Analysis: A new publication gives insights into the scope of intelligence gathering by both Irish and British authorities in Northern Ireland
By Michael Kennedy, RIA
Aidan Mulloy had no experience of the murky world of international arms trafficking. One day in 1970, all that changed. The diplomat, Ireland's consul in Hamburg since 1965, usually worked on trade and economic matters.
On May 4th 1970, Mulloy had a visit from two officials of the German Customs Security Service. They had received instructions from the Ministry of the Interior in Bonn to watch for possible illegal shipments of arms to Ireland via Hamburg and Bremen. It was straight from the pages of John le Carré, who (as David Cornwell) had served at the British Consulate in Hamburg, though leaving a year before Mulloy arrived in the north German city.
At much the same time as Mulloy’s visitors paid their visit, his boss in Dublin, the Secretary General of the Department of External Affairs, Hugh McCann, was briefing Ireland’s Minister for External Affairs Patrick Hillery. He told the minister that 'the Department of External Affairs does not normally receive reports from any of the specialised security agencies or military intelligence services abroad. Such agencies, like the Irish G.2 and Garda Special Branch, are presumed to have their own contacts within and outside the State and it is traditional for Missions abroad not to be involved in such security channels.’
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From RTÉ Radio 1's History Show, Gerard Lovett discusses his book Ireland's Special Branch: The inside story of their battle with the IRA, 1922–1947
Perhaps conscious of McCann’s views, Mulloy suggested to the two Germans that they should avoid giving the impression that the Irish Consulate was co-operating with them in their investigations. But, as evidenced by the identity of Mulloy’s visitors, the rules had changed since August 1969 and the outbreak of the Troubles.
In an unusual move, External Affairs, in conjunction with the Department of Justice, had contacted Ireland’s embassies in Austria, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands to get them to ask the local authorities to be on the look out for and prevent illegal shipments of arms surreptitiously bound for Ireland.
The German officials arrived at the Irish Consulate in Hamburg just 24 hours before allegations became public that members of the Cabinet in which Hillery served were attempting to smuggle weapons into Ireland, including most recently via Hamburg, to aid the nationalist community in Northern Ireland. The 'Arms Crisis', which shook Taoiseach Jack Lynch's government to the core, remains one of the most significant moments in 20th century political Irish history.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's This Week, David McCullagh speaks to Prof Stephen Kelly of Hope University Liverpool about the Arms Crisis 50 years on and what ultimately came of it
Volume XIV of the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy (DIFP) series covers August 1969 to March 1973 and includes Mulloy’s correspondence with Dublin concerning his German visitors. The volume focuses on Irish foreign policy in the early years of the Troubles. It gives insights, however opaquely, into the role intelligence gathering played for the Irish and the British authorities amidst the rapidly worsening situation in Northern Ireland.
In the run up to the outbreak of the Troubles, contacts between Irish diplomat Eamonn Gallagher and John Hume in Derry proved vital in providing Dublin with an assessment of the seriousness of the situation in city in August 1969. Hillery attempted to explain this seriousness in London, but his analysis was dismissively disregarded by British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart.
After the deployment of the British Army to Northern Ireland following the outbreak of serious violence in Derry and elsewhere, the Irish Defence Forces security and intelligence branch G2 developed an assessment of the incoming British units and their strength and equipment. Based on information from local sources, as well as from Defence Forces personnel sent to Northern Ireland to acquire information, ongoing situation reports were given to Lynch and provide a rolling outline of the British military build up in Northern Ireland.
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From RTÉ Archives, RTÉ News report on the arrival of British troops in Northern Ireland on August 14th 1969, while the Battle of the Bogside was raging in Derry
The activities of Defence Forces intelligence officers in Northern Ireland were occasionally raised in the House of Commons in London. However, it is a normal activity of civilian and military security and intelligence services to gather information in areas of interest. Indeed, from August 1969 Lynch’s cabinet agreed to increase the capabilities of Ireland’s intelligence services when it came to such activities.
One of the most interesting documents in DIFP XIV is a G2 debrief of an unnamed person (the name is redacted in the original) who was in Derry on Bloody Sunday. Quite possibly the person was a member of the Irish Defence Forces on account of the language they use in the report – it is the language of a trained soldier, but this may be the military debriefer’s intervention.
At one point they noticed that ‘for some time a young man had been lying injured in the roadway, about 30 yards from the house I was in, at the junction of the slipway’, they ‘then saw this man’s coat jump twice in the air, saw two (2) puffs of smoke at his back and also heard two (2) shot reports. All of this happened in quick succession [and] ‘saw a paratrooper moving back in the direction he came from.’
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From RTÉ Radio 1's This Week in January 2022, Carole Coleman reports from the Bogside area of Derry, where events have been taking place to mark 50 years since Bloody Sunday
Since the late-1930s, the British and Irish security services had a level of ongoing co-operation. At its closest during the Second World War, it had come to deal with Cold War issues by the 1970s. It became a useful link as British-Irish relations deteriorated in the early years of the Troubles.
When British naval units searched the Irish vessel MV Owenro for arms in Carlingford Lough in November 1970, it was seen by Dublin as a breach of friendly relations. It became an escalating diplomatic incident and Dublin and London searched for a solution. G2 learned that instructions were later issued to British naval patrols not to stop and search Irish boats proceeding through waters around Northern Ireland. Eamonn Gallagher at External Affairs suspected that British military intelligence had deliberately passed this information on to G2 via a back channel to help de-escalate the situation.
That is not to say that London sought always to co-operate with Dublin on Northern Ireland intelligence matters. Far from it. Britain acted to protect its interests and there was a strong belief in London that Lynch’s government was soft on the IRA and were perhaps willing to turn a blind eye to their actions along the border.
The British security system needed information from within Ireland and the new publication provides some glimpses into how they sought this information
The 1973 case of Kenneth and Keith Littlejohn, and Kenneth’s alleged connections with the IRA and British intelligence services is the topic of a conversation reproduced in the volume between Irish Ambassador to Britain Donal O'Sullivan and Sir Stewart Crawford of the Foreign Office. There is also information on an earlier case where English national John Wyman, allegedly a British agent, attempted to obtain official information from Garda detective Patrick Crinnion, a member of C3, the security section at Garda Headquarters.
Finally, there is the August 1971 suggestion by London-based Irish journalist Leslie Mallory that the British were putting an ‘under cover man into Dublin with an assignment to investigate possible Irish Government links with the IRA’. Ambassador O’Sullivan understood that the person was one Christopher Daybell (1939-2000), an English language teacher and poet, who was later well known for selling his verse on Dublin’s Grafton Street, gently introducing himself with ‘Do you read poetry?’
O’Sullivan passed the information on to McCann on a personal basis ‘for what it may be worth’ and because it was felt that Daybell was ‘bound to have ready entrée over a wide range area of Ireland’ due to contacts made while studying History and Political Science at Trinity College.
Was Daybell really a British agent? Your guess is as good a mine. Consider the lines from his collection The man with the crowded eye: ‘For I have learned the double tongue / In places where I've walked / And now that I am fifty-one /My tongue has come out forked.’ They recall a quote from George Smiley, no stranger to Mulloy’s Hamburg, in le Carré’s masterpiece Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: ‘The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.’
Dr Michael Kennedy is the Executive Editor of the Royal Irish Academy's Documents on Irish Foreign Policy programme and is one of the editors of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy Vol. XIV: 1969-1973.
Documents on Irish Foreign Policy is a partnership between the Royal Irish Academy, the National Archives of Ireland and the Department of Foreign Affairs
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
