Now that the cabinet's gone to its dinner,
The Secretary stays and gets thinner and thinner;
Racking his brains to record and report,
What he thinks what they think they ought to have thought.
This ditty was written by an anonymous British civil servant as a warning to historians not to necessarily rely on the secretary's summary of ministerial contributions in cabinet minutes.
Although only summaries, these do record dissent and differing viewpoints before the British cabinet collectively endorses any decisions reached.
Irish Cabinet minutes, in contrast, leave no clue about the course of the discussion: they merely record the attendance, duration, location and date of the meeting, along with a listing of any decisions taken.
Thus expectations were not high that the Cabinet papers for 1969 would lay bare the origins of the Arms Crisis of May 1970, when Jack Lynch dismissed two of his most senior ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney.
Both were subsequently charged with using Government money to conspire with others to illegally import arms destined for Northern nationalists.
The case against Blaney was dropped due to insufficient evidence; Haughey was subsequently acquitted.
Allowing that the Cabinet minutes reveal nothing of the exchanges at Government meetings, one must search through the departmental files for traces of contributions by individual ministers. And in 1969 one is especially on the lookout for some explanation of the crisis, which rocked not just the Government but the State. Tellingly, the best evidence of Cabinet dissent in many thousands of pages of files covering Northern policy is in a report of an RTE Radio This Week interview with Neil Blaney on the Sunday following his Letterkenny speech of December 8th, in which he had controversially insisted that "no one has the right to assert that force is irrevocably out".
Blaney admitted on radio that during August, at the height of the rioting and shootings in the North, there had been "hard words and plain speaking" around the Cabinet table.
"It was a very difficult, serious situation, and the views and expressions and opinions and knowledge of every member of the Cabinet were sought and given frankly and outspokenly; and it was as a result of this pooling of knowledge and opinions that we made our decisions and took our steps accordingly."
Among the decisions was one which, when originally drafted, read: "that a sum of money determined by the Minister for Finance should be made available from the Exchequer to provide aid for the victims of the current unrest in the Six Counties".
Before being passed by Cabinet, an additional phrase was inserted to empower Haughey to determine the amount of the money and "the channel of disbursement".
There was an attempt to import arms. It was stopped. The question at the heart of the Arms Trial was whether it amounted to a treasonable, illegal conspiracy, or whether it was within Haughey's remit. Any expectation that this question might be resolved by an examination of the files, which have now become available in the National Archives, would be naive.
Conspirators - if that is what they were - do not tend to leave incriminating documents on files available to public servants; and if no conspiracy was involved, the political sensitivity of the operation would have ensured a paucity of written records.
What records there are provide no clue as to whether the Government decision of August 1969 to empower Haughey to channel aid to the North was driven by himself or whether it was the result of Cabinet consensus.
And it would be interesting to know whether he was among those who, in Blaney's testimony, had been outspoken at the Cabinet meetings in August.
Haughey's reputation was that of a pragmatist and, because he had not been foremost among those in Fianna Fail who banged the anti-Partition drum, it was often presumed by his critics, after he was dismissed by Lynch in May 1970, that his involvement was partly motivated by his leadership ambitions.
But it is much more likely that his family's roots in Derry played a major part in his response to the trauma of August 1969.
Paradoxically, there are more traces of Haughey and his interest in the North in the records just released in Britain than in the Irish archives. There is some evidence to suggest that he was making something of a solo run on Northern policy.
For instance, the British Ambassador, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, records an account of a personal invitation to Haughey's home, where Haughey sounded him on various matters of Northern policy, including defence issues and membership of the Commonwealth - all far removed from his Finance portfolio.
Was this done with the knowledge of Haughey's Cabinet colleagues?
Gilchrist must have appreciated that Haughey was wandering far beyond his ministerial responsibilities; and within a month he was marking London's cards concerning Haughey's involvement in funding a Monaghan-based organisation which was prepared to support civil rights defence units "by way of weapons, radio sets and personnel".
That there is more evidence of the roots of the Arms Crisis in London's state papers than in those just released in Dublin is not that surprising. On security grounds alone, Irish records might well have been minimal.
But another possibility cannot be excluded: if highly sensitive records existed, might they have been removed from the main policy files which have now become available?
One must remember that the Arms Trial had a seismic impact on Fianna Fail. The party remained divided for 20 years between two factions: broadly, these were led, firstly, by the accusers in that trial; and then by the accused.
And each faction had control of the Taoiseach's Department during long periods in the 1970s and 1980s.
I am not necessarily suggesting a conspiracy. Such theories about missing files - as was proved last week - are not always well founded. It is always possible that some controversial material could have been placed in a new file with a higher security threshold and is now among files not released on security grounds. Or we may have to wait until the archives are opened next January for 1970.
But I wouldn't hold the front page.
Dr John Bowman is a broadcaster and historian.