Charles Haughey resisting temptation
CHARLES HAUGHEY AND THE DANGERS FOR THE SOUTHERN GOVERNMENT
Looked at from the point of view of the southern government, however, this was a very dangerous principle. Towards a new Ireland had recognised the right of the Ulster Protestants to maintain the link with Britain 'in the absence of a settlement which they will regard as better than their present position.' It had argued that the Catholic sectarian nature of the Republic was a product of the fact that the Protestant element had been abstracted from it by partition. The Republic of Ireland would have been a very different country, culturally and economically, had the Ulster Protestants been a part of it. This was putting a responsibility on the Republic to change in such a way as to satisfy the desires of a people - the Ulster Protestants - traditionally hostile to its Catholic and Gaelic culture. It implied a considerable infringement of the right of the people of the Republic to order their own affairs. It would also - had the full SDLP programme been implemented - have implicated their government in the messy business of maintaining order in Northern Ireland - 'the provision of a firm basis for concerted governmental and community action against terrorist organisations', to quote the document prepared by the British government to introduce the Sunningdale principles. (5)
(5) Northern Ireland constitutional proposals, HMSO, March 1973, Cmnd 5259, p.30.
The person who seems to have understood this most clearly was Charles Haughey. Haughey could hardly be accused of indifference to the wellbeing of the Northern Catholics. At the time when the IRA - having committed itself fully to the civil rights struggle as the way forward - had lost its military capacity, Haughey was instrumental in the then Irish government policy of helping the Catholic community arm itself against the intense and murderous assault it was enduring at the hands of the Protestants. His political career was nearly ruined when the government of Jack Lynch backtracked and tried to pretend that this was an individual and illegal initiative on the part of the ministers and army personnel involved. (6) But Haughey never supported Hume's idea that the Irish government should share responsibility with the British government for running Northern Ireland. Nor that the Republic, having fought hard to secure its independence, should bend its own culture and mores into a shape designed to attract the population of Northern Ireland that considered itself to be British.
(6) For this understanding of the 'arms crisis' see Angela Clifford: The Arms Conspiracy Trial, Ireland 1970: The Prosecution of Charles Haughey, Captain Kelly and Others (Arms Crisis Series), Belfast Magazine, 2009: Michael Heney: The Arms Crisis of 1970: The Plot that Never Was, London, Apollo, 2020; David Burke: Deception and Lies: The Hidden History of the Arms Crisis, Cork, Mercier Press, 2020.
Haughey's disagreement with Hume was evident in the 1980s when Hume persuaded the government of Garret Fitzgerald (who had been Irish Foreign Secretary at the time of the Sunningdale Agreement) to launch the 'New Ireland Forum'. The Forum's report published in May 1984 bears a marked resemblance to the SDLP's document of 1972, Towards a New Ireland. It amounts to an argument for what it calls 'joint authority', a joint rule by the two sovereign governments in which the role of a devolved assembly is more marginal than it is in Towards a New Ireland: 'Joint authority would involve shared rule by the British and Irish governments. Although this could be exercised directly, there would be enabling provision for the exercise of major powers by a locally-elected Assembly and Executive.' (ie it could operate quite happily in the absence of any locally elected assembly, given the apparent impossibility at the time of bringing one into existence. Nothing was said about the Macrory gap and simple objective need for a reform of local government structures. Nor was anything said for or against Northern Ireland sending representatives to Westminster or the Dail).
'Joint authority', however, is only one of three options put forward in the Forum report. There was also a 'unitary state' and - apparently on the principle that all good things come in threes - a federal/confederal state, essentially Northern Ireland remaining as a separate state within an Irish confederation, a proposal I think from the Irish Labour Party that was never pursued with any vigour. Effectively there were two proposals - unitary state or joint authority. John Hume had clearly hoped to secure the support of parties representing 'over ninety per cent of the nationalist population and almost three-quarters of the entire population of Ireland' for joint authority. He was willing to concede unanimous support for any of the three options, including joint authority. But in the event Haughey, as leader of Fianna Fail, then in opposition, insisted that the only proposal that had secured unanimous support was 'unitary state.'
Although he had initiated discussions with the British government when he was Taoiseach Haughey was also very reticent with regard to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. To take up Pat Walsh's account in Resurgence (p.338):
'Haughey opposed the Hillsborough Treaty, despite considerable pressure even from within his own party, on the basis that it was a purely inter-Governmental arrangement that excluded the internal political forces of the North. He pointed out to the Irish negotiators of the Hillsborough Treaty that any recognition made of British sovereignty in the North would be unConstitutional. The Agreement they signed could not override the Constitution [in the event, in 1998, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution which claimed sovereignty over Northern Ireland, were changed through a referendum - PB]. He described the North as a "failed entity" that should not be meddled with. In this way he made a grand Republican gesture against the Treaty that helped him disengage from the North on the basis that to do so [ie to engage with the North - PB] would be futile and simply create antagonism ...
'Haughey's view of the Hillsborough Treaty, and his refusal to fish in troubled waters was proved to be fully justified by the extent of Unionist opposition to the Treaty. Later, taking it to be an established fact, he moved towards lukewarm support of it. And, when he returned as Taoiseach, he kept its apparatus in being, but operated it in the most minimal forms possible in co-operation with Tom King, the new British Secretary of State, who also saw it as an antagonising influence on the North.'