Stagg party
Rawle Knox
The last journey of Frank Stagg will some day be part of Irish legend, though you can be sure that there will be more than one version. While the surprises of it are still fresh and yet untwisted by the folk historians, it is well to try having a straight look at what Liam Cosgrave's government in Dublin was attempting. Two misconceptions are already being fostered in infant growth. One, nurtured mainly in the Dublin press, is that the stern actions of the Garda, at Cosgrave's express order, were intended to impress on outsiders, especially the northern Unionists and the British government, the firmhandedness of the Irish government in dealing with the IRA. (This would be quite out of keeping with the character of Liam Cosgrave, who always lets impressions look after themselves, and leaves the record to straighten itself out behind him.) The other is that the dramatic acquisition of Stagg's coffin by the Garda gave him more heroic publicity than Rory O'Brady, Joe Cahill and all their cohorts could have done. I have heard this view expressed by sensible Britons and Irishmen, but it ignores the plethora of vitriolic speeches that would have been made on the long journey from Dublin to Co. Mayo, all to be conscientiously reported in the Irish newspapers and then thrown back across the Irish Sea, with bitter comment, by the British press—which is read by a majority in the eastern half of the Republic.
So much nastiness, coming at a time when northern Irish politicians are again facing that same blank wall in their search for a way to government--a confrontation, as we know so well by now, that does Irish tempers no good at all—might well have touched off new fuses; and the explosions could have happened in fresh areas. Indeed they still may, and it is a southern Irish dread, whose strength is naturally not fully felt in England, that the situation in the northern six counties may reproduce itself in the south. The bombs in Dublin the evening after Stagg died, which, for all the reflex responses about the British SAS and the Ulster 'Loyalists', could hardly have been other than the work of IRA sympathisers, sounded to many citizens like Ireland's little Hiroshima. ( Incidentally, the British seem already more acclimatised to bombs than the southern Irish. A couple of days later, at the normally crowded lunchtime in the Shelbourne Hotel, which had reopened after its bomb-blast, there were only about half a dozen eating, all audibly recognisable as 'cross-Channel'.) Security ('possible danger to life') was given as the reason for diverting the plane carrying Stagg's coffin from Dublin to
Shannon, and again for removing the corpse by helicopter and depositing it beside a small church in Co. Mayo, in the parish where Stagg was born and lived briefly before his family moved to England. Security, in the long run, was the aim, but there had been such remarkable apathy in Dublin over the whole Stagg affair, coupled with some late indignation against the Provisional IRA for allowing their man to die, that the sudden marshalling of scores of gardai, with army backing, could easily be made to look melodramatic. In fact Cosgrave was logically pursuing his war against the IRA in the field of propaganda which, in the Republic, is the only area in which it can be won, since thus far there is no shooting war in the south—indeed the area in which it must be won if all prospect of that war is to be destroyed.
The Irish government won a successful battle against the IRA in the Herrema kidnapping last November. But that was easy. Two rogue revolutionaries had seized and held captive a foreigner, a guest on Irish soil whose job was to employ Irishmen. There was virtually no public sympathy for the criminals and therefore every encouragement for Cosgrave to take the tough line he wished to follow anyway. This time it was much harder. True, the demonstrations in Stagg's favour had been small and spiritless. But the latent pity could not be ignored, nor the ever underlying feeling about an Irish patriot dying on hunger strike in a British jail. Every schoolboy knows about Terence McSwiney, Mayor of Cork, and his death in 1920; and sure enough Rory O'Brady reminded everyone that then the British Navy had 'snatched' the body and taken it to Cork to avert a demonstration in Dublin. Before the Stagg episode, no Irish government had moved with such decisive force against an IRA funeral, and I don't think any ordinary Irish person thought it could. There was so much to be shocked, not only patriotic feelings but the whole emotion about death, where Holy Ireland exhibits her virtue with such lavishness.
So it was courageous of Cosgrave to act as he did, and the more so to make, during the height of the hullabaloo, one of his firmest statements on the northern Ireland situation. He repeated that the people of Ireland still aspired to eventual unity, and that that unity could only be achieved with the consent of a majority in the North; he added that his government would do nothing to make it more difficult to make that majority feel it could withhold consent until it was willing to give it spontaneously. He again condemned all terrorists and offered to help any agreed government in the North to stamp them out. He demanded nothing. His tone was very different from that of those Labour MPs who, the day before he spoke, had written to the Times asking for a declaration of British intent to withdraw from the North, and for Northern Ireland 'again to be placed in an all-Ireland context'. It's as well that there was an all-party group of British MPs visiting the Republic
last week. They may have discovered that the SDLP opposition in the North is far closer to the views of Liam Cosgrave than to those of the Labour letter writers.
It doesn't seem to me that the Irish government could make its position much clearer than it now has done. Its foreign minister, Garret FitzGerald, makes frequent visits to the North, sees politicians of all parties, and though the `Loyalists' usually send him home with a feeling of gloom he goes on trying, and no one could call him an unfriendly man. So far, of course, the 'Loyalists' have reacted to Cosgrave's latest statement with doctrinal suspicion. The reasonableness of Leinster House, however, may yet prove more important than any new devisings at Westminster now that constitutional work for the North is to begin over again. All Cosgrave is asking is that there should be some form of agreed administration for the North, and he will go along with it. He has shown that, when he does go along, he can be tough enough on the IRA to suit any 'Loyalist', even though he is acting basically to keep his own house in order. Already, public opinion polls have shown, there is a majority in the North which favours (if vaguely) some sort of sharing in government between the communities. Brian Faulkner and William Craig could still be right when they say they are only a little ahead of their time.
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