The Puppet Masters: How MI6 Masterminded Ireland's Deepest State Crisis

Author’s Note

The events of 1969–70, which include the Arms Crisis, are the subject of two books I have previously written: Deception and Lies (2020) and An Enemy of the Crown (2022). The Arms Crisis concerned allegations that two Fianna Fáil politicians, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, together with others, broke Irish law in an illegal attempt to import weapons with the assistance of Irish military intelligence, G2, to arm the Provisional IRA. In those books I set out the basis for my belief that the endeavour, while a chaotic shambles, was not an illegal operation.

A quarter of the present book includes new evidence about the role played by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and their mole within garda intelligence, Patrick Crinnion, in the Arms Crisis. Some of the information published in my previous books is revisited here, albeit in summary form. I have included footnotes which direct interested readers to the unabridged versions of these events which are available in my earlier works. The summaries are included in this volume to maintain a coherent narrative.

I enjoyed access to two separate tranches of documents written by Patrick Crinnion during my research for this book. First, a collection of letters Crinnion sent to various parties in 1973. Second, a compilation of memoranda, also from 1973, which were written by Crinnion. The latter was supplied to me by a source who must remain confidential. For clarity and to avoid repetition, I have made some very minor edits to the 1973 memoranda and I have chosen not to place a footnote after each quote from that material. Readers can assume that where Crinnion is quoted without the addition of a footnote, the words emanate from the second tranche of documentation.

Various people quoted in this work have spelled the names of other individuals and organisations differently. In order to avoid confusion, and for consistency, I have amended these.

When Seán MacStíofáin published his memoirs in 1975, he spelled his name as Seán MacStíofáin, which is the form used throughout this book, except in direct quotations. Crinnion, for example, spelled it Sean Mac STIOPHAIN.

DAVID BURKE, DUBLIN, 2024

Dramatis Personae

AINSWORTH, Joseph: Garda intelligence chief.

BERRY, Peter: Secretary-General to the Department of Justice, 1960–70.

BLANEY, Neil: Fianna Fáil politician. Charged along with Charles Haughey for attempting to import arms illegally into the Republic of Ireland in 1970. The charges against him were dropped at an early stage.

CALLAGHAN, James: Home Secretary 1967–1970. British prime minister, 1976–79.

CASEY, Martin: a member of Saor Éire.

COSTELLO, John A: Fine Gael politician who served as Taoiseach, 1948–1951, and 1954–1957.

COSGRAVE, Liam: Leader of Fine Gael, 1966–1977; Taoiseach 1973–77.

CRINNION, Patrick: a member of the special detective unit (SDU) of An Garda Síochána’s assigned to C3, garda intelligence division.

CULHANE, Detective Sergeant Patrick: a member of the SDU.

DOOCEY, Detective Inspector Patrick: a member of the SDU.

FITZGERALD, Garret: Leader of Fine Gael, 1977–1987. Taoiseach 1981–1982; 1982–87

FLEMING, Chief Superintendent John: Head of the SDU.

GIBBONS, James: Fianna Fáil politician and Minister for Defence, 1969–70.

GILCHRIST, Andrew: British ambassador to Dublin, 1966–70.

GODFREY, Hyman: Scotland Yard and/or MI6 agent who posed as an arms dealer in London in 1969.

GOULDING, Cathal: Chief-of-Staff of the IRA. Founding member of the Official IRA. Marxist in his political outlook.

GRAHAM, Peter: a member of Saor Éire.

HAUGHEY, Charles: Minister for Finance, November 1966–May 1970. Leader of Fianna Fáil, December 1979–February 1982. Taoiseach, December 1979–June 1981, March 1982–December 1982 and March 1987–February 1992. Arms trial defendant.

HAUGHEY, Pádraig (‘Jock’): businessman and brother of Charles Haughey.

HEATH, Edward: Conservative Party Prime Minister of the UK, 1970–74.

