In 1975, the CIA admitted in Congressional evidence that Forum World Features was a CIA front.

CIA documents stated that it was

‘run with the knowledge and cooperation of British Intelligence’.

Before this, on December 20, 1968, Izvestia, the Soviet newspaper, denounced Mr Crozier as a spy. The Izvestia story was reported the following day in The Times of London.

The ISC had close, but hidden, links with MI6, the British Secret Service. Senior intelligence chiefs like Sir Edward Peck, one-time Cabinet Intelligence Co-ordinator and Rear-Admiral Louis Le Bailly, the former Head of British Military Intelligence, were members of the secretive Institute for the Study of Conflict.

In 1972, Crozier published a book entitled ‘Ulster Debate’. It had a foreword by Brian Crozier, and 14 intelligence experts contributed, including Garret FitzGerald.

Two weeks after the Cosgrave Coalition took office, the Gardai arrested the crew and passengers of the MV Claudia as it arrived in Irish waters from Libya. Two IRA men on board were arrested, but the crew was let go m as part of a deal between Lindon and Dublin. The crew was cooperating with MI6.

MI6 had learned about the trip in advance. The Cypriot crew discovered this and were reluctant to sail as they feared they would be arrested. Paddy Donegan, who was Minister for Defence, subsequently revealed that the coalition had reached an agreement with London that the Cypriots would not be jailed in Ireland. With this assurance, MI6 was able to persuade the Cypriots to sail to Ireland. FitzGerald was Minister for Foreign Affairs when the security coup was planned and must have been aware of the discussions with the British. The Claudia affair can only have enhanced his reputation in London. Meanwhile, MI6 was engaged in black propaganda against Haughey.

38. Sunningdale, December 1973.

In 1973, FitzGerald, Cosgrave and others negotiated the Sunningdale Agreement with British Prime Minister Edward Heath. It proved to be one of the more astonishing U-turns in Heath’s career. Before that, he had told Irish politicians that Northern Ireland was none of their business.

At Sunningdale Heath agreed to let them have a say in its internal affairs. FitzGerald was instrumental in securing these concessions. After the anti-Sunningdale Ulster Workers Council strike, Oliver Napier, former leader of the Alliance Party, who participated in the conference, blamed these concessions for the eventual downfall of the Sunningdale power-sharing government.

42. Plotting against Cosgrave (1976)

FitzGerald has always projected himself as a bumbling, absent-minded academic who found his way to the top in politics almost by accident.

In 1976, he held a secret meeting in his house in Palmerstown. The purpose was to see what support he would have in taking over as Taoiseach from Cosgrave. The conspirators referred to Cosgrave as ‘yesterday’s man’, someone who was not ‘progressive enough’. Amongst those present was Michael Keating, who was not yet a Fine Gael TD but whose election to the Dáil looked certain. It was the only such meeting he attended. John Donlan TD, along with others, was present.

Throughout his career, FitzGerald made sure not to become a target of Britain’s intelligence services. This was facilitated, e.g., by his provision of information to Ambassador Peck about the Public Accounts Committee.

He also rubbed shoulders with MI6 during his involvement with Brian Crozier.

Another opportunity arose during his dealings with the British-Irish Association (BIA). The BIA was founded in 1972 at the behest of David Astor and others. Astor, then editor of The Sunday Observer, was an MI6 asset.

In ‘All In A Life’, FitzGerald recounted how he tried to attend as many BIA meetings as possible, including the inaugural conference at Magdalen College, Cambridge, in 1973.

Haughey was clearly afraid the British would use the BIA to eavesdrop on unguarded conversations and gossip among his associates. Indeed, he also forbade alcohol consumption during conferences with the British to avoid giving away secrets. Although he was probably wrong to suggest the BIA was a mere ‘front’ for British intelligence, it was definitely infiltrated by it.

By the late 1970s, one of the BIA’s organisers was Dame Daphne Park. She had only recently retired from MI6, where she served as Controller of its Western Hemisphere Division. She used to refer to FitzGerald as ‘Dear Garret”.

Park’s last MI6 post was as Controller of the Western Hemisphere, where she oversaw efforts to mislead the Americans into believing the Provisional IRA was linked to the Soviet Union and to tarnish Fianna Fáil’s reputation among Irish-American politicians by associating them with the IRA.

Park was a member of the Special Forces Club, where she regularly mingled with ex-SOE, SAS, and MI5/MI6 personnel.

Margaret Thatcher appointed her to the BBC Board.

Park was a ruthless operator and deeply involved in the machinations behind the murder of Patrice Lumumba. He was captured and handed over to his enemies. He was shot, after which his body was dissolved in sulfuric acid. The murder was designed to help British and other European business interests extract minerals.

