Questions for the former Minister for Justice

32 November 2020

INTRODUCTION

Des O’Malley served as Chief Whip and Junior

Minister for Defence to Jack Lynch’s govern

ment in 1969 and 1970. In May 1970 he was

appointed as Minister for Justice by Lynch,

though he was only 31 years of age - just as the

Arms Crisis was erupting. Despite his youth

and inexperience, Lynch chose to place him in

this crucial position.

On top of this, the appointment was made

as the Provisional IRA was learning to crawl.

Questions for the former

Minister for Justice

by David Burke

The Provos maintained a low proﬁle through-

out 1970 and some of 1971 while its leaders

focused on recruiting volunteers in competi

tion with the Marxist Ocial IRA. So low was

its proﬁle that Martin McGuinness joined the

Ocials unaware that the Provisionals even

existed. Cleary, O’Malley did not appreciate

what was afoot either.

O’Malley has recently descended from re

tirement claiming to be “duty bound” to set the

record straight on new revelations about the

controversial arms importation attempt that

sparked the Arms Crisis. The new – and not

so new – evidence about the crisis O’Malley

contests portrays his hero Jack Lynch in a very

poor light. It indicates that Lynch knew about

the arms importation that sparked the Arms

Crisis; moreover, that it was a secret but legal

manoeuvre of the State. In making his case

O’Malley pointedly viliﬁed the memory of Cap

tain James Kelly and a multitude of others in

the Citizen Defence Committees (CDCs) whom

he has recklessly and inaccurately portrayed

as midwives to the Provisional IRA.

Unfortunately, Des O’Malley has not en

gaged with any of the evidence which has

emerged in recent times, not to mention that

which has been in existence for decades.

His account is a conceited fantasy in which

he and Lynch saved the State from civil war

despite daunting odds and the treachery of

disloyal Fianna Fáil colleagues who were aid

ed and abetted by menacing allies in military

intelligence. All he seems prepared to oer is

an assertion that Lynch was a man of great in

POLITICS

Des O’Malley, who nurtures

a reputation for lawyerly

truthfulness, attacked recent

research on the Arms Trial in a

surprisingly evidence-free article

in the Sunday Independent in

September. Here are 10 questions

he must answer

November 2020 33

tegrity incapable of deceit and that – for some

bizarre reason – the authors of two new books

on the Arms Crisis - Michael Heney and I - have

claimed that Jack Lynch was a party to a plot

to arm the Provisionals. This is an astonishing

misrepresentation for neither of us made any

claim that even remotely chimes with this.

I would like to test O’Malley’s account of his

struggle to save Ireland from doom by refer

ence to a number of documents which contra-

dict his mythmaking.

THE SMOKING GUN DOCUMENT

THAT REFERS TO THE TAOISEACH

How, if the arms importation operation which

was at the centre of the Arms Crisis was con

ducted behind Lynch’s back, does O’Malley

explain the content of a document which came

into existence on 10 February 1970?

It was prepared by the Department of De

fence. It was withheld from the jury at the Arms

Trials but eventually released by the National

Archives.

It was reproduced in a book by Angela Clif

ford entitled ‘Military Aspects of Ireland’s

Arms Crisis of 1969-70’ in 2006. In other

words, O’Malley has had at least 14 years to

provide his account of it. He ignored its exis

tence in his memoirs which appeared in 2014.

He did not mention it in his recent Sunday

Independent article. O’Malley was the Junior

Minister for Defence when the document -

from his Department, remember - came into

existence.

The document speciﬁcally referred to the

Taoiseach Jack Lynch and was entitled Ad

dendum to the Memo of 10/2/70, Ministerial

Directive to CF: It stated that: “The Taoiseach

and other Ministers have met delegations

from the North. At these meetings urgent de

mands were made for respirators, weapons

and ammunition the provision of which the

Government agreed. Accordingly truckloads

of these items will be put at readiness so that

they may be available in a matter of hours”.

There is no sign this document, despite it’s

unimpeachable pedigree, has yet registered

with O’Malley.