HEFFERON, Col Michael: Director of Irish Military Intelligence, G2, 1958–1970.

HILLERY, Patrick: Minister for External Affairs July, 1969–1973.

HUGHES, Detective Garda Michael: a member of the SDU.

KEANE, Frank: a member of Saor Éire.

KELLY, Capt. James: joined the Irish Army in 1949. He went into the intelligence directorate, G2, in 1961. He was posted to the Middle East, 1963–65. He returned to G2 and retired in 1970.

LITTLEJOHN, Keith: criminal and MI6 agent and brother of Kenneth.

LITTLEJOHN, Kenneth: criminal and MI6 agent and brother of Keith.

LYNCH, Jack: Fianna Fáil politician. Taoiseach, 1966–73; 1977–79.

McMAHON, Superintendent Philip: head of Garda Special Branch, 1961-69.

MacSTÍOFÁIN, Seán: IRA Director of Intelligence. Founding member of the Provisional IRA.

MALONE, Patrick: Head of C3 in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Garda Commissioner, 1973–75.

‘MARKHAM-RANDALL’, Capt.: the nom de guerre of a British spy who visited Dublin in November 1969.

MULLEN, Thomas: Garda intelligence officer attached to C3 in the 1950s and early 1960s.

O’BRIEN, Conor Cruise: Irish Labour Party TD, June 1969–June 1977. Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, March 1973–1977.

O’DEA, Detective superintendent Ned: a member of the SDU.

O’MALLEY, Des: Chief Whip, July 1969–May 1970; Minister for Justice, May 1970–March 1973.

OLDFIELD, Maurice: Deputy Chief of MI6, 1964–73; Chief of MI6, 1973–78; director and co-ordinator of intelligence, Northern Ireland, 1979–80.

PECK, John: British ambassador to Dublin, 1970–73. Founding member of the IRD, and director of the IRD, 1952–53/4.

RENNIE, Sir John: Head of the IRD, 1953–58. Chief of MI6, 1968–73.

ROWLEY, Allan: Director and Controller of Intelligence (DCI) Northern Ireland, 1972–73

SMELLIE, Craig: MI6 Head of Station, Lisburn, 1973–75.

STEELE, Frank: MI6 officer stationed in Northern Ireland, 1971–73.

TIMMONS, Richard: a member of Saor Éire.

WALLACE, Colin: Psychological operations officer with the British army at HQNI in the early and mid-1970s.

WALSH, Liam: a member of Saor Éire.

WARD, Andrew: Secretary of the Department of Justice, 1971–86.

WHITELAW, William: Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, 1972–73.

WILSON, Harold: Labour Party Prime Minister of the UK, 1964–70, and 1974–6.

WREN, Larry: Head of C3 in the 1971–79, and Garda Commissioner 1983-87.

WYMAN, John: MI6 officer.

Organisations, terms, locations and acronyms

B Specials: the auxiliary force of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

C3: Garda intelligence unit responsible for the analysis and co-ordination of information collected by the SDU.

Citizens’ Defence Committees (CDCs): A collective description of the groups which assembled in 1968 and 1969 to defend Nationalist communities in Northern Ireland from attacks by Loyalist extremists, RUC and B Specials.

CDCs: see citizen defence committees.

Dáil Éireann: Irish parliament, located in Dublin.

DoJ: Department of Justice, Dublin, Ireland.

Dublin Castle: Headquarters of the Special Detective Unit (SDU) of An Garda Síochána.

FCO: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom.

FDCO: The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FDCO), formerly the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) of the United Kingdom.

FO: Foreign Office of the UK.

Fianna Fáil: Irish political party led by Éamon de Valera, 1926–1959, Seán Lemass, 1959–66, Jack Lynch, 1966–79, and Charles Haughey, 1979–92.

Fine Gael: Irish political party led by Liam Cosgrave, 1965–77, who was succeeded by Garret FitzGerald, 1977–87.

G2: Irish Military Intelligence.

