The central theme in a recent Spotlight programme on BBC Northern Ireland was that Jack Lynch, who was Taoiseach at the time, was fully aware during 1969-1970 of the involvement of members of his Government in an attempt to import arms illegally into the State and that the attempt was, in fact, a Government-authorised operation.
Nobody on the programme asked the question as to why a government which regularly imported guns for the State's security forces should resort to a most bizarre and impractical exercise to bring in guns from a very dubious dealer in Hamburg when it could so easily have obtained all the weapons it wanted through the normal channels.
In fact, on March 25th, 1970, when Capt James Kelly and John Kelly, who were subsequently charged with conspiring to import arms illegally, were waiting at Dublin Port for a consignment of weapons they had purchased from the Hamburg dealer, Schleuter, and which never arrived, a platoon of regular soldiers under the command of an Army sergeant were able to collect from another vessel a consignment of weapons.
They had no difficulty in collecting the guns and taking them to a Dublin barracks where they were, in due course, issued to members of the Army. All the documentation for the delivery was in order, unlike the other consignment for which an "end user's certificate" had not been obtained and consequently, the guns could not be loaded at the point of embarkation.
Similarly, when the attempt to bring in the guns switched to Vienna and efforts were made to transport them on an Aer Lingus passenger plane to Dublin, the attempt failed when it was discovered by an official at Dublin Airport that no clearance had been obtained from IATA for the transport on a passenger plane of guns and ammunition. The only two Government departments which had authority to seek clearance from IATA, Defence and Justice, were contacted and knew nothing about the importation.
The Garda Special Branch was informed and Dublin Airport was surrounded by armed detectives, leading later to the arrest and charging of the Minister for Finance, Charles J. Haughey; the Minister for Agriculture, Neil Blaney; Capt James Kelly, who had tried unsuccessfully to get the guns aboard the plane in Vienna; John Kelly, Belfast republican leader, who was waiting at Dublin Airport to collect the guns on arrival under the pretence of being an official of the Department of Finance; and Albert Luyckx, a Belgian businessman who owned a hotel in Sutton and was a friend of Neil Blaney.
Informations were refused against Blaney in the District Court and he was discharged. All the others, except Haughey, defended their actions on the grounds that they were acting in accordance with Government policy and with full authority. Haughey claimed he knew nothing about the operation and was quite unaware his co-defendants were engaged in trying to import guns into Dublin. All four were found not guilty by a jury.
It was hardly surprising the two Kellys regarded their activities as being in accordance with Government policy. John Kelly had come to Dublin with a number of delegations seeking guns from the Government to defend the nationalist population, particularly in Belfast, where Catholics were terrified of being murdered by gangs of marauding loyalists, led, in some cases, by members of the RUC and B-Specials.
Capt James Kelly, an intelligence officer in the Irish Army, was horrified by what he saw in Derry and Belfast in August 1969. He feared that unless help was given by the Irish Government by way of guns, large numbers of Catholics would be wiped out. (The British army had not arrived at this time). John Kelly claimed that all his contacts with Government Ministers led him to believe that help would be provided and that in a "doomsday" situation, the Dublin Government would send in the Army and would also provide weapons for the nationalist population to defend themselves.
In an interview in The Irish Times on March 19th last, John Kelly repeated his conviction that Jack Lynch knew all about the operation and that their actions were authorised by the Government.
The logic of this interpretation is that other members of the Government such as Paddy Hillery, Erskine Childers, George Colley and Padraig Faulkner were all party to the exercise and approved of it. Having known all of these people and being aware of the strength of their hostility to a body like the Provisional IRA, it is impossible to believe that they would have approved of a clandestine operation of this kind, involving dealings with an arms merchant in Hamburg whom John Kelly had described as a most unsavoury character.
It was difficult for Capt Kelly to believe other than that he was acting with full Government authority in view of the fact that he had regular access to Government Buildings, that he was regularly meeting a senior Minister, Neil Blaney, and that he was also meeting the Minister for Finance, Charles Haughey, and his officials with requests from "his people" in Belfast for money from the £100,000 voted by the Dail for the relief of distress in Northern Ireland.
The requests were never refused, although Haughey later claimed he had no idea the money was being spent on weapons. Capt Kelly was also reporting to his superior officer, Col Michael Hefferon, on the understanding that his reports were being passed on to the Minister for Defence, Jim Gibbons, for submission to the Cabinet. There is no evidence that Gibbons, who was rightly worried about what was happening, ever tried to stop Kelly's activities or to tell Col Hefferon to bring them to an end.
Neither is it surprising that the note which was eventually sent by the gardai to the Fine Gael leader, Liam Cosgrave, in May 1970, named Gibbons and Hefferon as being involved with the others in the conspiracy. The first thing Lynch said to Cosgrave when the Garda note was drawn to his attention was that Gibbons and Hefferon were not involved. Had they been involved, of course, a prosecution could not have been brought against the others because Gibbons and Hefferon would have been seen to act, and have the authority to do so, on behalf of the Department of Defence. Their involvement would have legitimised the entire affair. It could be said that while neither of them played any role in the clandestine operation, they knew it was in progress and did not try to stop it.
Hefferon believed, as he swore in evidence, that Kelly was acting on behalf of the Government and was taking his orders directly from senior members of the Government. Gibbons's failure to go to Lynch and inform him of what was happening was governed by a number of factors, among them being the belief that it was the responsibility of the Minister for Justice, Michael O'Morain, to convey the information he was receiving from the Special Branch to the Taoiseach and to the Government. We have Gibbons's evidence that he tried to fix Kelly up with a job outside the Army, that he went to Haughey and appealed to him to call off the whole operation and that he went to O'Morain and asked him if he had told Lynch. To which, according to Gibbons, O'Morain replied: "No, not yet."
The major question remains - how much did Lynch know and when did he know? One of the more disquieting things about the Spotlight programme, from a historical perspective, was the assertion by an academic, Prof Henry Patterson from the University of Ulster, that "we are increasingly getting evidence that Lynch broadly knew what was going on and that he was dealing out enough rope to Haughey and Blaney to hang themselves". There may well be a growing perception but there is no positive evidence to support this viewpoint. Anybody with the slightest knowledge of Jack Lynch's character would know that the assertion does not stand up to serious consideration.
There are things he should have known and he should have exercised more authority over individual members of the Government, but he exercised a hands-off approach to his Ministers in the knowledge that many of them had more experience than himself and he believed that they would act at all times in the interests of the State.
Like most other people at the time, he could not believe the Garda reports which the Secretary of the Department of Justice, Peter Berry, eventually brought to his attention in April 1970. Berry himself had great difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that Haughey, whom he had admired greatly in his previous role as Minister for Justice, was being named regularly in the reports.
Lynch was greatly shocked at the reports and would have preferred to keep the whole affair quiet while privately rebuking Haughey and Blaney, but the matter was taken out of his hands when Liam Cosgrave made him aware of the Garda note and when, more significantly, the gardai, fearing the whole thing would be hushed up, arrested Capt Kelly.
Lynch told me shortly afterwards that he lost all trust in people after the event. I suggested to him that there were many people around whom he could trust, to which he replied: "How can you expect me to trust anybody after what had happened?"
He also told me that one of the first questions he asked O'Morain before he sacked him as Minister for Justice was why he had not informed him of the Garda reports and that O'Morain said it was because he could not believe that members of the Government, and especially Haughey, were involved in an operation of this kind.
Series concluded