While the IRA was derided in republican ghettoes as the Northern crisis erupted in 1969, the Department of Justice in Dublin took a serious view of the organisation. A file made public by the National Archives (20/69) reflects official concern at the left-wing activities of the movement. The government was urged to foment a split.
A memorandum concluded there were between 1,100 and 1,200 members, with splinter groups numbering less than 100. The organisation was in a poor financial state. Its sources of revenue were: sales of Easter lilies, a monthly journal, the United Irishman (the circulation of which had fallen that year from 60,000 to 25,000 copies); an annual levy of 50p on each member (many of whom were in arrears); Irish-American funding ("the most recent contribution of £865 resulted from [Cathal] Goulding's visit in December 1968 and £400 was used to pay off an immediate debt"); the Birmingham branch of the British Communist Party had donated £100.
It then provided a list of left-wing intellectuals associated with the IRA, including a professor, a barrister, lecturers and journalists. Tantalisingly, their names are obliterated.
The department believed it was dealing with an unlawful treasonable organisation, contemptuous of parliamentary democracy and committed to the establishment of a workers' republic.
In pursuance of its new policy of economic resistance, the IRA had committed a number of crimes involving arson or the use of explosives in the Republic during the previous year; £25,000 had been stolen at Dublin Airport in a commando-style operation. The memorandum suggested it might be necessary to re-establish the Special Criminal Court, which would involve opting out of the European Convention on Human Rights, and, "as a last resort, to operate the powers of detention without trial contained in the Offences against the State (Amendment) Act, 1940".
It considered the activities of the IRA were being given too much publicity in the media. Contrary to provisions of the Offences Against the State Act, "some newspapers - particularly The Irish Times - have openly referred to `the IRA', `Oglaigh na hEireann', `The Irish Republican Army' etc in describing the organisation which is still the subject of a proclamation of government declaring it to be an unlawful organisation. There have, too, been appearances on RTE by well-known leaders of the IRA, who have been facilitated in speaking on the aspirations and activities of `the republican movement' . . . "
Front organisations included the Citizens for Civil Liberties and the Wolfe Tone Society.
Moreover, "it is thought in the Department of Justice that if the facts of the new policy were publicised sufficiently by State and church authorities, a result would be [as in the case of the Republican Congress movement] a split in the IRA organisation and the communist element would become discredited". The government should promote "an active political campaign" to fragment the organisation.
The file on the Dublin Housing Action Committee (2000/6/423) makes the golden jubilee of the First Dail ring hollow. A veteran social campaigner, Hilary C.J. Boyle, asserted that during a peaceful march in January 1969, "the gardai acted with brutality and as agents provocateurs and tried to raise a row".
Department of Justice mandarins viewed the Dublin Housing Action Committee as "an IRA offshoot"
Meanwhile, 10,000 people were living in intolerable conditions in Dublin.
Another remarkable woman, Una O'Higgins-O'Malley, informed the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, that she would have been happier representing her assassinated father at the commemoration of the First Dail - and its democratic programme - "if I could feel in some way able to contribute to a betterment of this grave scandal . . . The children of the nation are very far from being cherished equally . . . I blame my own self and many like me who for years have called ourselves Christians living in a Christian society - and have not faced Truth."
The lord mayor of Dublin, Frank Cluskey, in a telegram to the Taoiseach on the eve of the First Dail ceremony, appealed for the release of an imprisoned squatter "as a tangible token of our acceptance of the principles espoused on that occasion."
Mr Lynch replied that, as Denis Dennehy's imprisonment arose from his refusal to obey an order of the High Court, his release was a matter for the court.
In the course of 1969, Mrs Boyle arraigned the Taoiseach in three typewritten letters. On January 20th, she claimed the gardai had charged at the march "like mad bulls . . . They hit out with their batons, they kicked and punched and generally acted as agents provocateurs".
A superintendent intervened when she was being dragged by two gardai. She suggested later to friends that the senior officer had been afraid of her upper-class accent and age. The friends said not at all, she told Mr Lynch; the officer was afraid of her pen.
She urged Mr Lynch to act and "show you are not another Craig or Paisley. Order an investigation into Garda conduct last Saturday. Things have come to a pretty pass when a lame old lady of 70 who was completely peaceful can be kicked by a garda."
Mrs Boyle wrote on November 15th, 1969, that structurally-sound houses in Dublin were being turned into offices, "or allowed to become uninhabitable [like those owned by Mr Haughey on the North Strand] when you bulldoze them down for the ubiquitous foreign office".
She predicted: "You create unbearable social problems by building ghettoes like Ballymun miles outside the city. You are destroying our heritage of beauty by allowing Regency houses, such as the Stephen's Green-Hume Street ones, to be destroyed for the concrete and glass monstrosity of the foreign speculator."
She wanted Mr Lynch to declare a housing emergency, challenge greedy landlords, acquire neglected houses by compulsory purchase order and convert them to flats for the working class. She died in 1988.
Brendan O Cathaoir is a historian and Irish Times staff journalist