QUESTION : How do you reconcile this docu

ment with your assertion that Jack Lynch did

not know about attempts to supply weapons

to the citizens of the North?

THE ‘SECRET’ MILITARY DOCUMENT

THAT REFERS TO THE 150 RIFLES

WHICH WERE STORED IN DUNDALK.

IT WAS WITHHELD FROM THE ARMS

TRIAL JURY.

In early April 1970 panic swept across Bal-

lymurphy, a Catholic estate in Belfast,

that the British Army was about to aban

don the Catholics who lived there to an

onslaught by Loyalist murder and arson

gangs: in other words, a repeat of the

violent killings and forced evictions of

August 1969. The fear proved ill-founded

and was short lived.

While the panic was abroad, (senior)

Minister for Defence James Gibbons or

dered the transport of some of the Irish

Army riﬂes that had been set aside under

the orders given in February 1970. He did

so without input from Jack Lynch who

could not be contacted.

A transport of army trucks with 500

riﬂes, 80,000 rounds of ammunition and

respirators was sent to the North but

did not cross the border. Instead, the

trucks parked at Dundalk Barracks in the

Republic. According to a Military Intel

ligence ﬁle, there was insucient room

to store all 500 of the riﬂes so 350 were

returned to Dublin. The remaining 150

were kept in Dundalk. This contradicts

the Gibbons-O’Malley-Lynch version of

events which would have us believe that

there was never any intention of storing them

in Dundalk.

Evidence about the storage of the 150 riﬂes

was withheld from the Arms Trials.

The arms were returned to Dublin on 1 May.

The ostensible reason for their return was a

fear that Dundalk barracks might be raided.

It is far more likely, however, that they were

returned because the Arms Crisis which had

been simmering behind closed State doors

was about to boil over.

The riﬂes could only have been stored in

Dundalk on the orders of Gibbons. The testi

mony provided by Gibbons at the Arms Trial

about the transport of the arms was illogical,

unbelievable and bordered on farce. I outline

it in my book.

Des O’Malley was junior minister for de

fence and a member of the Council of Defence

at this time.

QUESTION : What, if anything, can O’Malley

tell us about the purpose of storing 150 riﬂes

in Dundalk?

My belief is that they were left in Dundalk

as a stop-gap measure pending the imminent

arrival of arms from Europe which – unlike

those in Dundalk – were not going to have se

rial numbers which could have been traced

back to the Irish Army. Hence, if military intel

ligence decided to distribute arms in a dooms-

day situation, there was less of a chance that

the British government would discover their

true origin.

Part of a handwritten ‘secret’ military report,

again from the Department of Defence, on the

storage of the riﬂes is reproduced below. The

last paragraph is the relevant one. It states as

follows:

34 November 2020

QUESTION : Are we to believe that such high-

ly sensitive ﬁles were brought to your atten-

tion but you were not told the news that had

shaken the Special Branch to its core: that the

Provisional IRA network was more extensive

than had been believed because the Garda

was relying on its top informer who had hid

den this fact from his handlers?

We know that O’Malley knew that there was

an informer because he mentions this fact in

his memoirs – where he reveals that the Garda

received a “tip-o” from an informer about the

arms importation attempt that sparked the

Arms Crisis of 1970.

THE RECORDS WHICH CONTAIN

FURTHER EVIDENCE OF AN

INFORMER.

O’Malley would also have known of the exis-

tence of an informer, from the evidence pre-

sented by the Head of the Special Branch,

John Fleming, at the Public Accounts Commit

tee in 1971.

In addition, Peter Berry who was Secretary

General at the Department of Justice at the

time of the Arms Crisis also conﬁrmed the

existence of an informer in his diaries which

were published by Magill magazine.

Andrew Ward took over from Peter Berry

in January 1971. It was his job to monitor the

activities of the Provisional IRA and report on

them to his minister. Ward relied on C3 and

the Special Branch for his information. C3 was

led by Patrick Malone at the time while Flem

ing was in charge of the Special Branch.

