At around the time of the Cuban Missiles disaster Sir Ian and his wife Margherita had been beginning to look forward to his mooted next posting in New Zealand; but that blissful vision had been snatched away from them as had so much else by the war. Neither of their adult children had survived the night of war; both had disappeared without trace like so many other parents’ hopes for the future. Afterwards, there was only duty to fall back upon, no matter how onerous or pointless it sometimes seemed in Dublin, the drably hostile capital of the Irish Republic.
The British Ambassador had received the Taoiseach’s note requesting an urgent ‘interview’ while breakfasting that morning with Anglo-Irish friends in Wexford. Inwardly, he had groaned because it was invariably the case that whenever the Taoiseach — the Irish Prime Minister — or his colleague, the Irish Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, summoned him at short notice it was invariably to deliver a new denouncement of perfidious Albion’s ongoing colonial malfeasance. Like all insecure and only superficially united administrations preoccupied with looking over its shoulder most of the time, the Fianna Fáil Government of Taoiseach Sean Lemass, was intensely sensitive to the least suggestion of a slight or insult, large, small or simply imagined towards his person, party or country and the mere continuing existence of the six northern counties of Ulster partitioned from the island of Ireland back in the early 1920s still hung over Dublin like a dark cloud.
Everybody knew the history; but it was not until an Englishman came to Dublin that he understood what that history meant. Under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act (1920) Ireland had been partitioned north and south on 3rd May 1921. But the Act had solved little. Under its provisions the entire island of Ireland had become the Irish Free State on 6th December 1922 which ought to have been but was never going to be the end of the affair; on the 7th December 1922 the Parliament of Ulster had formally opted not to join the new Dominion of the British Empire and thereafter the ‘Irish Question’ had remained malignantly unresolved, a festering canker. To the majority of undeniably decent, peace-loving Irish folk Sir Ian MacLennan was, therefore, the living embodiment of Oliver Cromwell’s ghost and there was nothing he could say or do to win over hearts and minds. Other that was, than to take the slings and arrows that inevitably flew his way with unflappable, unfailing good grace.
It had been with a weary sense of ‘here we go again’ that he had finished his breakfast, bid farewell to his wife and their hosts — there was no point dragging Margherita back to the bear pit of Dublin since he planned to return to Wexford as soon as possible — and driven in the company of the customary Irish Army escort the eighty miles back up the coast road to Dublin. Stopping briefly at the British Embassy in Merrion Square near Leinster House, the home of the Oireachtas Éireann, the Parliament of the Irish Republic to collect the latest Foreign Office telegrams, he had immediately set off again for his ‘interview’ with the Taoiseach.
In the back of the Embassy Bentley he had glanced at the latest telegrams.
It seemed the Argentine had seized Port Stanley on East Falkland. And South Georgia…
That did not sound like good news.
Malta was under attack…
By whom?
The Ambassador rifled through the other telegrams; none of which shed fresh light on either the situation in the South Atlantic or in the Mediterranean. Did the Irish know something about these widely separated incidents? No, that was hardly likely. There were few more parochial administrations on the planet than the one in Dublin. He brought himself up short; knowing he was being unfair. The Irish might have escaped direct attack in the October War but they were as much its victims as the United Kingdom. Sporadic American aid had taken the edge off the hunger on the streets of Irish towns and cities immediately after the war; otherwise austerity had bitten hard throughout the twenty-six counties and contrary to what many people in England believed, the government in Dublin wanted nothing to do with the near civil war in the six northern counties of Ulster. Not least because although it had shamed the Fianna Fáil Government of Sean Lemass to accept it, the food ships diverted — apparently at Margaret Thatcher’s direct intervention — from the Operation Manna convoys to both Belfast and Dublin during the past winter, had probably stopped thousands of Irish men and women starving to death.
Nobody needed to tell an Irishman or woman about the tragedy of war and the last thing most Irish people south of the border wanted was a shooting war with their wounded but infinitely more powerful and potentially vengeful neighbour across the other side of the Irish Sea. However, if anybody in England had anticipated the charity of the unexpected food ships arrival — barely publicised or acknowledged at the time — in Dublin to ameliorate ancient hatreds, they would have been rudely disabused of that hope by the upsurge of violence in the north in recent weeks.
Sir Ian MacLennan was a little surprised to discover that the Taoiseach was not alone in his rooms at Leinster House. Frank Aiken, the Minister for External Affairs and Lieutenant General John McKeown, Chief of Staff of the Óglaıġ na hÉıreann — a title literally translated as ‘Irish warriors’ but more prosaically descriptive of the ‘Irish Defence Forces’ — rose to their feet when the British Ambassador was shown in.
Sixty-six year old Frank Aiken was no friend of the United Kingdom but if he had ever been one he had long ago ceased to be a blanket ‘Brit hater’. The former IRA — Irish Republican Army — veteran of the Civil War and one of the longest serving members of the Dáil, the Irish Parliament, had been a campaigner on the European and wider World stage for de-colonisation, equality, peace and nuclear disarmament before the October War and like most old soldiers, he had no appetite for a new civil war in Ireland that might entrench the current partition of the island for another generation.
A tall, thin man with a brush moustache Aiken stepped forward and shook Sir Ian MacLennan’s hand, greeting him with a solemn nod of his head.
Lieutenant General John McKeown had lost the sun-burnished tan acquired during his pre-war tour as Commander-in-Chief of the United Nations Force in the Congo. His conduct of that operation had earned him high praise and respect well beyond the boundaries of the Irish Republic and raised the profile not just of the small Irish Army, but of the whole nation in the eyes of professional military contemporaries abroad.