An unapologetic colonialist, she told the Daily Telegraph in April 2003:

FitzGerald asked his first Cabinet if any of them were members of secret organisations. He did not disclose that he was a member of the secretive pro-NATO Bilderberg Group, which had been set up with CIA funds.

It is not known how or when FitzGerald became involved with this group, but he did attend its 1977 annual meeting at Cesme, Turkey, in 1975 while Minister for Foreign Affairs. It is not known if he went to Turkey (and no doubt other meetings) with Taoiseach Cosgrave’s knowledge and permission. He definitely attended the 1977 Bilderberg meeting in Torquay, England. And in 1984, when he was Taoiseach, he attended the secretive group’s meeting in Stockholm.

None of this was made known to the public. In 1985, during his visit to the US, it was discovered that he was secretly attending a Bilderberg meeting in New York. Reports reached Ireland via the US media.       

Fitzgerald was also a member of the Trilateral Commission. Not much is known about it – or its curious associations with the British, US and Japanese banking institutions.

46. Atlantic Institute  of International Relations

Fitzgerald was appointed as a Governor of the mysterious Atlantic Institute of International Relations, based in Paris.

It promoted economic, political, and cultural relations among NATO members and the international community. Based in a mansion at 120, rue de Longchamp in Paris. It was founded in 1961 and closed in 1988.

On July 12, 1984, the offices of the Institute were bombed by the left-wing guerrilla group Action Directe,  who described the institute as an ‘imperialist’ organization working for NATO.

47. Kilowatt Pact. (1976)

In 1976, during his tenure as Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ireland joined the Kilowatt Group, a network through which MI6, the CIA, and other NATO intelligence agencies exchanged information on common adversaries.

In 1976, Ireland agreed to the Kilowatt Pact, the secret intelligence equivalent of Interpol. As Foreign Minister, FitzGerald signed the secret treaty. It still operates. Details of it only became available when Iranian students invaded the US embassy in Tehran and seized CIA documents, which identified Ireland as a member of the intelligence cooperation organisation.

In this respect, FitzGerald was the polar opposite of Haughey, who maintained friendly ties with the very people the Kilowatt Group spied upon: the Libyans and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Notably, there is no mention of Kilowatt in FitzGerald’s autobiographies.

48. Denying the State repayment of £36,000 – the equivalent of €833,472.78 in 2026 – or part thereof, for political gain.

In 1970, Capt. James Kelly of Irish Military Intelligence gave Otto Schlueter, a Hamburg arms dealer, funds to purchase the guns which became the subject matter of the Arms Crisis. The arms were never delivered. Schlueter eventually sold them to the Philippines.

Various attempts by the Department of Foreign Affairs were made to recover the money Captain Kelly had paid. Ireland’s Consul in Hamburg, Aidan Molloy, paid him a visit in 1971 to seek the return of £36,000. The approach proved fruitless. £36,000 is the equivalent of €833,472.78 in 2026.

The State issued legal proceedings for the money.

Schlueter made the point that he had held onto the arms and wanted to reduce the price by the costs of storage, insurance, and interest. Schlueter eventually made an offer which was brought to FitzGerald’s attention. The department was satisfied with the offer, but FitzGerald overruled them. That would have meant a trial during which the Arms Crisis would be revisited.

The legal action was held up and eventually abandoned after Fianna Fáil returned to power in 1977 with Jack Lynch as Taoiseach and Haughey in his cabinet.

The State was therefore denied a considerable sum due to the combined machinations of FitzGerald and Lynch. The beneficiary was Schlueter, who was not merely an arms dealer but also a former member of the SS.

49. Airey Neave, Thatcher’s spymaster and friend of Garret FitzGerald.

FitzGerald’s friend Airey Neave was famous for his daring escape from Colditz during World War II and had served in MI9. After World War II he helped British intelligence set up what has become known colloquially as Gladio, an underground army originally established to act as a ‘stay behind’ network in the event Western Europe was overrun by the Soviet Army. It later became a dirty-tricks organisation that was responsible for bombings in Belgium and Italy.

Gladio was behind a series of ‘false flag’ operations and murders during the Cold War. The Belgian Senate investigated the deeply suspicious murder of Julien Lahaut, who had served as the deputy and chairman of the Communist Party of Belgium. He was cold-bloodedly shot dead by two strangers in front of his house in Seraing on the evening of August 18, 1950. A string of bombings formed part of what became known as the ‘strategy of tension’ to create anti-communist feelings in Western Europe. The Bologna train station bombing of August 1980 is also attributed to far-right Italian fascists, aided and abetted by Gladio in the deep background. 85 people were slaughtered, while over 200 were wounded.

