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NI Prime Minister Terence O’Neill Meets Taoiseach Jack Lynch

Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Terence O’Neill calls on the Taoiseach Jack Lynch at Iveagh House in Dublin on January 8, 1968. There is no advance publicity, largely to ensure that Ian Paisley is not able to upstage the meeting with his antics. The dozen reporters present are impressed at the friendly informality.

”How are you, Jack?” O’Neill says as he gets out of the car, extending his hand to the Taoiseach.

O’Neill is accompanied by his wife, Jean, and a number of officials. They have lunch in Iveagh House with the Taoiseach and his wife, Maureen, together with a number of official staff, and five of Lynch’s cabinet colleagues and their wives. The ministers are Tánaiste Frank Aiken, Minister for Finance Charles Haughey, Minister for Industry and Commerce George Colley, Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries Neil Blaney, and Minister for Transport and Power Erskine Childers.

The official statement at the end of the four-hour meeting states that progress has been made in “areas of consultation and co-operation.” The Taoiseach says they discussed industry, tourism, electricity supply, and trade, as well as tariff concessions, and “measures taken by both governments to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth disease from Britain.”

Afterward, O’Neill returns to Northern Ireland by a different route in order to avoid any possible demonstration. Paisley has been developing a high profile for himself with his attacks on O’Neill in recent months. But he misses the opportunity to protest on this occasion. The next day he issues a statement regretting O’Neill’s return home. “I would advise Mr. Lynch to keep him,” Paisley announces.

Five years earlier, in 1963, O’Neill becomes Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. From very early on, he tries to break down sectarian barriers between the two Northern communities. He also seeks to improve relations with the Republic of Ireland by eradicating the impasse in relations that has existed since the 1920s. He invites then-Taoiseach Seán Lemass to meet him at Stormont on January 14, 1965. Lemass courageously accepts the invitation. At their initial meeting, when they are briefly alone, Lemass says to O’Neill, ”I shall get into terrible trouble for this!” The Northern premier replies, ”No, Mr. Lemass, it is I who will get into terrible trouble.”

O’Neill makes his return visit to Dublin on February 9, 1965, and the two leaders agree to co-operate on tourism and electricity. It is Lemass who makes the most significant concessions, because the Constitution of Ireland does not recognise the existence of the North. Article 2 of the Constitution actually claims sovereignty over the whole island. Thus, by formally meeting the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, O’Neill claims that Lemass accorded him “a de facto recognition.”

The Taoiseach then bolsters this at their follow-up meeting in Iveagh House, Dublin, three weeks later. ”The place card in front of me at Iveagh House bore the inscription, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland,” O’Neill proudly explains. Surely this is tantamount to formal recognition. But many Unionists still have grave reservations about dealing with the Republic of Ireland.

In 1966, Ian Paisley establishes the Protestant Unionist Party (PUP) to oppose O’Neill. He rouses sectarian tension by holding mass demonstrations at which he brands O’Neill as the “Ally of Popery.” Nevertheless, public opinion polls indicate support for O’Neill’s leadership from both communities in the North.

After Jack Lynch replaced Lemass as Taoiseach in late 1966, O’Neill continues with his efforts to improve relations with the Dublin government by inviting Lynch to Stormont Castle. The Taoiseach travels to Belfast by car on December 11, 1967. There is no formal announcement of his visit, but word is leaked to Paisley after the Taoiseach’s car crosses the border.

Paisley arrives at Stormont with his wife and a handful of supporters, just minutes before the Taoiseach. With snow on the ground, two of Paisley’s church ministers, Rev. Ivan Foster and Rev. William McCrea, begin throwing snowballs at Lynch’s car. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) promptly grabs the two ministers. While they are being bundled into a police car, Paisley is bellowing, “No Pope here!” Lynch asks his traveling companion, T. K. Whitaker, “Which one of us does he think is the Pope?”

Paisley demands to be arrested by the RUC, and actually tries to get into the police car with his two colleagues, but he is pulled away. The two clergymen are taken to an RUC station and quickly released. Lynch ridicules the protest. “It was a seasonal touch,” he says. “It reminds me of what happens when I go through a village at home and the boys come and throw snowballs.”

Paisley says he had come to protest against “the smuggling” of Lynch into Stormont. If he had known about the visit earlier, he says that he would have brought along 10,000 people to protest. Denouncing O’Neill, as a “snake in the grass,” he goes on to accuse Lynch of being “a murderer of our kith and kin.” In an editorial, the Unionist Newsletter proclaims that ”there is no doubt that Capt. O’Neill has the full support of his colleagues and of the country.”