QUESTION : Are we to believe that Ward,

Malone and Fleming concealed the fact that

MacStiofáin was an informer, from you, Mr

O’Malley, when the Conaty papers were pre

sented to you?

In his memoirs O’Malley did let something

signiﬁcant about the informer out of the bag.

He stated that the Gardai had received a ‘tip-

o’ about the pending arms ﬂight from the

Continent to Dublin Airport. This was a bad

slip on O’Malley’s part because this contra

dicted the account which Lynch gave to the

Dail about how the arms ﬂight was discovered.

Following intelligence reports of the

possibility of a raid by a subversive

organisation in Dundalk military barracks,

the balance of 150 rifles and 80,000

rounds of ammunition stored in Dundalk,

were returned to stores in Dublin on Fri 1

May 1970.

QUESTION : Do you deny that 150 riﬂes were

stored in Dundalk while you were junior min

ister for defence?

QUESTION : What was the purpose of the

storage operation?

QUESTION : Why was this information with

held from the jury at the Arms Trial?

THE LETTER FROM THE GARDA

OFFICER WHO HAD SERVED IN C3

There is another document – a letter – which

refers to Des O’Malley by name. It is repro

duced in the picture beneath this paragraph.

It was written by an ocer who once served

with the overarching Garda intelligence direc

torate known as C3. The ocer was involved in

the Sean MacStíofáin case. MacStíofáin was

the former Chief of sta of the Provisional IRA.

He somehow managed to mislead the Garda

into believing that he was a reliable informer

during the 1960s and early 1970s. I have writ

ten about MacStíofáin’s machinations in my

book, ‘Deception and Lies: the Hidden History

of the Arms Crisis’. It reads as follows.

“Mac STIOPHAIN had until July 1972 con

ducted a brilliant masquerade as a Garda in-

formant and been well paid to boot. His status

would in all probability have continued but

for documents found in the home of a retired

Irish/American and a former Clann na Gael

Treasurer, James CONATY, Drumshirk, Stra

done. These documents were such that they

were brought to the Minister for Justice for his

personal perusal. That MacSTIOPHAIN should

have been in receipt of State funds and regard

ed as an Informant must, to any sane objec-

tive person, appear the height of improbability

but it is a fact. MacSTIOPHAIN was recruited in

good faith in approximately 1961 but the justi

ﬁcation of his later role must surely bewilder

men of goodwill. You know how the PROVOS

were formed, how SAOR EIRE acted as their

Financial agents in the Republic so as not to

incur the disapproval of the State against the

Provos and until disenchantment about Mac

STIOPHAIN occurred in July 1972 his immunity

was at a reasonable level”.

In the article O’Malley felt “duty-bound”

to produce for the Sunday Independent on

27 September 2020 he cast doubt on the

revelation that MacStiofáin was an ‘informer’.

He stated that he is “99.9% sure” that MacS

tiofáin was not an informer. I ﬁnd this curious.

O’Malley either knows or does not know that

MacStiofáin was an informer. So, why leave

the element of 0.1% uncertainty ﬂoating?

QUESTION : Who do you believe was the

informer if you are so certain that it was not

Sean MacStíofáin?

THE CACHE OF DOCUMENTS IN

JAMES CONATY’S HOUSE WHICH

WERE SHOWN TO DES O’MALLEY.

CONATY WAS A PROVISIONAL IRA

VOLUNTEER.

The information in the letter written by the C3

ocer described a cache of documents relat

ing to the Provisional IRA which was found on

a premises owned by James Conaty, an Irish

American who was a supporter of the IRA,

indeed one who had taken part in the 1916

Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil

War. The discovery of the documents in Co

naty’s house alerted the Garda to the fact that

MacStíofáin had been misleading them for

years as he had concealed the names of the

IRA volunteers recorded in the ﬁles from them.

Signiﬁcantly, the letter reveals an additional

fact: that the Conaty ﬁles were shown to Des

O’Malley while he was serving as minister for

justice.

Rare photo of Provisional IRA leaders

Twomey, MacStiofáin, McGuinness and Ó

Conaill.

