Burke An Enemy of the Crown

The British Secret Service Campaign against Charles Haughey
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78117-822-5
Verlag: Mercier Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

In the early 1970s, Sir Maurice Oldfield of the British Secret Service, MI6, embarked upon a decade-long campaign to derail the political career of Charles Haughey. The English spymaster believed Haughey was a Provisional IRA godfather, therefore, a threat to Britain. Oldfield was assisted by unscrupulous British agents and by a shadowy group of conspirators inside the Irish state's security apparatus, all sharing his distrust of Haughey. Escaping scrutiny for their actions until now, Enemy of the Crown examines more than a dozen instances of their activities. Oldfield was conspiratorial by nature and lacked a moral compass. Involved in regime change plots and torture in the Middle East, in the Republic of Ireland he engaged with convicted criminals as agent provocateurs as well as the exploitation of pedophile rings in Northern Ireland. He and his spies engaged in dirty tricks as they ran vicious smear campaigns in Ireland, Britain and the US. MI6 and IRD intrigues were deployed to impede Haughey's bid to secure a position on Fianna Fáil's front bench and any return to respectability. London's hateful drive against Haughey saw no let-up after Fianna Fáil's triumphal return to power in 1977 which saw them win a large majority of seats in the Dáil. When Haughey sought a place at Cabinet, Oldfield and his spies devised more dirty tricks to impede him. While Haughey was suspicious of MI6 interference, he had no inkling of the full extent of London's clandestine efforts to destroy him. By circulating lurid stories about him, they played a major part in trying to prevent him succeed Jack Lynch as Taoiseach in 1979. This book attempts to shed light on some of the anti-Haughey conspiracies which took place during the period of the late 1960s right through to the early 1980s.

David Burke, a practising barrister, writes on many issues for Village Magazine. He is the author of Deception and Lies: The Hidden History of the Arms Crisis 1970 and Kitson's Irish War.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Burke, David

Leseproben

Haughey’s Republican Pedigree

Seán Haughey was one of the most capable and trusted officers who served under Michael Collins during the War of Independence. He was a man to whom Collins entrusted a vital role in a secret mission, one that could have changed Irish history had Collins not perished at Béal na mBláth in August 1922. Seán and his wife Sarah (née McWilliams) were born and reared almost next door to each other on small farms in the adjacent townlands of Knockaneil and Stranagone, near ‘Fenian’ Swatragh, a few miles from Maghera town, Co. Derry. It was deep inside unionist territory. Seán Haughey, who was born in 1897, served as the second in command and later officer in command of the South Derry Battalion of the Irish Volunteers during the War of Independence. Sarah, who was born in 1901, also played an active part during the campaign. A price was placed on Haughey’s head and he was hunted relentlessly by the Black and Tans. One of his hiding places was an underground bunker, where he and his colleagues had to live in cold, damp and wet conditions.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on 21 December 1921 and ratified the following January. Yet, hostilities persisted in the north.1 On 19 March 1922, 200 men surrounded the town of Maghera. They cut the telephone wires before attacking the Royal Irish Constabulary barracks from which they removed 17 rifles, 5,000 rounds of ammunition and a sergeant as a hostage. The next day the IRA in Derry attacked a series of mills, sawmills, stables and outhouses. Burntollet Bridge (which would become infamous in 1968) was blown up.

On 30 March 1922, Michael Collins and Sir James Craig attempted to bring about an end to this cycle of violence. In return for a halt to IRA operations, it was agreed that it would be open to Catholics to join the Special Constabulary (B-Specials) and to assume responsibility for policing nationalist areas. In mixed nationalist/loyalists areas, an equal force of Catholic and Protestant officers would be deployed. Meanwhile, mixed units would conduct all searches, with British soldiers in attendance. The B-Specials were to wear uniforms with identification numbers and surrender their arms once they had finished their duties.

On 31 March 1922, royal assent was given to the Free State Bill that would evolve after further deliberations into the new constitution of the Free State. The ceasefire which Collins and Craig negotiated proved a failure. On 2 April 1922, 500 B-Specials swooped across Derry and Tyrone detaining up 300 men for questioning. Only four were found to be in the IRA. The remainder of the IRA membership escaped to Co. Donegal.

By now the IRA was on the verge of a split into pro- and anti-Treaty factions. The volunteers who lived in the new jurisdiction in Northern Ireland were virtually all anti-Treaty. Collins did not intend to abandon them. He arranged to supply them with arms, something that offered him a possible way to prevent a split in the IRA. It also provided an opportunity to covertly undermine the new unionist regime across the new border.

