In all his talks with Jack Lynch, Jim Callaghan was minimising Lynch's room for manoeuvre, writes John Bowman
AS BRITISH prime minister in 1978, James Callaghan had baggage on the Northern Ireland issue. A mere decade before, as home secretary, he had been feted by nationalists as their saviour in west Belfast and the Bogside at the start of the Troubles. Nationalist euphoria was because Callaghan had supported the replacement of the RUC on these streets with the British army.
Later, in opposition, Callaghan had written a book on Northern Ireland, A House Divided. This had been published in 1973, the year before the loyalist UWC strike had sabotaged the painstakingly constructed Sunningdale Agreement.
It seemed to many that in that book, Callaghan had spelt out the consequences for the union of just such behaviour. He had written that "if, by sabotage of the political structure of Northern Ireland, the majority deliberately contracted out, then Britain should feel morally free to reconsider the link between herself and Northern Ireland". He explained that Britain could not "be expected to sit patiently and bleed indefinitely if her best efforts face deliberate sabotage by the elected majority of the province".
If unionists had been startled by such opinions, they must have been surprised and reassured a mere five years later, when Callaghan, by now prime minister, was speaking like a comfortable mainstream Ulster unionist.
Not that his minority government was comfortable. Its future was precarious. And those monitoring Anglo-Irish relations in Dublin believed that this was the key to Callaghan's volte-face; they assumed that his sympathy for the unionist agenda was driven by an understanding with the Ulster Unionist MPs at Westminster that they would do nothing to bring down his government.
The first irritant of 1978 in Anglo-Irish relations was the British misinterpretation of Jack Lynch's This Week interview on RTÉ radio in January when his call for a British declaration of interest in Irish unity as the ultimate solution was reported in many quarters as support for a precipitate withdrawal of British troops.
With an election due by autumn 1979, and possible at any time, the British government was manifestly shy of Anglo-Irish summitry. But with a European heads of government meeting scheduled for Copenhagen in April, the Irish ambassador in London, Paul Keating, and Philip Mallet, who headed the Irish desk at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, discussed the possibility of a Lynch-Callaghan meeting when both men would be in Copenhagen.
Keating said that Lynch favoured a tete-a-tete meeting with only notetakers present. But Mallet was not certain whether David Owen as foreign secretary might not want to attend.
Keating said that "this would indicate a new interest in Northern Ireland affairs" for Owen to which Mallet replied that the foreign secretary "had been rather upset at what he regarded as difficulties in our relationships in recent weeks and he was accordingly taking much more interest in this meeting".
On his return to the embassy, Keating was surprised by a contradictory call from Mallet in which he reported that Downing Street was now thinking merely of a 15-minute breakout meeting during the course of the European summit. This caused "considerable concern and disappointment" in Dublin. Lynch insisted he would stay at the summit and "could not treat his colleagues of the nine in this way". Besides he had "much more" to say to Callaghan "than could be contained in a 15-minute talk". When the meeting eventually took place it lasted 95 minutes.
Dermot Nally, from the Office of the Taoiseach, in briefing Lynch on Northern Ireland issues for the meeting, listed "creeping integration" and the need for a political initiative.
He also cited the "negative guarantee" and the need for the British authorities to recognise the legitimate aspiration of the Irish people for unity.
This was to copperfasten what Callaghan had privately agreed at their meeting the previous September, that British policy was still to support Irish unity if in the future a majority in Northern Ireland favoured it. Callaghan had then confirmed this Sunningdale formula while declining to include it in the joint communique on the grounds that it would prove counter-productive.
On the eve of the Copenhagen summit the British ambassador in Dublin protested that Callaghan was "surprised and disturbed" at the Irish approach to the summit; it had even prompted the Danish ambassador in London to call to Downing Street to arrange facilities for the meeting. "This was altogether too intense a preparation."
Nally reassured the British ambassador that he did not see "any reason why the meeting should not be friendly and constructive - rather than confrontational, as Mr Callaghan appeared to fear".
Lynch opened the meeting by admitting that in the recent past "relations had been a bit ruffled". He rejected as "not in accordance with the facts" the Northern Ireland secretary Roy Mason's claim that Dublin was "getting soft on security".
Lynch reserved an especial disdain for what he saw as Mason's cheap shot following the notorious IRA bombing of the La Mon House restaurant in February when he repeatedly briefed - as he put it at Westminster on March 6th - that the bombers "could easily have escaped across the Border". Lynch reckoned such statements "particularly dangerous".
He assured Callaghan that while the Dublin authorities were not "on top of the IRA", they were "on their heels everywhere".
Callaghan having listened to Lynch's opening salvo insisted that he had not sought the meeting to engage in "tremendous quarrels". He was at pains to emphasise that "unity could not be thrust on the people of Northern Ireland".