Gaeltacht: a region in which the Irish language is spoken.

Garda Síochána: the police force of the Republic of Ireland.

Garda Special Branch: The intelligence gathering apparatus of An Garda Síochána. It is also known as the special detective unit (SDU).

HQNI: British army headquarters NI, based in Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn.

IRD: Information Research Department. A propaganda and forgery department attached to the FCO.

MCR: monthly confidential reports which were prepared by the C3 directorate of An Garda Síochána. They were produced by the gardaí for the Department of Justice.

MI5: Britain’s internal security service, active inside the United Kingdom and her overseas colonies. It is attached to the Home Office.

MI6: Britain’s overseas intelligence service, also known as the British secret service. It is attached to the Foreign Office. It is often referred to as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

MoD: Britain’s Ministry of Defence.

NAI: National Archive Ireland.

NIO: Northern Ireland Office.

OC: Officer-in-command

Official IRA: the Marxist wing of the Republican Movement which emerged after the split in December 1969. Its chief-of-staff in the 1970s was Cathal Goulding.

Partition: a phrase used to describe the division of Ireland pursuant to the Government of Ireland Act 1920 by a border into two separate jurisdictions, whose successor states are the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Provisional IRA: the wing of the IRA which emerged after the IRA split in December 1969 with the intention of ending British rule in Northern Ireland.

PSYOPs: Psychological Operations to influence people and events by manipulation and deception.

RTÉ: Radio Telefís Éireann, the national television and radio broadcaster of the Irish state.

RUC: Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police force of Northern Ireland.

Saor Éire: a Republican socialist paramilitary organisation responsible for bank robberies, the killing of Garda Richard Fallon and an arson attack on Fianna Fáil HQ in 1967.

SDU: special detective unit or special branch of An Garda Síochána

TD: Teachta Dála or member of the parliament of the Republic of Ireland.

UDA: Ulster Defence Association.

UPV: Ulster Protestant Volunteers.

UVF: Ulster Volunteer Force.

Introduction

A Fog of Deceit

Detective Garda Patrick Crinnion was a senior member of C3, the intelligence wing of An Garda Síochána (the gardaí), in the 1960s and 1970s. Secretly, he was working for the British secret service, MI6.

Crinnion rose to become C3’s leading analyst. One of those who came under his microscope was John Stevenson, an Englishman better known to history as Seán MacStíofáin. The latter was appointed as director of intelligence of the IRA by its chief-of-staff, Cathal Goulding, and his colleagues on the Army Council, in 1966.

MacStíofáin and Goulding were of immense interest to Crinnion and MI6.

Goulding wanted to nudge the Republican movement in the direction of mainstream politics. That entailed recognising the legitimacy of Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament, and Stormont in Belfast. MacStíofáin was steadfast in his opposition to both of those assemblies. Instead, he wanted to retrieve the pike from the thatch, swap it for a machine gun, and lead another charge at the British empire in order to achieve full Irish independence.

Crinnion watched the IRA through the prism of his spy-glass as the power struggle between these two Republicans grew in intensity in the mid-1960s. The clash culminated in the fracture of the IRA, in 1969, into the Officials, supported by Goulding, and the Provisionals, led by MacStíofáin.

Although MacStíofáin and Goulding had been arrested in 1953, after a raid on an armoury in England, and had served six years in prison at Wormwood Scrubs, they ultimately had little in common. Goulding developed a Marxist vision of a united Ireland hoping to make common cause with working-class Loyalists. MacStíofáin, on the other hand, believed that Unionists were a rabble who ‘lacked a cultural identity’ and would be taught to speak Irish after reunification. ‘I don’t see this Irish-speaking provoking a reaction from Northern Protestants . . . Adopting the Irish language would show them the real difference between being Irish and being English’. ¹

MacStíofáin was conservative in his views; Goulding a liberal. The former saw himself as a family man. He was a non-smoker and professed not to drink alcohol, whereas Goulding was a ‘relentlessly cheery’ individual who made friends easily and frequented the ‘fashionable bars around St Stephen’s Green drinking with writers, musicians and painters and became a recognised feature of Dublin Bohemia’. ² The writer Brendan Behan, an ex-IRA man, featured prominently among Goulding’s friends. The pair had been close since childhood. In adulthood, they shared a common trade as decorators and a similar political outlook.

