TV & Radio

GunPlot introduces us to a gallery of … well, were they rogues, patriots or victims?

TV review: RTÉ’s Arms Crisis documentary has elements of a John le Carré thriller

John Kelly (right) with Gerry Jones (left) and Neil Blaney during the Arms Trial in 1970. Photograph: Jack McManus

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Ed Power
Wed Apr 28 2021 - 22:50

"GunPlot" (RTÉ One, Wednesday, 9.35pm ) sounds like a musical about Guy Fawkes that someone has tried to sex up for Broadway. However, this documentary about the 1970 Arms Crisis is anything but flippant, even if it has aspects of a John le Carré thriller gone off the rails.

The tale features quite a gallery of … well, the film is in two minds as to whether they were rogues, misguided patriots or victims of a cover-up. Even at the time nobody seemed entirely clear as to who precisely was colluding with whom to ship arms north of the Border.

The basics of the story are well known. As the Troubles went from fizzing powder keg to out-of-control dumpster fire, the sense in Dublin was that something had to be done for Northern nationalists. And so a secret plan was hatched to import weapons.

Jack Lynch has come to be regarded as an ineffectual figure who prevaricated as Derry and Belfast burned. But Gunplot's director, Brian Hayes, brings a different perspective

But just how secret was it? And what, specifically, did Taoiseach Jack Lynch know? Were Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, the two highest-profile figures caught up in the scandal, scapegoats for a wider conspiracy?

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And what of Capt James Kelly, who went to his death waiting for an apology from the State for failing to back his claim that he’d been authorised by senior ministers to import arms? That silence endured despite the fact he, along with Haughey, the senior IRA figure John Kelly and the Belgian businessman (and former SS member) Albert Luykx, was acquitted at trial (charges against Blaney having been dropped).

“It really hurt him. And it really affected him for the rest of his life,” says James Kelly’s daughter, Sheila. “Everywhere you went, you could never escape it.”

Lynch has today come to be regarded as an ineffectual figure who prevaricated as Derry and Belfast burned. But Gunplot’s director, Brian Hayes, brings a different perspective. The suggestion is that, if Lynch didn’t instigate the plot, then he was certainly aware of it – yet failed to intervene until details were leaked to the opposition.

“The government decided to ignore the acquittals. It was their view that the men were guilty,” says one historian. “Lynch could be a hard man when he needed to be.”

The documentary, accompanied by an eight-part podcast, brings something new in focusing on the international dimension of the scandal.

'There was lies told by all sorts of people. Big lies told by big people,' says Seán Haughey TD. 'Whether my father lied or not I don't know. His response was, Don't get mad, get even'

The cache of arms – including machine guns – was to be acquired from a German arms dealer, Otto Schlueter. The go-between was Luykx, a Belgian resident in Dublin. Yet Schlueter, “a man with many enemies and a lot of luck”, was playing his own game. He claimed the authorities in Belgium blocked the export. Whatever the truth, the weapons never arrived.

These cloak-and-dagger shenanigans sit alongside a story of destinies forged and lives destroyed. “There was lies told by all sorts of people. Big lies told by big people,” says Seán Haughey TD, Charles Haughey’s son. “Whether my father lied or not I don’t know … His response was, Don’t get mad, get even.”

But if the scandal was the making of some, it was the breaking of others. “We got beaten up, we got spat at. We were marked as being troublemakers,” says Eamonn Blaney. “My mother, God rest her, went to her grave without ever seeing my father’s name cleared.”