He dated what he termed "a considerable stirring" on the issue to Lynch's RTÉ interview in January noting that "all parties now seem to be moving in what he would call the Fianna Fáil direction and using Fianna Fáil language".
Lynch reminded him that the aspiration to unity was common to all parties.
Callaghan emphasised that as the media had already erroneously billed the meeting as a confrontation, it was now "extremely important" that the presentation of the outcome "should be agreed and carefully watched".
Lynch read to Callaghan his lengthy notes for the press briefing which would follow and which comprehensively detailed Irish government policy. Callaghan thought the statement "a bit long", adding that he thought it "went outside the limited objective" which the British had for this meeting which they considered private.
And he then added, ominously, that he "wanted to make it clear" that the British did not wish to give Dublin "any particular status" on Northern Irish policy. "It was simply common sense that when difficulties arose they could get together to talk privately."
Lynch expressed total disagreement with this line, which he termed "most dangerous". He reminded Callaghan of the Sunningdale outcome where the Republic "had a very definite and open status". Callaghan replied that "things had happened since then" and he could give "no encouragement on prospects for a new Sunningdale". Lynch reiterated that "any suggestion of a change on this particular issue, emerging from this meeting, could have the most dangerous consequences".
The archives of the Department of the Taoiseach and the Department of Foreign Affairs for 1978 are replete with criticism of how Roy Mason was handling his role as northern secretary. Foreign minister Michael O'Kennedy complained to Lynch in late April of his continuing difficulties with Mason.
"We are told informally at official level that Mr Mason will, albeit reluctantly, be coming to Dublin . . ." but he had not confirmed dates.
O'Kennedy added that three separate sources had told of a press lunch given by Mason for Irish and British journalists on April 14th and that the occasion "was devoted mainly to his attacking the government here in an intemperate and, at times, irrational manner".
Mason had insisted that Lynch could "huff and puff" as much as he liked on the North but would achieve nothing. "Our journalist sources say that the whole presentation was so unbalanced that they agreed among themselves afterwards not to give the occasion any coverage."
Eventually Mason presented himself for a meeting which lasted more than four hours at Iveagh House on May 5th.
Elsewhere in these pages Eamon Phoenix reports on this stormy meeting from the records which have been released in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
The report from the Iveagh House files accords with that account. But notice should also be taken of O'Kennedy's blunt rebuttal of the British suggestion that the Irish were under pressure from their European partners "to sign the Council of Europe Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism".
O'Kennedy pointed out that the Irish approach to extradition was in fact in line with European states, and that there was "no question of our being the renegades of Europe and no one had ever privately or publicly said any such thing to us".
Some days after this stormy meeting Callaghan telephoned Lynch asking how he thought the O'Kennedy-Mason meeting had gone. Lynch replied that he had yet to receive a written report but from what he knew "things appeared to have gone quite well". Callaghan spent the rest of the call attempting to reassure Lynch that his government had made no concession to the Ulster Unionists; and that the proposed increase in Northern Ireland seats at Westminster from 12 to 17 or 18 was not evidence of a drift towards integration but merely an adjustment based on Northern Ireland's population.
This argument was never accepted in Dublin, as the briefing note for Lynch's November meeting with Callaghan attests: "whatever gloss" was put on it, the extra seats were evidence "of a further move in the direction of integration". At the summit, which was predominantly concerned with European issues, Callaghan insisted that on Northern Ireland he "had no political issues to raise at the moment".
But he did conclude with a comment on the re-emergence of a debate in Britain on a possible British withdrawal.
He insisted there was "no basis" for the suggestion that after the election he would support such an initiative.
"The rumour had to be killed; and he would drive it as far down as possible."
He then added that any statement "that would be made would be made only when the use of force in Northern Ireland was finished".
Manifestly in all his exchanges with Lynch in 1978, Callaghan was keeping Anglo-Irish relations on ice, minimising Lynch's room for manoeuvre and insisting that any talk of Irish unity was counter-productive.
In response, Lynch diligently reiterated the aspiration to unity and effectively won over Callaghan to an admission that Dublin was doing all it could on security co-operation.
After he lost power to Thatcher the following year, Callaghan was to admit privately that his government had had no policy on Northern Ireland. He had alarmed his own son-in-law, Peter Jay, by admitting this in front of Ted Kennedy: Jay's alarm derived from the fact that, as British ambassador in Washington, he had spent much of his time trying to explain and defend the Callaghan line.
But readers of the 1978 archives will recognise what Callaghan meant. Politically it was a barren year. This, however, did not mean that the mandarins in Foreign Affairs were not assiduously at work: keeping abreast of politics within the North; monitoring every shift in British opinion; and seeking to ensure that any pressure from the United States would be as well-informed and constructive as possible.
Tomorrow we will examine what the 1978 papers reveal of their work in these fields.