Analysis: Cosgrave owes us an explanation
By Tom McGurk
14 December 2003
In years to come when historians begin to search for an
explanation for the behaviour of the Cosgrave government to
its own mass-murdered citizens in relation to the Dublin and
Monaghan bombs, I have no doubt they will still feel as
astounded as we all felt on reading last Wednesday's Barron
Report.
The criminal disregard of its responsibilities exposed by
Barron seems inexplicable. The failure to act on the names of
the bombers, personally supplied by the British prime minister
to Liam Cosgrave, the failure to pass information to the
Garda, the loss of forensic and material evidence, the
winding-down of the investigation and finally the missing
files from the Department of Justice.
But perhaps to begin to understand just where such a mentality
comes from, historians might do worse than study the following
paragraph from Thursday's editorial reaction in the
Irish Times.
"A British Labour government had just come to power and a
loyalist strike was under way because of the Sunningdale
Agreement. The leadership of Mr Cosgrave's administration was
constantly threatened in a climate of terrorism. In the
circumstances prevailing, confirmation that members of the
Northern Ireland security forces had colluded in the bombing
would have done terrible damage to Anglo-Irish relations,
strengthened the IRA and undermined the government."
So there you go, you have it in one - "in the circumstances
prevailing" and in its wider political interests, as the
Cosgrave government saw them, the largest massmurder of the
citizens of this state was to be quietly put on the back
burner by their own government.
For the greater good, then, the 33 blown to bits, the hundreds
wounded, the years of loss and suffering and official lies
were all for the greater cause of what Cosgrave used to call
"the determination of my government to maintain law and
order".
For those old enough to remember, the historical sight now of
that administration's clambering on to the moral high ground
on violence, and its wider implications, leaves one almost
nauseous now.
And in the days, too, since the report was published, why the
deafening silence from the major players still alive -
Cosgrave, Garret FitzGerald, Paddy Cooney, Conor Cruise
O'Brien and others?
At the very least, Justice Barron's work will have caused
considerable rewriting of political obituaries. How many
political reputations will have now joined the scrapheap of
the history of the dead and wounded of the Monaghan and Dublin
bombings?
Equally, those who ever expected that Barron might be in a
position to shed light on what we politely call "official
collusion" were, of course, utterly naive.
The British intelligence services long ago created a modus
operandi that left neither footprints nor political fallout.
Indeed, how vain was the hope that Barron might spill the
beans whenyou consider the testimonies of former intelligence
agents such as Colin Wallace and senior MI6 agent Peter
Wright, author of Spycatcher.
Both have testified that it was at this time precisely in the
1970s that the secret intelligence services were themselves
attempting to destroy British prime minister Harold Wilson,
because they were convinced he was compromised by the Soviets.
In fact, the evidence that the Ulster Workers' strike against
the Sunningdale Agreement in the same era was clandestinely
run by elements in British intelligence grows with the passage
of time.
Indeed, in the longer historical perspective,there is
increasing suspicion that the situation in the North had
effectively become a convenient bonfire for the frying of much
bigger fish back in London.
Wilson's alleged Soviet links,the growing and at times
crippling power of British trade unionism, even the declining
power of the old aristocracy within Edward Heath's
Conservative party, all rang alarm bells in the lands of the
spooks and their friends. Within a generation they had found
their champion in Margaret Thatcher, who seemed to understand
the old pecking order, and as a result, very quickly the
British secret state and its political executive were supping
at the same table again.
Indeed, the fact that, by the late 1980s, they were actively
seeking a draw and an end to hostilities with the IRA
indicates just how much they were back in charge.
And so it remains under Tony Blair. No wonder, then, that in
most recent times the latest ghost knocking on the door was
the unfortunate Dr David Kelly. But what are we to do now with
our ghosts from Dublin and Monaghan? What now can be done to
assuage them and their still grieving relatives?
And is it too much to expect that those in government at the
time, and still alive, might grant us all an explanation?
Of course, what Barron does not point out is the reaction in
Whitehall to Dublin's reaction to the bombings. That a
government could be so insistent on self-interest and value so
lightly the lives of its own citizens must have been a seminal
lesson in Whitehall.
Is it any wonder that they decided when Sunningdale fell that
the North was quintessentially a British problem, and as long
as Dublin's political self-interest was catered for, there
would be no trouble from that quarter?
Clearly within their Irish stew the British quickly recognised
that the most biddable and easily-contained political voice
was that from Dail Eireann.
So within months we had `Ulsterisation', Castlereagh, the
ending of special status, which led to the hunger strikes, and
then 15 more bloody murderous years.
Section 31 here, and its equivalent in Britain, ghettoised
republican paramilitarism and enshrined in official political
culture the myth that the sole root of the problem in the
North was the IRA.
It took the deaths of thousands before Charles Haughey and
then Albert Reynolds opened up the avenue of political escape
for them that became the peace process.
There will be a fall-out from the Barron Report for some time
to come. But how extraordinary that the same political class,
which claims to have established the state, decided, when its
own citizens were massmurdered on the streets of the capital,
that their version of theTricolour was not of sufficient
dimensions to enfold them.
Truly Lord Denning's "appalling vista" has come visiting.