So Boris is coming to visit Leo, although Leo’s pretty clear there’s going to be no backsliding on the backstop.

The Prime Minister will just have to try and keep his manners and not mispronounce “Taoiseach” as “teashop,” or repeat his gag that Leo should be called Murphy “like all the rest of them.”

Still, if you think Anglo-Irish relations are going through a bumpy spell, you should have seen what they were like fifty years ago this week.

In what is still a landmark television address, the then Irish Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, took to the airwaves half a century ago today to call for the United Nations to intervene in Northern Ireland in order to protect Catholic families from loyalist pogroms in Derry during the ‘Battle of the Bogside’.

All this was being played out in front of television cameras as Northern Ireland’s grisly sectarian secrets poured forth and were transmitted around the world.

The normality of the sectarian settlement was such that the Royal Ulster Constabulary – 90% Protestant – and their part-time reservists, the thuggish ‘B-Specials’ – generally didn’t think twice about knocking lumps out of any Catholic who stood in their way, television cameras or not. The kids of the civil rights movement were, of course, a target of choice.

Anyway, this part is familiar enough history, so back to Lynch.

What is remarkable, viewing that television address all these years later is both his eloquence and cold fury. He begins the address by stating that the Irish Government “have been very patient and have acted with great restraint over several months past.”

Behind the scenes, diplomatic pressure had been applied as the situation in the North deteriorated, but this had proven futile.

“…[I]t is clear now,” he said, “that the situation cannot be allowed to continue.”

In words Varadkar could echo in relation to Brexit, Lynch said it was “evident” that the Stormont regime was “no longer in control of the situation” and that the present situation was “the inevitable outcome of the policies pursued for decades by successive Stormont governments.”

He added: “It is clear, also, that the Irish Government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse.”

In an all-too-prophetic section, Lynch said it was obvious the RUC “is no longer accepted as an impartial police force. Neither would the employment of British troops be acceptable nor would they be likely to restore peaceful conditions – certainly not in the long-term.”

Scolded into action by the inertia in Westminster, Lynch then pulled a blinder:

“The Irish Government have, therefore, requested the British Government to apply immediately to the United Nations for the urgent despatch of a Peace-keeping Force to the Six Counties of Northern Ireland and have instructed the Irish Permanent Representative to the United Nations to inform the Secretary-General of this request. We have also asked the British Government to see to it that police attacks on the people of Derry should cease immediately.”

Not content with causing diplomatic embarrassment by invoking the UN, Lynch went further still:

“Very many people have been injured and some of them seriously. We know that many of these do not wish to be treated in six county hospitals. We have, therefore, directed the Irish Army authorities to have field hospitals established in County Donegal adjacent to Derry and at other points along the border where they may be necessary.”

UN peacekeepers and field hospitals to protect Northern Ireland’s citizens from the brutality of their own police force? Lynch was treating Britain like some despotic banana republic. But that wasn’t the end of it:

“Recognising, however, that the re-unification of the national territory can provide the only permanent solution for the problem, it is our intention to request the British Government to enter into early negotiations with the Irish Government to review the present constitutional position of the six Counties of Northern Ireland. These measures which I have outlined to you seem to the Government to be those most immediately and urgently necessary.”

He concluded:

“All men and women of goodwill will hope and pray that the present deplorable and distressing situation will not further deteriorate but that it will soon be ended firstly by the granting of full equality of citizenship to every man and woman in the six-county area regardless of class, creed or political persuasion and, eventually, by the restoration of the historic unity of our country.”

Just look at Lynch’s list of demands. The internationalisation of the management of Northern Ireland’s Troubles. A role for the Irish Republic in its affairs. The replacement of the RUC. The granting of universal civil rights for all and the eventual unification of the island of Ireland.

Barring the last point, all the other demands were met in the Good Friday Agreement settlement, with the provision of a border poll still to be enacted. If Lynch could see what needed to be done as early as 1969, it’s all the more tragic it took so long to get to where we are now.

 

Kevin Meagher is the author of: ‘A United Ireland: Why unification is inevitable and how it will come about’