The former Fianna Fβil minister, Mr Kevin Boland, who quit the Cabinet in protest following the sacking of Mr Charles J. Haughey and Mr Neil Blaney in 1970, died last night aged 84.
Born in Dublin in October 1917, he was the second son of Mr Harry Boland, a former minister for justice and one of the founders of Fianna Fβil alongside Eamon De Valera.
Elected to the Dβil in 1957, he became one of the few politicians, then or since, to join the Cabinet - as minister for social welfare - on his first day as a TD.
Throughout his life, he held a consistent view on Northern Ireland that was simple in its clarity for some, but simplistic in the extreme for many others, including oftentimes his own Cabinet colleagues.
For many, however, his life will always be associated with the Arms Trial and its aftermath.
A man of stern views, he nevertheless earned grudging respect from those who admired the consistency of his views.
On May 4th, 1970, he wrote out his resignation as minister for local government and handed it to an usher in Leinster House for the personal attention of the Taoiseach, Mr Jack Lynch.
Just 24 hours later, the public knew what he had then known. Both Mr Haughey and Mr Blaney had been sacked. The State was in the throes of one of the biggest political sensations in its history.
The sackings were provoked by allegations that Mr Haughey and Mr Blaney had conspired to illegally import arms for supply to republicans in Northern Ireland.
Later that year, Mr Boland was expelled from the Fianna Fβil parliamentary party. He went on to resign entirely from the Fianna Fβil organisation and formed his own party, Aontacht ╔ireann.
The opening moments of the party's life held promise. Eleven hundred people attended the function at which it was launched on September 19th, 1971, including Captain James Kelly, the Army officer at the centre of the Arms Trial.
Their ambitions ran large. They would not be a splinter group of Fianna Fβil "but a new and truly republican party - to cut down the rotten tree that Fianna Fβil has become and to replace it with a new growth rooted in the old tradition of nationhood".
However, the good days passed quickly. Throughout, Mr Boland alleged that the Garda Special Branch was subjecting the party to unjustifiable surveillance. Soon, attendances dropped away to just a few hundred people.
For a time, Mr Boland expected both Mr Haughey and Mr Blaney to join him in Aontacht ╔ireann: "I felt let down by Mr Blaney and will never understand why he didn't join. He saw his main aim, as far as I could understand it, as being to remain a member of the Dβil and his best chance of doing that was not to take any action that would alienate the goodwill of his own supporters in Donegal. I went to Haughey and tried to persuade him that even if he did succeed in taking over Fianna Fβil he would be dealing mainly with people who were incompetent, inadequate and unreliable. But he didn't see it that way."
In 1973, Mr Boland led an unsuccessful challenge in the Supreme Court to the Sunningdale agreement on Northern Ireland, arguing that it was unconstitutional because it accepted that a part of the island was part of the United Kingdom.
However, the court did not agree, ruling that the agreement merely reflected the government's recognition of the political reality of the day.
For a time, Mr Boland feared that he would have to sell his farm to pay the legal bill.
In addition, the judges held that it would be an "unwarranted and unjustifiable interference" with the government's right to make policy if the court interfered in the case.
Later, Mr Boland argued for a change to the Constitution which would force the government of the day to hold referenda on any aspect of national policy if the call was made by at least 50,000 people.
Throughout his lifetime, he maintained a high regard for the man who first appointed him to Cabinet, Eamon De Valera, who, he said, could have remained on for longer as Taoiseach had he so wanted.
"He was going blind at the time, but he had as much a grasp of matters as his ministers. He came into Cabinet meetings with an incredible knowledge of the most complex memoranda", he said.
In June 1973, Mr Boland refused to attend a State reception to honour President Erskine Childers because he believed that the government led by Mr Lynch had "perjured itself collectively" over the Arms Trial.
Over the years he consistently maintained that the rest of the Cabinet had known of the attempts to bring weaponry into Northern Ireland using a Belgian arms dealer, Mr Albert Luykx.
However, Mr Boland's unhappiness with Mr Lynch predated any of these events. When the Northern Troubles erupted in 1969, he wanted the government to pressure the British into leaving Ireland for good.
In Mallow, Co Cork, in January 1968, he told a Fianna Fβil function that the historic claim contained in de Valera's 1937 Constitution could never be watered down.
Younger members of the party needed to be on their guard against any attempt "by trickery" to change the position. The claim on the North was Fianna Fβil's fundamental reason for existing.
During a newspaper interview in 1983, he said: "I wanted the Government to take the attitude that this was the climax of a period during which it had been demonstrated that what we call the 1920 solution to the Irish problem had been a complete failure, because it was contrary to the principles of democracy and a concession to an armed force, the Ulster Volunteer Force.
"The essential requirement to make peace possible was for the British to make a decision to end the Union. I found the Government as a whole, and the Taoiseach in particular, opposed to this view."
For years afterwards, newspapers inaccurately said that Mr Lynch had sacked him from the Cabinet. Frequently, he sued. He always won. On one occasion, the mistake cost Independent Newspapers £75,000.
In 1974, he pressed the Government again to seek a British withdrawal declaration. "The two communities in the North cannot get together as long as the British are there", he declared.
That same year, he attended meetings in London of the Irish Civil Rights Association to urge Irish voters living there to support the association's candidates.
In March 1982, Mr Boland was fined £25 for assault in Dublin District Court for punching a schoolboy in the face at an athletics meeting, following a fracas. In 1998, Mr Boland went on hunger strike in protest at South Dublin County Council's ruling that he had built a shed on his lands at Rathcoole, Co Dublin, without planning permission.
Mr Boland is survived by his wife, Cecilia (Cis), two sons, Brendain and Fachtna, two daughters, Kathleen and S∅le, and two brothers, Ciarβn and Harry.
In 1996, he once more went back to the courts to challenge government policy towards Northern Ireland, complaining that it was not actively seeking a united Ireland.