O’Neill’s four formal meetings with Lynch and his predecessor contribute to a thaw in relations at the summit between Belfast and Dublin, but the whole process is exploited by others to fan the flames of Northern sectarianism.

People do not realise it in early 1968, but Northern Ireland is about to explode. On October 5, 1968, people gather in Derry for a civil rights march that has been banned by Stormont. When the march begins, it is viciously attacked by the RUC. This ignites a series of further protests, which ultimately leads to Bloody Sunday, and the eruption of the Troubles for the next quarter of a century.

(From: “Meetings helped thaw relations before the North exploded,” Irish Examiner, http://www.irishexaminer.com, January 8, 2018)


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Death of John McKeague, Northern Irish Loyalist

John Dunlop McKeague, a Northern Irish loyalist and one of the founding members of the paramilitary group the Red Hand Commando (RHC) in 1970, is killed by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on January 29, 1982.

McKeague is born in 1930 at Messines Cottage, Bushmills, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, one of six children of Thomas McKeague and his wife, Isabella. The family operates a guesthouse in Portrush before moving to Belfast, where they open a stationer’s shop on Albertbridge Road. It is inherited by McKeague and in the late 1970s it becomes a confectioner’s shop and café.

In the late 1960s, McKeague is active in Ian Paisley‘s Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster and the Willowfield branch of the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV). He is linked to William McGrath and the revived Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) of the mid-1960s, and he publicises the claims of Gusty Spence that the police had framed him for the murder of a Catholic barman. On November 30, 1968, he participates in a banned demonstration by supporters of Ian Paisley against a civil rights march in Armagh city. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s he publishes a magazine, Loyalist News, full of anti-Catholic rhetoric and gossip, sectarian rhymes, Protestant religious material, and illustrated lessons in the use of firearms. He takes part in the bombing campaign of 1969 which leads to the downfall of Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Terence O’Neill and stands unsuccessfully for Belfast Corporation in 1969 as a Protestant Unionist Party (PUP) candidate. McKeague, who never marries, is a promiscuous homosexual. His paramilitary recruitment of young men has homoerotic overtones, and his violence contains elements of sexual perversion.

In 1969, McKeague and his associates take over the nascent Shankill Defence Association (SDA), which had been formed to oppose a destructive redevelopment scheme. He becomes its chairman and, despite his outsider status and eccentricities, is given to strutting around wearing a helmet and brandishing a stick, often seen as offering communal defence against a perceived Catholic threat. The organisation acquires 1,000 members. In August 1969, he orchestrates mob attacks on Catholic enclaves in Belfast, including Bombay Street. He boasts of these activities, becoming a figure of hate for Catholics. In October 1969, he is arrested and charged with conspiracy to cause an explosion but is cleared in February 1970. The sentence is reduced to three months on appeal. He testifies before Justice Leslie Scarman‘s tribunal, appointed to inquire into the unrest. In the course of his evidence, he exults over the August 1969 riots and the tribunal’s report condemns him by name. He later further enrages Catholics by calling the events of Bloody Sunday in January 1972 “Good Sunday” in a television interview.

McKeague seeks publicity and power, but his eccentricity and unwillingness to participate where he cannot command dooms his political ambitions. In the 1970 United Kingdom general election he wins only 441 votes in Belfast North. He is expelled from the UPV after being prosecuted in February–March 1970 over the loyalist bombing campaign of 1969, even though he is acquitted. He and Ian Paisley exchange bitter invective and he subsequently supports William Craig‘s Vanguard movement. In 1971, he and two associates are prosecuted under the new Incitement to Hatred Act for publishing a Loyalist song book, which includes verses, probably composed by McKeague, reveling in the murder of Catholics. The defendants plead that the book is purely a historical record, and their acquittal vitiates the act. After he quarrels with the newly formed Ulster Defence Association (UDA), which is created by a federation of the SDA with other local vigilante groups, his elderly mother is burned alive when the UDA petrol-bombs the family shop on May 9, 1971.

