Conference tallis::celt

1175.0. "Secret Irish invasion plan revealed" by TALLIS::DARCY () Wed Jan 27 1993 00:44

    Irish Officials plotted in '70 to invade Ulster,
    BBC says
    
    (Reuters) LONDON - Some members of the Irish government
    plotted secretly to invade Northern Ireland in 1970 using
    the IRA as their own guerrilla force, according to a
    British television documentary to be shown tomorrow.
    
    The BBC "Timewatch" program alleges that secret bank
    accounts were set up along with weapons training.
    
    Called "The Spakrs That Lit the Bonfire," the report
    says Cabinet ministers used promises of money and guns
    to boost the element in the Irish Republican Army that
    broke away from the movement's official wing to form
    the Provisional IRA.
    
    "We didn't help to create" the Provisional IRA, "but we
    certainly would have accelerated, by what assistance we
    could have given, their emergence as a force," says Neill
    Blaney, who was Irish agricultural minister at the time.
    
    Blaney says on the program that he saw the plan to send
    Irish troops across the border into Ulster not as an
    invasion but as "the home army entering home territory."
    
    "I don't regret what I did," he says.
    
    In April 1970, with fierce rioting in Belfast, the Irish
    government sent troops to the border.  According to the
    program, the troops had 500 weapons that would have been
    handed over to the IRA to help in the defense of Roman
    Catholic areas.
    
    The troops did not cross the border and the guns remained
    in Dundalk, it says.
    
    It asserts that four secret bank accounts were set up by
    then-Finance Minister Charles Haughey, later to become
    prime minister.
    
    In 1970, Haughey was charged with conspiring to smuggle
    arms to nationalist guerrillas in Ulster.  Though acquitted,
    he was forced to resign, but later returned to power.
    
    Accoding to "Timewatch," one account was to be used to
    buy guns for use in Northern Ireland.  Other money was
    smuggled in cash across the border every week and used to
    pay the men manning the barricades in Catholic areas of
    Belfast.
    
    "Timewatch" said Haughey and Jack Lynch, the Fianna Fail
    prime minister during the period, refused to take part
    in the program.

    A couple of questions
    	What type of weapons were to be handed over?
        What decisions led them to stop?               
    
    The invasion probably would have drawn the Republic
    into a contracted battle and weaken its economy and
    tourism base.  The implications of such a attack
    however would be complex at best.
    
    Obviously, you wonder what other plots have been
    contemplated since 1970...

The programme traced the events leading up to the introduction of the British
Army into the equation. It did not shrink from criticism of the then Labour 
Government, Big Ian, the Stormont Goverment or the Irish Government.

Essentially the thesis was that nobody outside Northern Ireland wanted to know
the extent of civil rights abuses and were totally wrong footed once the attacks
on the civil rights campaigners began.

The argument of the Dublin Government 'hawks' seemed to be:

1. Arm selected (non Marxist) nationalist in the north

2. move the Irish Army into Derry, Newry (and possibly West Belfast)

3. Provoke U.N. intervention

The arms concerned were FCA surplus rifles (Lee Enfield 1930s vintage, I seem
to remember).

The whole plan was as half-baked and ill-prepared as the British Government
intervention.

The most chilling speaker was Joe Cahill of the Provos who, when asked about
the bombing of civilian targets in the '70s, smiled and said that in a war 
civilians always suffer.

The press reports that preceeded the programme, were totaly misleading.