MacStíofáin was a practising Catholic, whereas Goulding’s religion was Marxism. Throughout the years that MacStíofáin spent in prison in the 1950s, he was ‘sustained’ by his ‘belief in God and in the practice of our religion, which I have always found to be a great consolation any time I have been in a tight spot’. ³ In jail, Goulding played chess with a God-less Russian spy convicted of attempting to steal atomic secrets.

WHILE HE WAS LIVING in Cork in the 1960s, MacStíofáin once refused to sell the United Irishman newspaper because it had published a letter by Dr Roy Johnston which criticised the recital of the rosary at IRA commemorations as ‘sectarian’. At one stage he would only attend mass if it was celebrated in Irish. He told Rosita Sweetman, in 1972, that in a united Ireland he saw the Catholic Church ‘playing a very important role’. ‘I don’t see why the educational control should be taken from the Catholic Church. I think people like the Christian Brothers have done great work in promoting the Irish language and Irish games. What I do think though, is that the same educational facilities should be offered to other non-Catholic people to educate their children.’ ⁴ He would eventually move to live in a Gaeltacht in Meath and place a mat at his doorway instructing visitors thus: ‘Labhair Gaeilge anseo’. (Speak Irish here).

MacStíofáin had conservative views about divorce and contraception. ‘I don’t think these things should be [contained in the] written or unwritten laws of any country. They’re a matter of conscience. I do think family planning clinics should be set up to help young married couples, but there are other ways of planning a family you know than these artificial contraceptives. I don’t agree with divorce, I think it undermines the foundation of marriage, and I wouldn’t agree with contraceptives in slot machines on the street like you have in London and America. But I’ve never had any problems like this myself.’ ⁵ When the IRA discovered condoms could be used to make acid fuse bombs, MacStíofáin refused to smuggle them into the Republic.

When the IRA split in December 1969, MacStíofáin became one of the key architects of the Provisional IRA. At first the dissidents were perceived by many as a splinter group that would fade away, as had so many other offshoots. They maintained a low profile, recruited volunteers, raised funds and armed themselves. Aside from Goulding, who called MacStíofáin a ‘petty-minded conspirator’, few had an inkling of MacStíofáin’s determination, ability and cunning. He became the Provisionals’ first chief-of-staff. While the Provisionals engaged in the defence of the Nationalist ghettoes in Northern Ireland in 1970, they did not go on the offensive until early in 1971.

During his career as an IRA leader MacStíofáin kept many secrets from his colleagues, one of which was that he was an informer for the special branch, or special detective unit (SDU) of the gardaí.

But MacStíofáin, in reality, was playing cloak and dagger games with the gardaí. He never wavered from his vision of Republicanism. He was a quasi double agent.

MacStíofáin’s masquerade lasted more than a decade during which he benefited from the immunity afforded to him by his role as an apparent ‘informer’. He used his influence to deflect garda attention away from himself towards his rivals, especially Goulding. After the creation of the Provisionals, MacStíofáin enjoyed a breathing space which lasted an impressive two and a half years during which he imported arms and trained his recruits, with far less scrutiny and intrusion from the police than he might otherwise have encountered.

A lot has been written about MacStíofáin. The overlapping story of Patrick Crinnion has received minimal attention from historians despite the massive disruption his career as a garda and British spy occasioned to his homeland.

Between them, Crinnion and MacStíofáin would change the course of Irish politics, throw Fianna Fáil into disarray, and create an atmosphere in which the most militant form of Republicanism came to the fore.