Liam Cosgrave resigned as leader of Fine Gael and was replaced by FitzGerald.

Charles Haughey succeeded Lynch in late 1979.

While Haughey remained an enigma to the British establishment and a figure of deep suspicion, FitzGerald continued to be a regular visitor to the British Embassy, where he provided diplomats with political information. Britain’s National Archives contain papers detailing how FitzGerald supplied the Embassy with information about the circumstances surrounding Jack Lynch’s resignation in 1979.

51. Flawed pedigree, snobbery lies and the Arms Crisis (1979).

On the morning that Haughey first became Taoiseach, FitzGerald told one of his TDs that he ‘didn’t wish Haughey well’. Later that day in the Dail chamber, where the laws of defamation do not apply, he accused Haughey of having a ‘flawed pedigree’. He didn’t explain what he meant by this. During a distinctly separate part of the speech, FitzGerald spoke about the 1970 Arms Trial. The ‘flawed pedigree’ slur was hardly, therefore, a reference to that.

His dislike of Haughey was so intense that when the Sunday Independent reported, wrongly as it happened, in a tiny back-page gossip item, that Fine Gael backbench Deputy Michael Keating had disassociated himself from the slur in a conversation with Haughey, FitzGerald awoke Keating at 1.30 a.m. on Sunday morning to ask if the report was true.

‘Most politicians come up through the process – TDs or Senators, Junior Ministers, Senior Ministers by a more or less steady process. In his case that whole process halted in May 1970 and his political progress and pedigree was flawed at that particular point.‘

In other words, Haughey was alleged to lack the necessary uninterrupted experience, due to an absence from power in the 1970s while on the backbenches, to become a good Taoiseach.

Over time, the ISB obtained the additional men, vehicles and a new computer system, although the new communications network never materialised.

According to a confidential brief prepared by the Northern Ireland Office on 15 May 1980, the security forces of Northern Ireland and the Republic were

..  making substantial inroads into the terrorists’ supplies and are restricting their ability to mount operations. But despite this the Provisional IRA in particular still has the capacity to attack and destroy but they are turning increasingly to soft targets. … The Garda and the RUC seem to be working together well in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, we have no cause for complacency. The terrorists still have a considerable capacity to disrupt the lives of ordinary citizens on both sides of the border with the aim of undermining the policies (presumably of both governments) … It seems to me that the best way forward is to maintain the present pattern of professional liaison between the Garda and the RUC, without undue publicity; the results will speak for themselves. We both continue to reassure (the Irish) of our support, but let them get on with the practical business of prevention and detection.

The RUC was particularly happy. In his biography, Holding The Line, former RUC Chief Constable Sir John Hermon recorded that in the period 1980/81:

‘It was also a source of personal satisfaction that the Commissioner of the Garda Siochana [Patrick MacLaughlin] kept in regular contact with me. Following the appointment of Assistant Commissioner Joe Ainsworth [as intelligence Chief in December 1979] there was a noticeable increase in the attrition rate against terrorists in the Republic of Ireland. Within the resources available to the Gardai, which had been considerably enhanced by Commissioner Patrick MacLaughlin in 1980/81, co-operation between the two forces was extremely good.’

Haughey let the brothers serve their sentences without interference after becoming Taoiseach in late 1979.

However, when FitzGerald became Taoiseach for the first time in 1981, one of his early initiatives was to release the Littlejohns. This sent a clear signal to the British intelligence community that FitzGerald harboured no particular animosity towards them. Conversely, Haughey was wary of anyone associated with MI6.

Although FitzGerald justified the release of the Littlejohns on purported humanitarian grounds related to ill health.

However, the brothers were not ill.

Within a year, Kenneth Littlejohn committed at least one armed robbery in the UK, was captured, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to six years imprisonment—hardly the behaviour of a sick man.

In 1981, FitzGerald was informed about the activities of British agents attached to an entity called ‘The Cell’, operating in Dublin. One of their tactics was to mingle with people they hoped would provide information about Haughey.

This information was relayed by a journalist to the then Lord Mayor of Dublin, Michael Keating. Keating informed FitzGerald, who took no action.