Peter Berry (l) Captain James Kelly (r)

November 2020 35

porters of the IRA, let alone MacStíofáin’s fac-

tion which transformed into the Provisional

IRA after the IRA split in December 1969.

Yet, O’Malley would have us believe that the

CDC as an organisation was the incubator of

the leadership cadre of the Provisional IRA.

Tom Conaty who was Chairman of the

Central Citizen Defence Committee (CCDC)

was opposed to physical force violence. In

1972 he was chosen as part of a commission

of 11 to advise William Whitelaw, the Secretary

of State to Northern Ireland. He denounced

the Provisional IRA during interviews he gave

during his tenure as Chairman of the CCDC.

Paddy Doherty was one of the most

important leaders of the CDC in Derry. He was

also opposed to physical force violence. He

was a friend of John Hume.

Canon Padraig Murphy was another man

who was opposed to violence and exercised

great influence over the CDCs. James

Callaghan, the then Home Secretary and later

prime minister of Britain, described him in

glowing terms in his NI memoirs.

Lynch’s account made it seem there was no in-

former, no ‘tip-o’ rather that the ocials at

the airport unravelled what was going on inde

pendently. While they may very well have dis-

covered what was afoot, their activities served

to conceal the role of the informer.

ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL WHILE THE

PROVISIONAL IRA BOMBED ITSELF

INTO EXISTENCE

It is now clear that the most senior men in the

State’s security apparatus were asleep at the

wheel. They did not realise that their prized

asset – the Chief of Sta of the Provisional IRA

– was playing deceitful and dangerous games

with them. They somehow managed to remain

in a deep slumber during 1971-72 despite the

cacophony of bomb explosions and gunfire

that had announced to the rest of the world

that the Provisional IRA was on the warpath.

Had competent individuals served instead

of them, MacStíofáin might have been arrest

ed at one of his many assignations with his

Garda handlers.

VILIFYING CDC ACTIVISTS AS

PROVOS JUST IS NOT

HONOURABLE, MR. O’MALLEY.

The arms which Gibbons and his colleagues

attempted to import in 1970 were going to be

transported to a monastery in Co Cavan where

they were to have been held under lock and

key by the Irish Army and only released after

a vote of the Government. Such a vote would

only have taken place in the most dire of cir

cumstances, i.e. a threaten of a pogrom. After

such a vote, they would have been distributed

to the Citizen Defence Committees (CDCs) in

Northern Ireland, not the IRA.

The CDCs were made up of people, many of

whose leaders cannot be described as sup

Jim Sullivan was another senior figure in

the Central CDC. The suggestion that he was

a militant hawk, the type of person who later

became a Provisional IRA volunteer is yet

another of O’Malley’s fantasies. O’Sullivan

was a Marxist who was loyal to Goulding and

later sided with the Ocial IRA and became

active in politics on behalf of the Workers

Party.

Paddy Devlin and Paddy Kennedy MP.

Paddy Devlin served as Secretary to the Cen

tral CDC. He was opposed to physical force

violence and later became an SDLP minister

in the 1974 Power-Sharing Executive. Paddy

Kennedy was a Nationalist Stormont MP. He

was one of the signatories to the CDC bank ac

counts along with Paddy Devlin.

None of these men were supporters of the

Provisional IRA.

QUESTION : On what basis do you say these

men were supporters of the Provisional IRA?

QUESTION : If you are not in fact saying

these men were Provisional IRA members or

supporters, are you prepared to oer an apol

ogy to their families?

Cathal Goulding and Jim Sullivan

Canon P Murphy

Paddy Kennedy

36 November 2020

DUCKING ALL THE HARD

QUESTIONS.

O’Malley has ducked all the hard questions.

He exploited his Sunday Independent article

to smear Captain James Kelly, Charles Haugh

ey and others as conspirators who helped to

create the Provisionals. O’Malley did not deal

with a single one of the 30 instances described

by Michael Heney in his masterful analysis

of the Arms Crisis, particularly where he de

scribed how Lynch misled the public about

these events. Instead O’Malley professes his

belief in the honesty and integrity of Lynch. –

as if research doesn’t matter or as if history did

not depend on research.