1

The Man from Mensa

Joseph Crinnion and Mary Hogan were married in October 1933 in Monkstown, Co. Dublin. Joseph, a carpenter, lived in Dun Laoghaire. The couple welcomed their first child, Patrick, to the world on 15 November 1934. He was born at the family home at Mill Lane Shanganagh, Co. Dublin. Another boy, Peter, followed on 12 February 1939, and a daughter, Phyllis, after that. ¹

The Crinnions went to work for Mervyn and Sybil Wingfield and, later, his son Mervyn Patrick, the viscounts of Powerscourt, Enniskerry. Mary served as a housekeeper at their magnificent family home. It was originally a thirteenth-century castle, part of the estate of Phelim O’Toole. In 1603, King James I of England granted a lease of the property for twenty-one years to Sir Richard Wingfield, to punish O’Toole for his disloyalty to the crown. The Wingfields murdered O’Toole in the Killing Hollow, near Powerscourt, in May of 1603. The property remained in the Wingfield family for the next four centuries.

Patrick Crinnion grew up in more humble surroundings. The Wingfield family owned a row of cottages on the Boghall Road, Bray, County Wicklow, in which loyal and trusted servants of the family, such as the Crinnions, were allowed to reside. ²

The Powerscourts went into a decline in the late 1920s and, by the early 1930s, Mervyn was talking about having to sell the estate. The family was saved by Patrick’s marriage to the poet Sheila Claude Beddington.

Mervyn and Sybil died in 1947, almost simultaneously, a double blow that meant that their son Patrick faced dual death duties which took their toll on the wealth of the family. ³

Crinnion’s parents continued to work for the Wingfields. By the 1950s, the mansion had become a ‘sombre’ place. ‘There were no visitors, nobody went out in the evenings, and the gates were locked at half past ten.’ ⁴

On the positive side, the Wingfields were good employers, certainly to the Crinnions. Patrick Crinnion’s father Joseph predeceased his mother, Mary. She spent her retirement years in a pleasant apartment on the second floor of a Georgian house on Vevay Road which the Wingfields kept for their former servants.

Crinnion, a bright student, was educated at the local national school. He went on to become a member of Mensa. The latter is an organisation recognising those who achieve a 98% score in a supervised IQ examination or other approved intelligence test. Mensa boasts many policemen within its elite membership and, in 1955, Crinnion chose a career in An Garda Síochána. Aged twenty, he commenced his service on 10 May of that year. One of his early tasks, while stationed at Donnybrook garda station, was to protect the home of the then Taoiseach, John A. Costello, at 20 Herbert Park in Ballsbridge.

Nancy Lattimore lived in a mews house on Morehampton Lane, Ballsbridge, with her parents. She met Crinnion one day while he was on guard duty at Herbert Park and they became friends. ⁵ Soon, they were dating. Such was his acceptance by her family that Nancy’s mother now found herself preparing meals for Crinnion when he came off duty. The Lattimores had a military background. One of Nancy’s family had served in the British army during the First World War and had been gassed in the trenches. Although he survived, he never got over the ordeal. Two of Nancy’s brothers joined the British army. One of them, Seamus, rose to become a major. Patrick Crinnion trotted after Seamus like a besotted pup.

One night, shortly after joining the force, Crinnion was walking beside the wall of a school on his beat in Dublin when he noticed a bundle of old newspapers on the footpath. When he prodded them with his boot, bank notes spilled out. Crinnion could have trousered the money but gathered it up and brought it back to his desk sergeant in Donnybrook. The rule was that if no one came looking for money, the finder could claim it after a year. No one staked a claim. When he went to collect the cash, he was told that since he had been on duty the night he stumbled across the notes, they belonged to the Exchequer.

