Any challenge to the easy and often self-serving assumption that Charles Haughey was the originator of all perfidy in Irish public life is welcome. From that perspective, Michael Heney's Prime Time documentary on an aspect of the 1970 arms trial was a happy contrast to the shameful one-sided series on Desmond O'Malley earlier this year.
Unhappily, the Heney documentary went way over the top and made claims both about the significance of its own revelations and about the arms crisis itself which are unsustainable.
First about the programme's pretensions to have revealed something significantly new about the arms crisis: the claim was based on a document obtained from the National Archives which shows that in February 1970, the then Minister for Defence, Jim Gibbons, told the then Chief of Staff of the Army, Lieut Gen Sean Mac Eoin, that the government had decided that arms and other materials should be made available for distribution to nationalists in Northern Ireland in certain circumstances.
We have known about that directive since the arms trial itself in 1970, 31 years ago. Several journalists, including myself, wrote about this extensively in the period since then (in particular, I wrote about this in a series of articles in Magill magazine in 1980 and in the one of those articles I quoted from the February 1970 directive to the Army). So the breathless pretension of the programme to reveal something that had not been in the public domain previously was absurd.
So were the assertions that the jury in the arms trial had found that the attempted importation of arms in April 1970 was "legal" - all that could be inferred from the jury verdict was that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. Absurd also was the suggestion that the "discovery" of the February 1970 directive showed that the attempted arms importation had government sanction. All it showed was that it may not have been unreasonable for Capt Kelly and others to believe, in the light of that directive and of other actions by the government (such as the provision by the government of training in arms for Derry nationalists in Donegal in late 1969 and the transfer of arms to Dundalk in early April 1970), that the arms importation then under way did indeed have the full sanction of the government.
Certainly, all this raised a reasonable doubt.
What can be said about the arms crisis with some certainty is that Jack Lynch contributed handsomely to the rank confusion that reigned over government policy on Northern Ireland and that this created the ambience for the attempted importation of arms. It can be stated further that there is strong evidence to suggest that Jack Lynch knew from an early stage that James Kelly, an Army intelligence officer, was engaged with Northern republicans and he did little or nothing to stop it. We also know that Jack Lynch certainly knew of the involvement of Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney in an attempted arms importation from early April 1970 and he permitted them to remain in the cabinet.
He fired them only when Liam Cosgrave came to him with an anonymous note on May 5th, 1970. We also know that Jack Lynch stood by Jim Gibbons in that crisis.
Gibbons certainly knew of the attempted arms importation (he admitted this in the arms trial) and either he told Jack Lynch about it or he didn't. If he did, then Jack Lynch knew from a much earlier date than he ever acknowledged, in which case why did he not act sooner to stop it.
Alternatively, Jim Gibbons did not tell Jack Lynch about it, in which case he was in on the escapade and should have been fired as well.
There is reason to believe (as Justin O'Brien states in his book The Arms Crisis) that, as far as Jack Lynch was concerned, the criminal justice procedure was used (through the arms trial) as part of a power struggle within Fianna Fβil and that an injustice was done to all the defendants in that trial, including Charles Haughey. This does not mean that Jack Lynch did not make an enormous contribution to this country but merely to suggest that his record was not unblemished (no record is).
But all this does not absolve Charles Haughey. If it was the case that the attempted importation of arms was viewed by him as in accordance with government policy, why did he not say that and instead pretend to the court that he did not know about the attempted importation? Also, if the attempted importation was part of government policy, why did he hide it from the Taoiseach at the time and how was it that the cabinet minister who could have been expected to have most approved of it (Kevin Boland), did not know anything about it when Haughey told him about the escapade in March 1970? (Boland in fact was appalled at the suggestion that arms should be imported and handed over to persons over whom the government had no control.)
In a new biography of Jack Lynch by Irish Independent journalist Bruce Arnold, all the difficult questions concerning Lynch's handling of the arms crisis are glided over (as is every other difficult question one could think of concerning Lynch's entire career). A far more reliable and balanced biography, The Nice Fellow by T. Ryle Dwyer, also recently has been published.
It is as though any acknowledgment that Charles Haughey may not have been thoroughly evil and all his opponents consistently and unswervingly honourable will enthrone wickedness as the rubric of our politics. This has been the agenda of "Stickies", others such as Garret FitzGerald and of course Conor Cruise O'Brien, along with a phalanx of dim-witted hangers-on. But the riposte is not to mirror their prejudice with the opposing agenda, rather to let the facts speak for themselves.
vbrowne@irish-times.ie