Soldiering Against Subversion. Dan Harvey
on the quayside esplanade near the River Liffey is interrupted and an officer requested to report immediately to the Brigade Commander’s office. On the way he is joined by another junior officer, both Lieutenants from the 5th Infantry Battalion, similarly summonsed from elsewhere on the barracks. Three senior officers were waiting for them in the Brigade Commander’s office and the two Lieutenants were told to quickly get into uniform and that an already loaded convoy of trucks was awaiting their arrival in Cathal Brugha Barracks, Rathmines, Dublin. They were to command the convoy from there to Aiken Barracks, Dundalk, taking it on a given route from Dublin through Slane and Ardee to Dundalk. One of the former Lieutenants recalls:
On arrival to Cathal Brugha Barracks, it became apparent that the convoy contained a large consignment of Lee-Enfield rifles, ammunition and gas masks. Unable to verify the exact quantities involved and the specific serial numbers of the rifles, I declined to sign [the] Issues and Receipt Voucher presented for my signature by the Ordnance Survey stores staff. That I was unable to check the correctness of the convoy’s consignment was itself an irregular situation, but more worrying was the absence of any attendant armed escort party. The convoy was organised into two packets of three trucks each. The lead packet’s first truck contained rifles, the second rifles and ammunition, the third ammunition. I sat in the lead truck. All three drivers were armed, as were their companions. However, in terms of security this was light or minimal. The convoy’s second packet, to travel 15-minutes behind the first [and] commanded by the other officer, also had three trucks: two containing gas masks and the third truck empty, [which] acted as a spare in case of a breakdown. With a military police Land Rover placed well out in front as a vanguard ahead of the first packet. I briefed the drivers of the trucks to keep the truck behind in view. That completed, we headed off on our northwards journey out of Dublin’s Southside to Aiken Barracks, Dundalk.
The specified route was not that most regularly taken to reach Dundalk. Normally this involved turning right shortly after Slane and proceeding to Dundalk via Drogheda. Having made our way through the city and now beyond Slane, we were driving along the prescribed irregular route and as the road was winding, twisting and narrow, together with darkness having descended, it was difficult to keep the truck behind in view. I was also distracted by the fact that our radios were not working and concerned with thoughts in my mind as to why we were here, that it was all too easy to become intercepted by an armed body and was this planned to happen? It was then that I noticed the third truck full of ammunition was missing!
I ordered the driver of the lead truck beside me to pull over onto the side of the road so that we could regroup and was shortly joined only by the second truck. We waited and waited but no third truck appeared. The Military Police Land Rover had lost visual contact with us, so retraced its route and having located us I directed them back to find the missing third truck. The Military Police found the convoy’s separate second packet of trucks but there was no sign of the missing ammunition-carrying third truck. Suspecting that for whatever reason the driver of the third truck had mistakenly, or otherwise, taken the more usual, regular route to Dundalk, I decided to phone Aiken Barracks, Dundalk, to confirm that it had arrived. This, in the pre-mobile phone days, required a pay phone and loose change. Both eventually found, I got through to Aiken Barracks in Dundalk and ascertained that … having mechanically struggled up the hill at Slane, the driver [had] considered it prudent to travel the more familiar route to Dundalk.
We proceeded to Dundalk on our given route and arrived at Aiken Barracks. The Acting Post Commander, of Commandant rank, … was unhappy with the irregularity of the circumstances and was not prepared to take responsibility for the convoy, its content or to allow the consignment be unloaded, nor agree to provide an armed guard for it.
Having arrived to where [we were] ordered, albeit in unusual circumstances, I backed the six trucks up against each other, three abreast, and mounted our own guard. The acting Post Commander in Aiken Barracks was not happy. I, the Convoy Commander, was [also] not happy, the drivers now undertaking an overnight guard were not happy, the transport company unit who had provided the now not returning six trucks were not happy. All in all, for all involved, it was an irregular, unusual, unhappy situation and circumstance.
The gas masks were eventually emptied into a billet in the barracks and the three trucks released back to their unit. The three remaining trucks were left unloaded, the weapons and ammunition only taken off them two days later.
The ‘Dundalk Arms Shipment’, as it came to be called, and the likely intended release of arms and ammunition from army custody into Northern Ireland, had effectively been stalled. On hearing a report of the situation, the Taoiseach immediately insisted on the cessation of this unauthorised arrangement and the shipment of arms was cancelled. This unsanctioned effort to put Irish Defence Forces rifles and ammunition (obsolete but still deadly) into the hands of people in the North was a high level, but not governmentally authorised direction. The attempt to smuggle arms through the Defence Forces chain-of-command having failed, unbelievably a further clandestine ploy was revealed, but this too was fortuitously uncovered in the nick of time. Information was received about a surreptitious plot to bring a consignment of arms from the continent through Dublin Airport. A cloak-and-dagger episode of unparalleled gravity, it was a crisis within a crisis, the implications of which – if successfully executed, even in its very attempt – could have had a calamitous political effect. It might have completely undermined the diplomatic standing of the Irish Government and State. The ‘Arms Crisis’ was the greatest internal crisis since the Civil War in Ireland. With emotions throughout the country already running high due to the violent turn of events in the North, these were further legitimate concerns for stability in the South.
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