At one point he states “I am certain that I

and other colleagues were never misled by

Jack Lynch. I knew Lynch intimately, working

more closely with him at this time than any

one, and know what sort of man Lynch was”.

But, Mr O’Malley, the evidence must prevail

over feelings.

A MAN BOUND BY DUTY OR ONE

WHO LIVES IN A MAKE-BELIEVE

WORLD WHERE HE SLAYED THE

DRAGON?

The truth is that no one in Fianna Fáil or Irish

military intelligence set out to establish the

Provisional IRA. The reality is less shameful

but egregiously embarrassing nonetheless:

the Provisional IRA came into existence and

ﬂourished while Jack Lynch was Taoiseach and

Des O’Malley was Minister for Justice because

they and their ocials gave MacStíofáin a free

pass to recruit, train and deploy Provisional

IRA volunteers. This happened due to incom

petence and ineptitude. Worse still, MacStio-

fain was almost certainly ﬁnanced in his en-

deavours – in part – by State funds.

Charles Haughey once said of Bertie Ahern

that, “He’s the man. He’s the best, the most

skilful, the most devious, and the most cun

ning of them all”. That description is probably

more apt for Jack Lynch who did it unostenta

tiously. Honest hurling, pipe-smoking Jack.

Sadly for Des O’Malley, it is beginning to

look like Jack Lynch chose him for the crucial

role of Minister for Justice precisely because

he was young and inexperienced and he be

lieved he would be able to move him about

like a pawn on a chessboard. Despite hav

ing grown to maturity and achieved much

politically, the scales have never fallen from

O’Malley’s eyes.

Worse still, had Lynch not wrapped himself

up in lies and deceit, he might have appointed

a more experienced minister who might have

seen through MacStíofáin and crushed the Pro

visionals before they had a chance to ﬂourish.

O’Malley’s predecessor, Micheál Ó’ Móráin

paid little or no heed to the information which

Peter Berry and the gardaí were feeding him

from MacStíofáin.

I somehow doubt that O’Malley’s succes

sor as minister, Patrick Cooney (of Fine Gael),

would have fallen for MacStíofáin’s deceits.

As O’Malley put it in his recent article about

the Arms Crisis: “As the last man alive who

Michael Heney (l) Captain James Kelly (r)

was centrally involved, I feel duty bound to set

the matter straight”. If this is a sincere senti

ment, surely O’Malley will now address the

actual circumstances in which the Provisional

IRA was allowed to construct its foundations in

the South during the period 1970-72?

Thousands of people died during the Trou

bles because of the Provisionals and the other

organisations with whom they engaged in a

brutal and protracted campaign. Thousands

were maimed, wounded and traumatised.

There are countless people alive today who

lost loved ones; and many who are living with

physical and psychological scars.

O’Malley owes it to them to deliver more

than bluster and hot air about Lynch’s alleged

integrity. He should deal with the factual evi

dence that exists.

The issues raised in this article are far from

exhaustive. There are plenty more which con

tradict the Lynch-Gibbons-O’Malley account of

the Arms Crisis and the birth of the Provisional

IRA. Nonetheless, O’Malley’s response to

them would provide valuable materials for his

torians to adjudicate upon where the blame

for the success of the IRA in the period 1970-

1972 truly lies.

It is now time for O’Malley to address the

evidence, especially since, as things stand, it

is beginning to look like history will record an

inexperienced young man who was appointed

as a minister at a tender age by a wily and de

ceitful Taoiseach who reckoned he could ex-

ploit his inexperience to further his cover-up

of what had happened in the months leading

up to the Arms Crisis. Furthermore that Lynch

was not suciently astute to realise that the

State faced a deadly threat from an emerging

paramilitary organisation in the shape of the

Provisional IRA and that Des O’Malley was not

the man to thwart this.

The end result was that O’Malley and his ad

visers let MacStiofáin run rings around them.

By the time they realised their deep-rooted

mistake, it was too late and the Provisional IRA

was up and running.

Patrick Cooney