Seán Haughey became involved in the clandestine operation overseen by Collins to smuggle weapons across the new border to nationalists so they could defend themselves.2 Most, if not all, of the arms were supplied by the IRA in Cork. Commandant-General Joseph Sweeney, of the First Northern Division of the IRA in Donegal, revealed that Collins sent an emissary to him ‘to say that he was sending arms to Donegal, and that they were to be handed over to certain persons – he didn’t say who they were – who would come with credentials to my headquarters. Once we got them we had fellows working for two days with hammers and chisels doing away with the serials on the rifles ... About 400 rifles and all were taken to the Northern volunteers by Dan McKenna and Johnny [aka Seán] Haughey.’3

Some of the guns were stored in rural Donegal at the home of George Diver of Killygordon, albeit against his wishes. They were hidden by his daughter Kathleen, under the mattress where she slept. George feared that the family’s house would be burned down if word reached unionists about the guns. Killygordon, a remote rural village, was close to the Tyrone border.4

Another IRA man, Thomas Kelly, collected a consign- ment of 200 Lee-Enfield rifles and ammunition from Eoin O’Duffy, the leader of the Monaghan Brigade of the IRA. Many years later, Kelly revealed that the ‘rifles and ammo were brought by Army transport to Donegal and later moved into County Tyrone in the compartment of an oil tanker. Only one member of the IRA escorted the consignment through the Special Constabulary Barricade at the Strabane/Lifford Bridge. He was Seán Haughey, father of Charles Haughey.’5

The death of Collins in August 1922 brought about an end to the arms smuggling operation.6 Seán Haughey subsequently joined the Irish Army and rose to become a commandant. He was stationed in Castlebar in September 1925, when his third child Charles was born at the barracks in the town. After he retired in March 1928, the family went to live in Sutton, Co. Dublin, before moving on again in 1930 to Dunshauglin, Co. Meath, where they took up farming on a 100-acre holding. All told, the couple had seven children: Maureen, Seán, Charles, Eithne, Bridie, Pádraig, and Eoghan.

Seán Haughey developed multiple sclerosis, became severely incapacitated and was forced to sell his farm. His family blamed the atrocious conditions at the bunker in which he had camped during the War of Independence for the destruction of his health. In 1933, he moved his family to a small two-storey house, 12 Belton Park Road, Donnycarney, in Dublin. After this, the children were reared in modest cir- cumstances. While they were growing up, they received regular visits from their northern relatives and friends with news and stories about what was going on across the border. In the other direction, Charles and his brother Seán spent extended summer holidays in Swatragh, Co. Derry. Charles stayed with his mother’s parents at Stranagone, about half a mile up the mountain road leading from Swatragh. During these holidays, Charles Haughey and his cousins were sometimes stopped at night by B-Special patrols, something he found unpleasant, sinister and often quite intimidating. These patrols usually intercepted them as they were returning to Stranagone and were made up of men from the neighbouring areas who were known to them, but were never friendly; all were drawn from the loyalist community. They were quick to display their authority. Charles Haughey felt there was an element of ‘croppies lie down’ in their behaviour.7

The threat of violence in Northern Ireland was ever present. In 1935, sectarian rioting cost eleven deaths and 574 injuries in Belfast. In 1938, after a visit to the cinema at Maghera, Charles Haughey, his brother Seán and uncle Owen emerged from the building to witness a riot, during which loyalists fired rifles at unarmed nationalists. The event forged a lasting impression on Haughey. It was, he felt, a visceral experience of what life was like for some nationalists in Northern Ireland; an insight that was shared by very few, if any, of his contemporaries in Dublin, especially the middle-class children he would soon encounter at University College Dublin (UCD).8 Many of them looked down on him as a ‘scholarship boy’.

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Despite the difficulties his family faced, Charles flourished.9 Having come first in the Dublin Corporation scholarship examination, he went on to study commerce at UCD, and won a bursary. In 1941, at the age of fifteen, Haughey joined the Local Defence Force, the then reserve force of the Irish Army. He rose to become a lieutenant and enjoyed it so much at one time that he considered a career in the army.10

On 7 May 1945, the British government announced that Nazi Germany had surrendered to the Allies. This triggered jubilant celebrations by Trinity College students who raised a string of flags, including a Union Jack, over College Green. Word soon spread to UCD, then located a few minutes’ walk away from Trinity College at Earlsfort Terrace, where Haughey was a student. ‘This generated a wave of anger. The reason we were so furious was because the [Trinity] students were goading and insulting the rest of us’, said Seamus Sorohan, a friend of Haughey’s who later had a distinguished career as a barrister.11 Some of the students on the roof of Trinity were singing ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ while the Irish Tricolour fluttered beneath those of Allied flags, something which provoked criticism from the passing public. In response to the complaints, some of the Trinity students hauled the Tricolour down and set it ablaze, before throwing it onto the ground beneath them. This ‘inflamed the fury’ of Sorohan, Haughey and others from UCD. That night they tore down a Union Jack flag which they found hanging on a lamppost at the bottom of Grafton Street and set it alight. They then congregated on Middle Abbey Street and marched over O’Connell Bridge towards Trinity College, breaking windows in the offices of The Irish Times on Fleet Street...