Haughey wasn't the gunrunner
Gunrunners: The Covert Arms Trail to Ireland By Sean Boyne O'Brien Press, ?19.95
John Cooney Intriguing insights into the strained relationship between Charlie Haughey and Neil Blaney over their gunrunning roles in the 1970 Arms Crisis are presented by author Sean Boyne in this book, the most extensive work on IRA and Loyalist arms smuggling published to date.
According to Boyne, Blaney, the then Minister for Agriculture, was the driving force behind the covert importation of arms financed by Irish Government funds for the besieged nationalist community in the North on the outbreak of the Troubles, while Haughey, the Minister for Finance, had only a peripheral role in the actual event, for which he was hauled through the courts.
Yet, ironically, Blaney, the mastermind of various operations that led to his and Haughey's dismissal from Government by Taoiseach Jack Lynch, was cleared in the early stages of legal proceedings at the District Court level. In contrast, Haughey was charged, though later acquitted, with conspiracy to import arms.
In an interview with Boyne, John Kelly, a northern republican who was also found not guilty, suggests that Haughey may have felt a sense of having been betrayed by Blaney on account of the apparent ease with which the Donegal man engineered his way out of prosecution.
For Haughey, the Arms Trial was the prelude to seven years in the political wilderness before his recall to Cabinet by Lynch in 1977. By 1979, Blaney, estranged from Fianna Fail as an Independent TD, won a remarkable election victory in the first direct elections to the European Parliament, but he had come to regret that he did not go the whole distance in the Arms Trial which had allowed Haughey to claim his republican suit.
The central figure, however, of Boyne's chapter on the arms crisis is neither Haughey nor Blaney, but Otto Schluter, the wily German arms dealer with a reputation for cheating clients. Along with John McAleese of RTE, I was in the court in Hamburg in May 1977 when the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition led by Liam Cosgrave was trying to get £20,000 back from Schluter.
The case was adjourned to the following June 22, which turned out to be six days after a new Dail elected Jack Lynch as Taoiseach of a Fianna Fail Government in which Charles Haughey was appointed Minister for Health. Lynch did not pursue Schluter, as the Hamburg case would have embarrassed Haughey. It was expedient for Lynch to let the arms crisis fade, like Schluter, into obscurity. It is uncovering covert arms deals which paramilitaries would prefer to remain hidden that is the impressive achievement of Sean Boyne, the Political Editor of the Sunday World and a regular contributor to Jane's Intelligence Review.
The book's origins go back to 1972 when, as a young reporter for the Irish Press, he observed rival Provisional and Official IRA members openly carrying guns in 'Free Derry', whose unilateral freedom from the Queen's writ they had declared. A Dubliner and a UCD history graduate, Boyne was already sufficiently street-wise to contain his curiosity about the provenance of this increasingly sophisticated - and lethal - weaponry. It was only with the peace process decades later that he could quiz the main players about where the guns came from.
The result of Boyne's curiosity is this monumental book, an indispensable contribution to the literature of The Troubles, with invaluable appendices giving detailed lists of the arms imported by the various paramilitary groups. Scholarly and thoroughly documented, the book is highly readable, with vivid pen portraits of the spooks and moles, many of them introduced to the general public for the first time, such as the IRA's main gunrunner in the US, the Mayo-born George Harrison, and MI6 agent, the late Donald Guerry, who foiled two IRA shipments of arms, one from Prague and the other from Libya on the Claudia (the one Martin Ferris was aboard).
Boyne does not romanticise the gunrunners and reminds readers of the victims in both communities who died from imported guns, not least Garda Dick Fallon from a weapon smuggled in by Saor Eire. He shows that the Provos were the best gunrunners and the most efficient killers, accounting for the deaths of more than a quarter of fellow Catholics murdered in the conflict.
John Cooney is the author of The Irish Republican Brotherhood in Scotland, 1916-22.