56. A tramp at the door.

By 1981 FitzGerald had become terrified of Republicans. According to the late Ed Moloney:

‘There was one incident during the hunger strikes of 1981 that stands out as symptomatic of the FitzGerald paranoia about the Provos. It happened one night when a bearded, hairy and doubtless very smelly tramp called at chez FitzGerald in South Dublin, knocked the door and was about to beg for money. His wife Joan FitzGerald answered the door and nearly fainted with fright. That night RTE announced that Gardai were investigating reports that members of the Provisional IRA had attempted to attack the Taoiseach’s family and Mrs FitzGerald was suffering from shock  in the aftermath. In other words in the world inhabited by les FitzGeralds there was no distinction between the threat offered by one of Dublin’s indigent poor and an IRA terrorist.‘

57. The Criminal Conversation Bill.

In Opposition in the early 1980s, Michael Keating produced the Criminal Conversation Bill (a family law issue). Later, when Deputy Keating managed to get the Bill onto the order paper, conservative Fine Gael deputies opposed to it, asked Keating how he had managed this. FitzGerald said, ‘I was wondering that myself.’ This was deceitful because Fitzgerald had told Keating to put it there himself.

58. GUBU Bugging (1983)

Haughey’s Fianna Fáil Government of 1982 bugged conversations and tapped phones.

Garret FitzGerald purported to be outraged.

There was a heave against Haughey inside Fianna Fáil, but he retained his leadership.

But FitzGerald himself had been in a ministerial position of responsibility when similar electronic surveillance was carried out by the Cosgrave Government.

As Minister for Foreign Affairs, he should have been aware that Irish security officers were tapping not only the Russian embassy in Dublin, as anyone might expect, but also phones at the British and American embassies.

If he didn’t know that, he must have learned about it in 1983, when former Fianna Fáil Justice Minister Sean Doherty called a press conference at the Burlington Hotel to disclose all of this. But Doherty, apparently acting on advice tendered to him through Fianna Fail Press Secretary Tony Fitzpatrick, cancelled his press conference because of the possibility of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

During the era of the Cosgrave Government, of which FitzGerald was a member, several journalists’ phones were tapped. They included Vincent Browne and Tim Pat Coogan. Later, when FitzGerald became Taoiseach, phone tapping continued.

Browne subsequently sued the state. The state paid him substantial damages in a settlement before the case reached court.

59. Duke of Norfolk, 1982.

FitzGerald was a friend of the Duke of Norfolk, an influential Conservative peer in the House of Lords. During the November 1982 general election campaign, the Duke’s relationship with FitzGerald made headlines after Charles Haughey exposed him as a former British spymaster.

The Duke had served as Head of the Defence Intelligence Service (DIS) in the 1960s. However, in 1982, he attempted to mislead the Irish media by denying any affiliation with MI6 (also known as the Secret Intelligence Service). No one had actually accused him of being in MI6. Deceitfully, he relied on the media’s confusion between MI6, attached to the Foreign Office, and the DIS, part of the Ministry of Defence. At the time, he told reporters:

‘I have never been in the Secret Intelligence Service. Haughey has just made it up. It’s all absolute nonsense.’

One of the Duke’s close friends was Sir Brooks Richards, the Intelligence Coordinator in Ireland in 1980. The Duke and Richards socialised regularly at White’s Club in London.

The Irish state was presented with a Dalí picture (some say a sketch) by the Spanish government in 1985. The gift was made directly to FitzGerald, the then Taoiseach. FitzGerald put it in his attic for three years with no one any the wiser. Then, three years later, he suddenly ‘remembered’ what he had done and lodged the picture in a bank vault.

See also: riddle-of-garrets-missing-dali

FitzGerald wrote not one but two memoirs. Between them, they dissected the minutiae of his life, but, alas, nothing whatsoever about the missing Dali.

When he made his move, he sent the late Martin Mansergh to contact Fr. Alex Reid.

I spoke to Martin Mansergh about Haughey’s hesitancy to move on a few occasions. Mansergh was writing his memoirs and intended to cover this issue in great detail. Sadly, he died before he completed his book.

Mansergh confirmed to me that he moved with such stealth that John Hume of the SDLP was unaware of Haughey’s role when he joined the process. In fact, Hume believed that he was the political instigator of the development.

Haughey would have moved sooner and faster but for his concerns about being smeared again, especially by Dublin media. Lives may have been lost.

Haughey never sought credit for the peace process. Hume, who toiled on the project, ultimately won a much-deserved Nobel Peace Prize.

63. Maggie’s memoirs.

Wretchedly for FitzGerald, he was the victim of a cruel parody by Foreign Office officials at an amateur Whitehall Christmas pantomime where his perceived grovelling to the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, 1976 – 1979, Roy Mason, provided much amusement.

And what of Haughey? Incredibly, in her biography, Thatcher revealed that she actually admired Haughey while feeling irritated by FitzGerald.

This article is an expansion of a much shorter version that appeared in Village magazine in October 2025.

David Burke is the author of four books published by Mercier Press.

These books can be purchased here: 

https://www.mercierpress.ie/?s=Puppet

https://www.mercierpress.ie/?s=Kitson

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/an-enemy-of-the-crown

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/deception-and-lies