THE STORY of Ireland’s relationship with Muammar Gadafy’s Libya ranges from IRA gun-running in the 1980s to beef import bans in the 1990s, although in recent years the two countries drew closer based on growing trade and investment.
Relations were strained in the 1980s by Gadafy’s support for the IRA. Libya gave weapons, including about 1,000 AK47 assault rifles and six tonnes of Semtex explosive, to the IRA between 1984 and 1987.
DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson said yesterday that Gadafy’s death paved the way for the settlement of legal claims by IRA victims.
“We will be pressing for the establishment of a fund to assist the wider group of victims who suffered as a result of Gadafy’s sponsorship of the IRA and his arming of the IRA during the earliest years of the Troubles,” he said.
In 2009, unionist politicians began talks with Tripoli to secure compensation for 160 victims of the IRA. As part of the negotiations to lift UN sanctions against Libya in 2003, regime officials provided information about the funding and weapons Gadafy had given to the IRA. In recent months, the victims group has held talks with representatives from Libya’s interim government, the National Transitional Council.
The beef trade was, for some time, one of the strongest links between Libya and Ireland. A visit by then taoiseach Charles Haughey to Tripoli in 1983, during which he met Gadafy, helped forge agreements on live cattle exports which resulted in Libya becoming the State’s single-biggest market for live cattle. In the early 1990s, this trade was worth over £70 million. Libya banned such imports from the Republic and other EU countries in 1996 after the BSE scare, and Irish cattle and meat exports never recovered.
Irish companies, particularly those in the construction sector, began looking into the Libyan market after the US lifted its trade embargo in 2004 and the EU ended sanctions. Many of these firms are now tentatively exploring prospects for doing business in post-Gadafy Libya.
The relationship between the two countries has also been shaped by migration. The Libyan community here constitutes one of the biggest Libyan diasporas in Europe. A significant number sought political asylum here from the 1990s on.
MARY FITZGERALD