Some individual events of the 1970 Arms Crisis are being discussed without reference to their political context. To the present generation, three decades on, and even to older people whose memory has been blurred by so much that has happened since, this lack of context makes it difficult to understand how some politicians and others behaved at the time.
The crisis in Northern Ireland developed after the Fianna Fail leadership changed from the revolutionary elite to a new generation. When Sean Lemass retired in November 1966 three candidates put their names forward to lead the party: George Colley, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney. Fearing the election of any of these might divide the party deeply, Lemass persuaded Jack Lynch to stand.
Colley, together with the party's old guard - men like Sean MacEntee, Frank Aiken and Jim Ryan - feared the emergence, in his words, of "low standards in high places" if Fianna Fail fell into the hands of people like Haughey and Blaney. In turn, those two saw Colley as the principal obstacle to their takeover of the party. To defeat Colley in the leadership election Haughey and Blaney withdrew and backed Jack Lynch, a popular and modest figure who lacked deep party roots, and whom these two believed they could marginalise and eventually replace.
In June 1969 Fianna Fail was reelected with an enhanced majority, and the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland two months later gave Blaney the opportunity to start undermining Lynch by giving rein to his own adventurist nationalist instincts on the North. He and Haughey set about splitting what had become in the 1960s a left-wing non-militarist IRA, with a view to fomenting a new, more nationalist IRA, which Blaney believed he could then control as part of his aggressive agenda vis-a-vis Northern Ireland.
Later Blaney, while modestly disclaiming credit for creating the Provisional IRA, admitted: "We would have accelerated, by whatever assistance we could have given, their emergence as a force".
In mid-August 1969, in obscure circumstances, Lynch made a grave mistake in agreeing to set up a sub-committee on Northern Ireland policy comprising Blaney and Haughey and two other members of the government - but, curiously, excluding the ministers for defence and justice. That sub-committee met only once, but Blaney and Haughey continued to act on their own, without reporting back to government.
In circumstances that remain unclear, Capt James Kelly of Army Intelligence came to work closely with Blaney, attending meetings between Blaney and delegations from the North seeking arms.
In August, the government had authorised Haughey, as finance minister, to disburse funds for the relief of distress in the North. These were being channelled through Capt Kelly and the Irish Red Cross to bank accounts in fictional names, and so deployed to secretly finance a Blaneyite newspaper in Monaghan and to pay for arms for the "defence committees" in Belfast, which by then the newly-established Provisional IRA was starting to control.
Blaney was seeking through aggressive and populist public speeches to rally support to himself within Fianna Fail with a view to a coup against Lynch. In a speech at Letterkenny he rejected Lynch's emphasis on "winning the agreement of a sufficient number of the North to an acceptable form of reunification", asserting that "it is the majority of the people of all Ireland who alone have the right to decide this question", and "no one has the right to assert that force is irrevocably out . . . The Fianna Fail party has never taken a decision to rule out the use of force if the circumstances in the six counties so demand". And he indicated an interest in replacing Lynch as Taoiseach, "if there was a situation in which a Taoiseach was being sought"!
Jack Lynch's weak reaction to this challenge - "Mr Blaney . . . knows and endorses government policy on this issue" - made it clear that he felt under great pressure and in danger of a move to replace him by Blaney, a powerful and intimidating figure with much deeper roots in the party.
Were that to happen, Lynch knew there would be danger of violent cross-Border confrontation. If peace was to be maintained, Blaney had to be handled with kid gloves until and unless he could be safely removed without provoking a party coup.
Defence minister Jim Gibbons was a quiet politician who had been appointed to Cabinet eight or nine years after Blaney had passed this hurdle. He was 13th as against 3rd in cabinet seniority to Blaney, and defence was viewed as far less important than agriculture. From Gibbons's actions - or rather inaction - it is clear he was intimidated by Blaney, and felt unable to challenge his effective takeover of Army Intelligence from him. He seems to have been concerned not to know too much about what was going on. During the Arms Trial he said he had had only "vestigial knowledge" of arms importation events.
Col Michael Hefferon, Capt Kelly's boss as director of intelligence, was aware of what Kelly was engaged in, and that there might not be authority for these activities from his own superiors or from the minister for defence. To cover his position he sought to ensure that his minister at least knew something of it. But how much did Gibbons want to hear? As little as possible, perhaps. And how much did Gibbons tell Lynch, and when? That question, too, remains unanswered and may never be clarified.
We cannot now know how this potentially explosive situation would have worked out had the balloon not been punctured by Liam Cosgrave's approach to Jack Lynch at 8 p.m. on May 5th, 1970. Within two hours, the two ministers in question were dismissed and Kevin Boland had resigned.
Lynch's slowness to act against Blaney and Haughey, even after he had been fully informed of the arms importation attempts; Gibbons's "vestigial knowledge" of these attempts; Capt Kelly's and Col Hefferon's curious relationship with their minister and with Blaney, and the conflict between their accounts and that of Gibbons; the charging of the two ministers and others with involvement in arms importation; and how Col Hefferon's statement was handled and the drama of his court appearances: all these aspects have to be seen in the context of the prevailing belief that the country was at risk of a takeover of Fianna Fail by Blaney with potentially dangerous consequences for peace in the island.
We should be slow to criticise Lynch for not acting sooner, which might have precipitated a party coup, with Blaney replacing him as Taoiseach or, more probably, to a split in Fianna Fail, with Lynch and the moderates joining with Fine Gael and Labour to form a government facing a rump Blaneyite Fianna Fail opposition: a scenario dangerously reminiscent of 1922. However messy the actual outcome of the Arms Crisis 30 years ago, the way it was handled proved a safe route to the preservation of Irish democracy.