The money meant a lot to Crinnion. He was outraged that the cash was not returned to him. He approached John A. Costello, whom he had befriended while on protection duty outside his house in Donnybrook, about the matter. The passage of time did not dampen his indignation. In 1973, Crinnion wrote to John’s son, Declan Costello, the then attorney-general, recalling how:

… although I know you cannot picture me now, during the I.R.A Border Campaign of 1956/62, I spent about a year on duty outside your home on Herbert Park protecting your father who was then An Taoiseach. It was while on this duty that I met the girl from nearby who is now my wife. As well, in a matter where I found a hoard of money which the State sought to retain, usurping my rights as a citizen, your father took an interest and I brought the then Commissioner [Daniel Costigan] ⁶ to court in a civil action which although it failed on a technicality satisfied honour. ⁷

Crinnion was a non-smoker and teetotal. His potential was recognised quickly by his superiors and he was assigned to the special detective unit (SDU) at the end of the 1950s. To aid his finances, he worked many hours overtime, including VIP protection assignments.

With his career moving in the right direction, Patrick purchased a property in his sole name on Rathmore Avenue, on the Lower Kilmacud Road in Stillorgan, Co. Dublin, on 28 August 1959. He and Nancy were married on 12 September 1959.

Crinnion became a part of the garda intelligence machine that extinguished the flickering embers of the IRA’s Border Campaign of 1956–62, an offensive that never caught fire.

In a memorandum prepared in 1973, Crinnion recalled how, when:

married first I was working on shift [duty and] in order to get to the [Dublin] Castle [the HQ of the SDU] at say 5.45 a.m. on my bike, allowing for windy weather or punctures, I had to set my new alarm clock for a 4.30 a.m. early rise, put on the kettle, wash and shave and have a bit of breakfast, pick up my lunch and leave the house no later than 5.05 a.m. for the [cycle] journey a minimum of 30 minutes and during the winter, in the frost and ice, time was critical to me. At that early hour in the morning and at that time there was no radio station on for me to check the time as I had my cup of tea in the kitchen. The money situation was not good either and I confess I had no watch either.

In the late 1950s a brilliant piece of sleuthing and deduction brought Crinnion to the attention of one of the leading figures of garda intelligence, Patrick Carroll, the officer who commanded C3, the brain centre of garda intelligence at the Phoenix Park. Later, Carroll was promoted to oversee all of the departments in C division, and eventually rose to become garda commissioner, 1967–68. In one of his 1973 memoranda, Crinnion recounted how Carroll:

met me once while he was Chief Supt. C3 and I was a D/Gda. in SDU. He summoned me to his office to explain how I had reached a conclusion in a certain case where scurrilous anonymous documents, directed against political office holders were being distributed in the West of Ireland. He may recall that from sheer interest, although not specifically allotted the case; I had shown the culprit to be a particular person. The case had reached a dead end in the routine investigation and as was the custom then in SDU, the file was read [out] to the men, in case anybody might recall or know something to go further.

The young man impressed Carroll. The meeting proved to be Crinnion’s big break. According to one of Crinnion’s 1973 memoranda, in late December 1960, he was assigned to C3, and entered a world of deception and lies. The department was based at the Phoenix Park, whereas the SDU was spread out across the country with a HQ at Dublin Castle. C3 collected, analysed and co-ordinated the streams of intelligence which flowed into it from the various SDU divisions dotted across the country. Crinnion continued to work at C3 for the rest of his career as a garda. His role ‘was to utilise my special knowledge of [subversive organisations] for the benefit of the State’.

This provided him with the opportunity to peer inside the inner workings of the IRA. During the Border Campaign the IRA had been determined to shield their command and coordination network from the gardaí and the RUC. Crinnion recalled in a memorandum in 1973 how a phone tap revealed that ‘in the last two years’ of the conflict:

the controlling contact for all the ASU (Active Service Units) along the Border was [a] woman here in Dublin, who knew personally at least one man in each unit. This gave her a check on the authenticity of any caller . . .