Early in 1972 McKeague is expelled from the SDA. He founds the Red Hand Commandos (RHC), centered on east Belfast and north Down, which perpetrates numerous sectarian murders. As RHC leader, he allegedly participates in murders involving torture and mutilation. He aligns the RHC with the UVF in 1972 and in February 1973 he is one of the first loyalist internees. He is subsequently imprisoned for three years for armed robbery, although he always asserts his innocence of this charge. During his imprisonment he assumes a leadership role among loyalist prisoners, undertaking two short hunger strikes in protest against the Special Powers Act and prison conditions. Later, in December 1981, he acts as an intermediary during a loyalist prison protest. On his release in 1975, the RHC splits and thereafter he denies any connection with the organisation, threatening to sue newspapers that link him with it. Until his death he is co-chair of the Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee (ULCCC), a paramilitary umbrella group established in 1974. On October 6, 1975, a Catholic customer is killed and McKeague’s sister severely injured when his shop is bombed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

From the mid-1970s McKeague advocates negotiated independence for Northern Ireland, arguing that this can accommodate republican anti-British feeling and unionist fears of a united Ireland. “The days of the Orange card are gone forever,” he says (Sunday World, January 31, 1982). He is a founder and deputy leader of the minuscule Ulster Independence Association and suggests that the “Londonderry Air” become Ulster‘s national anthem. In talks with nationalists and republicans, he tells the Catholic priest Des Wilson that a united Ireland would be acceptable to Protestants, provided “we enter as a free people, even if we’re only independent for five minutes.” However, his record is an insuperable barrier to these initiatives.

In his last years, McKeague is chairman of the Frank Street–Cluan Place–Stormont Street Housing Association. He lobbies for a security wall to shield this Protestant district of Belfast from the Catholic Short Strand on which it borders. Construction of the wall begins just before his death. He is shot dead by the INLA at his shop on Albertbridge Road on January 29, 1982. Shortly before his death, he is linked to the rape and prostitution of teenage boys at Kincora Boys’ Home in east Belfast. He had apparently been an informer to the security forces, and it is sometimes suggested that his murder is part of an official cover-up. He is buried in Bushmills, with Church of Ireland rites.

McKeague exemplifies the social deviant who can gain prominence during political instability, projecting and legitimising his hatreds and obsessions through extremist politics. In his last years, he accepts that he will die violently. He says that if loyalists kill him, “I want . . . to be left in the Republican area so that they’re blamed” (Sunday World, January 31, 1972).

(From: “McKeague, John Dunlop” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Assassination of Irish Republican Ronnie Bunting

Ronnie Bunting, a Protestant Irish republican and socialist activist, is assassinated on October 15, 1980, when several gunmen enter his home in the Downfine Gardens area of Andersonstown.

Bunting is born into an Ulster Protestant family in East Belfast. His father, Ronald Bunting, had been a major in the British Army and Ronnie grew up in various military barracks around the world. His father became a supporter and associate of Ian Paisley and ran for election under the Protestant Unionist Party banner.

Having completed his education and graduating from Queen’s University Belfast, Bunting briefly becomes a history teacher in Belfast, but later becomes involved in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and then with Irish republican organisations.

Unlike most Protestants in Northern Ireland, Bunting becomes a militant republican. His father, by contrast, was a committed Ulster loyalist. Despite their political differences, they remain close.

Bunting joins the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) around 1970 as he is attracted to their left-wing and secular interpretation of Irish republicanism and believes in the necessity of armed revolution. The other wing of the IRA, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, is seen to be more Catholic and nationalist in its outlook. At this time, the communal conflict known as the Troubles is beginning and the Official IRA is involved in shootings and bombings. He is interned in November 1971 and held in Long Kesh until the following April.

In 1974, Bunting follows Seamus Costello and other militants who disagree with the Official IRA’s ceasefire of 1972, into a new grouping, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). Immediately, a violent feud breaks out between the Official IRA and the INLA.

In 1975, Bunting survives an assassination attempt when he is shot in a Belfast street. In 1977, Costello is killed by an Official IRA gunman in Dublin. Bunting and his family hide in Wales until 1978, when he returns to Belfast. For the remaining two years of his life, he is the military leader of the INLA. The grouping regularly attacks the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in Belfast. He calls in claims of responsibility to the media by the code name “Captain Green.”

At about 4:30 AM on October 15, 1980, several gunmen wearing balaclavas storm Bunting’s home in the Downfine Gardens area of Andersonstown. They shoot Bunting, his wife Suzanne and another Protestant INLA man and ex-member of the Red Republican Party, Noel Lyttle, who has been staying there after his recent release from detention.

Both Bunting and Lyttle are killed. Suzanne Bunting, who is shot in the face, survives her serious injuries. The attack is claimed by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), but the INLA claims the Special Air Service are involved.

Upon his death, Bunting’s body is kept in a funeral parlour on the Newtownards Road opposite the headquarters of the UDA. On the day of the funeral, as the coffin is being removed, UDA members jeer from their building. The Irish Republican Socialist Party wants a republican paramilitary-style funeral for Bunting but his father refuses and has his son buried in the family plot of a Church of Ireland cemetery near Donaghadee.