Turning "Green"

A republican in Dublin

On his trip to the U.S. this fall, Ireland's Prime Minister Jack Lynch sounded like a crusader. He denounced American supporters of the Irish Republican Army and castigated "evil men of violence" for prolonging the bloodshed in the North. As it turned out, that was Lynch's valedictory. Last week, in a surprise move, he abruptly resigned after 13 years as leader of the Fianna Fail Party and a total of nine years as Prime Minister. His successor: Health and Social Welfare Minister Charles Haughey, 54, a wealthy accountant with pronounced republican sympathies.

Haughey and Lynch have long disliked each other, and Haughey's selection was a clear defeat for his predecessor. A 22-year party veteran who has held four major Cabinet posts, Haughey (pronounced Hah-he) won with the votes of Fianna Fail M.P.s from the traditionally republican counties in the West and on the Ulster border. His wife Maureen's father was Sean Lemass, a veteran of the 1916 Easter Rising and a former Prime Minister. Haughey's climb to party leadership was interrupted in 1970 when he was tried, and acquitted, in a Dublin court on charges of running guns to the I.R.A. Lynch promptly sacked him as Finance Minister. Though he rejoined the Cabinet after Lynch's 1977 reelection, the gunrunning charges are not entirely forgotten. "My God," groaned a British Cabinet minister at the news of Haughey's election, "this will make things ten times more difficult."

Indeed, one of the reasons for Lynch's resignation was his willingness after the Mountbatten assassination to cooperate with the British in efforts to assist the cause of peace. He allowed some cooperation between Irish and British security forces, including an agreement that permitted British helicopters to fly into a small area of Irish airspace in search of terrorists. He treated the Fianna Fail aim of political unity for all of Ireland as a distant ideal rather than an immediate goal. To some party members, that was heresy.

Lynch had been expected to resign, but not quite so soon. He wanted to give his successor time to prepare for the next election. However, last week a Fianna Fail member raised a question in Parliament about the party's defeat in two November by-elections in Lynch's native County Cork. That was the second humiliation this year: in June, Fianna Fail was trounced in an election of delegates to the European Parliament. These reversals came on top of a number of economic woes that also undermined Lynch: high inflation (14%), soaring interest rates (up to 20%) and a plague of strikes.

As Health and Welfare Minister since 1977, Haughey did not publicly oppose Lynch's moderate policies. But the affable politician, a deputy from a Dublin constituency, took care to make friends in the republican counties whose deputies backed him last week.

In a post-election press conference, Haughey tried to sound like both peacemaker and patriot. "I'm tinged with green, all right," he conceded, but added firmly: "I condemn the provisional I.R.A. and all their activities." Yet his stance on Ulster's future was clearly hawkish: re-unification "is my primary political priority." On cooperating with the British, Haughey said that Ireland's own forces are "totally capable of dealing with security matters." He dismissed as "inadequate" Britain's latest proposals to end the Ulster violence, including an all-party conference of Catholic and Protestant leaders. Small wonder that the news from Dublin left London fearful that "more difficult" times in Ulster lay ahead.

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