Crinnion, however, had a haughty streak. In a letter he wrote to Garda Commissioner Patrick Malone, who had been his superior at C3 in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he described his work at C3 as ‘not just first class but exceptional’. ⁸ He spoke of his irritation at ‘inexperienced officers’ whom he believed should not have been ‘left to gain experience [in garda intelligence] in a hit and miss fashion’. ⁹ He criticised the fact that some of them had ‘never previously worked exclusively on Special Branch duties’ and, damningly, that a number had had to ‘be trained by the Staff [at C3] even in such elementary matters as recognition and, according to the SDU timescale, identification of the enemies of the State’. ¹⁰ He saw his own role as crucial because ‘the basic recognition and correlation of information’ which he developed was the ‘most profitable [method of] counter-action’ against subversives. That work depended ‘on the reflexes of the [SDU] Detective in C3’. ¹¹ Narcissus-like, he was clearly referencing himself.

The type of work Crinnion found himself performing at C3 was stimulating, such as the time he concluded that a maverick element of the IRA had tried to kill President Éamon de Valera.

2

The De Valera Bomb Plot

During the early hours of St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1963, two young men crept into St Finbarr’s Cemetery in Cork under the cover of darkness. St Finbarr’s is a hallowed place for Republicans. ‘Old’ IRA men from the War of Independence are buried there. It is the resting place of Terence McSwiney and Tomás Mac Curtain, both former lords mayor. The remains of the hunger striker Joseph Murphy can also be found inside its walls.

The men, Des Swanton and Gerry Madden, found what they were looking for, a platform made of tubular scaffolding and planks of wood beside a memorial. The structure had been erected for a ceremony which was due to take place the next day. They had brought a suitcase with them containing a bomb.

Their target was the memorial, which President Éamon de Valera was due to unveil at the plot, shortly after noon, that day.

Seán MacStíofáin and his colleagues in the Cork IRA were displeased about the forthcoming visit. The IRA had long since parted company with de Valera, a former IRA leader who had become a politician in 1926, when he established the Fianna Fáil political party. The actions his government had taken against the IRA during the Second World War were still fresh in their minds. Many volunteers had been interned. John Joe Kavanagh, an IRA man who had been killed by gardaí in 1940, was buried at St Finbarr’s. Some of the younger IRA men wanted to sabotage the ceremony but were told to stand down by the leadership, including MacStíofáin. Swanton and Madden defied the dictate. Madden stated later:

After carefully considering several courses open to us, Volunteer Swanton and myself decided that at this late stage in the proceedings there was only one alternative open to us that was to blow up the memorial to prevent the desecration of our patriots’ graves by those who had sold out the Irish Republic.

On the night prior to St Patrick’s Day, Volunteer Swanton and myself were engaged in preparing a mine when two members of the Army [IRA] came upon us. They were looking for a useless revolver, which we gave to them. These men were very obviously under most terrific pressure at the time. Members of the Staff were aware of this and had supplied them with a car to collect the weapon. This interruption delayed us an hour and also endangered the security of the operation. ¹

A celebration was taking place that night for Séamus Ó Líonacháin, an IRA volunteer, who had been captured by the RUC at Torr Head, Co. Antrim, on 12 December 1956, and had been in jail in Belfast Prison until March 1963. He was attending a ‘welcome home’ event at the Thomas Ashe Hall in Cork. Ó Líonacháin recalled that:

In the course of the night I noticed some agitation and heated discussions taking place and eventually I was approached by a tearful Elma O’Connell, [Dáithí Ó Conaill’s] sister who asked me if I could intervene and do something to prevent her boyfriend from doing something. She explained that on the following day de Valera was coming to the Republican Plot to unveil a monument and that her boyfriend and another volunteer intended to blow up the monument that night. I immediately approached the local OC and another senior member of the movement and we went upstairs to the library to discuss it and I was amazed at their casual attitude to what I thought could turn into a disaster. They said that they had warned the two lads that if they went ahead with their plan it would be an unofficial action and they would be dismissed from the movement and I felt that the least that should be done was that a group should go down to the house in Blackrock and detain the two lads there until after Dev had departed again. However, the