RELAND
Gunning for an Irish peace
R MAI; KNOX
Dublin uhlin's great gun-running trial, the rarest s for public house discourse since the Kil- ggan distillery scandal, was no turning nt in Irish history. Mr Justice Hinchy, ho bravely took over the case after a Ileague had thoughtfully found good legal ason to wash his hands of it, opened up
e patient but found the canker too far one to operate—at any rate with the assist- nce of a southern Irish jury. On the face it, Republicanism remains wedded to the Ile. just as, in the North. true Protestantism n only be upheld by the Bible and the ot. All those commentators who have eathlessly been noting continuous shifts pattern and 'shade either in Dublin's Dail up at Stormont can now go home. and rap their notes. Everything has always en the same. The trial did suggest, how- er. an inkling of a change in tactics. It might appear difficult to see what kind political life remains to an Ireland which fuses to see reason, or rather, which plies to politics, to ethics and to the Ia.', reasoning peculiarly her own. The future Mr lack Lynch must obviously be dicier an before, since he has publicly retained ith in Mr Gibbons as a cabinet minister. r Charles Haughey, principal accused in 'e arms smuggling case and one of Mr leh's dismissed ministers, maintained at e trial that he thought everything that was ne---and it certainly included an attempt Import arms illegally—was done with the owledge of Mr Gibbons. And so said all e other accused. If Mr Lynch is tottering, 11 Major Chichester-Clark be any firmer his feet? The hard men among the Ulster monists may not be dancing in the streets, hlin style, at the handsome acquittal of ugheY and Co.. but they must feel a com- liable inner glow a I told you so. They,-
as much as the jurors at the trial, should !' have been clamouring for Mr Haughey's autograph—written in blood.
The English find it very hard to remember that, as far as the Constitution of the Irish Republic is concerned, Ireland is de jure a single territory. Eire, as Mr Heath is so fond of calling the Republic, means all the thirty- two counties, not merely the twenty-six (in- cluding three of Ulster proper) which are currently administered from Dublin. Every southern Irish schoolchild knows this, and he or she grows up with a romantic attach- ment to the men who fought to reach the present stage of Ireland's independence. (For of course that independence is not yet com- plete). The men who fought belonged to the Irish Republican Army. Irish youth does not have to invent heroes, or even borrow them from Cuba. They are all there fresh from the history books, and homegrown heroes are the best. The arms trial carried echoes from the dock of Emmett. of Wolfe Tone, of Casement and countless others. In Ireland the best heroes are dead heroes, because in Ireland there is nothing so heart- warming as the damp, foggy turf fires of recollected bereavement and the smoky wakes of remembrance. The most revealing political photograph during the arms trial was taken at a remembrance service for Captain Noel Lemass, killed during the Irish civil war. It showed Mr Haughey, smiling inward and outward confidence, shaking hands with his father-in-law. Mr Sean Lemass, retired premier and, after President de Valera, most senior member of the ruling Fianna Fail party. After that, only a fool would have bet on a 'guilty' verdict at the trial.
The officially outlawed IRA has always shown outstanding courage, internal quarrel- someness and ineptitude. That is largely why it has so many dead heroes. Its membership is kept deliberately small, but its reputation this immense. `nta-ism', on which Mr Haughey and his acquitted friends are now riding high, is an unquenchable sentiment. British intelligence is constantly concerned over whether the IRA has penetrated the Civil Rights Movement in the North and how far 'Maoism' has influenced the IRA. The answer, in both cases, is quite consider- ably, but it is not an answer that really matters. IRA saboteurs will continue to blow up installations on the border and, occasionally, themselves. This is a slight nuisance to the northern administration and doesn't help the calculations of the southern politicians, but it maintains the mystique, which is important. It also provokes a heavy handed exorcism from Belfast, which is always useful to the republican cause. But at the moment the Dublin government could do without the ma's border fireworks.
Miss Bernadette Devlin might almost have been aware of this when she emerged from Armagh jail, for the first thing she told her riotous supporters was to_ keep the peace and work for justice through the law. Not that either she or Dublin has a ha'purth of faith in Stormont law. Dublin. however, is thinking in terms of peace before a little decent fighting. While Mr Haughey's friends were celebrating in Dublin last Friday, Mr Heath was making some intriguing remarks to the UN General Assembly. The peace- keeping problems of the '70s, he was saying, might spring less from international wars than from the internal strife of individual nations. He instanced the North of Ireland where, he said, the dispute was not between Protestant and Catholic, or have and have- not, but between those believing in law and
order and. the small minority which simply aimed at anarchy. 1 don't believe for a moment that this analysis is right. but it is interesting that Mr Heath should have thrown out the thought at the United Nations, where Britain has always said that the affairs of Northern Ireland are her own private business.
For Dublin has also been thinking about the United Nations. Mr Neil Blaney, another of Mr Lynch's dismissed ministers, would have sent the Irish army across the border when the whole trouble started in the summer of '69. In Dublin the idea of the boys from the Curragh throwing themselves on to British bayonets provokes some ironic mirth. but Mr Blaney and Mr Haughey are almost certainly thinking not in terms of a war but of an 'incident.' Even Mr Blaney admits that at the moment the time isn't ripe because there are so many British troops in the North that any southern move could cause a nasty bit of slaughter before it was stopped. That is why the IRA bombings and the Belfast riots have no approval from Dublin—they keep the British army around in active strength. For it is the stopping of a border affray that Dublin is interested in, not any battle for glory; the stopping of it— by the United Nations—before it has done any harm. In Dublin it's reckoned that the telegrams to New York are already drafted. And if the southerners can ever get the dis- pute on the agenda there, they're sure that, in the end, they can tire even the northerners out with talking.
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