Unknown soldiers: Fianna Fáil opens Northern front. Sort of

It’s been a long time coming but Fianna Fáil finally has a real presence in the North. Gerry McHugh, an Assembly member and local councillor who broke with Sinn Féin, has joined the party, giving it its first seat in the Northern Assembly. Sort of.

This poses a very simple question: how come this ‘republican party’ has never stood in the North before?

All of the parties in the South claim to be republican, even Fine Gael, by dint of their operation in and support for a republican polity. In Ireland, however, the term republican has a more precise meaning: declaring itself ‘the republican party’, as Fianna Fáil does, implies support for the reunification of Ireland as a single republic.

Indeed, successive Fianna Fáil administrations have dropped hint after hint that they are working day and night to unify Ireland. In reality they have worked day and night to keep the place at arm’s length. Most recently, the bizarre spectacle of ‘republican’ elected deputies chastising the public for shopping in the North, something they described as ‘unpatriotic’, gives some indication of Fianna Fáil’s ideology-free opportunism.

Of course, the Arms Crisis of 1970 occurred when two Fianna Fáil cabinet ministers, Neil Blaney and future Taoiseach Charles Haughey stood accused of conspiring to supply arms to the nascent Provisional IRA. This cannot be seen as an attempt to unify Ireland. Such moves would be political in form and would have come from the government taking collective responsibility for doing something, whatever that might be. The alleged arming of the Provos is much easier to understand as an attempt to kill two birds with one stone: stop Northern Catholics from getting massacred without getting dirty hands in the process and, at the same time, slap down the communist-inspired Official IRA of the era.

A year before the Arms Crisis, Taoiseach Jack Lynch raised and then dashed the hopes of Northern Catholics under siege from loyalist paramilitaries and the unionist police force. Reacting to the violence, Lynch made a now infamous broadcast address to the public:

“It is clear now that the present situation cannot be allowed to continue. It is evident also that the Stormont government is no longer in control of the situation. Indeed, the present situation is the inevitable outcome of the policies pursued for decades by successive Stormont governments. It is clear also that the Irish Government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse.”

This was widely interpreted as Lynch warning the Stormont government that unless they stood the mobs down he would send in the defence forces to fight them. Of course, Lynch did no such thing. Instead of standing (idly) by he paced up and down and then set up military-run field hospitals along the Derry-Donegal border.

Regardless of its occasional dalliances with outlandish republican rhetoric, Fianna Fáil has always been a partitionist party. Despite this rhetoric and, in fairness, a significant rural republican voter base, the party has done less than nothing to bring about a United Ireland. Indeed, De Valera’s foundation of the party out of Sinn Féin was itself ultimately an acceptance of the partition of Ireland.