Exercise Armageddon


Exercise Armageddon was a military exercise by the Republic of Ireland in 1970. The aim of the exercise was "to study, plan for and rehearse in detail the intervention of the Defence Forces in Northern Ireland in order to secure the safety of the minority population".

Background

The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association organised protest marches from 1968 seeking to improve conditions for Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland, who were discriminated against by the majority Protestant population. This had led to counter-protests and then sectarian riots, leading to 1,500 Catholic refugees fleeing to the Republic of Ireland. On 13 August 1969 the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch said in a television interview: "…the Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse". His cabinet was divided over what to do, with Kevin Boland and Neil Blaney calling for robust action. On 30 August Lynch ordered the Irish Army Chief of Staff, General Seán Mac Eoin, to prepare a plan for possible incursions.
The then Northern Irish junior home affairs minister John Taylor recalled that Lynch's comment about no longer standing by resulted in Taylor mobilising 8,000 police reservists "to repel a possible invasion".
While the riots continued, the introduction of British Army troops in the Falls area of Belfast, and around the Bogside part of Derry from mid-August under Operation Banner were brought in to theoretically protect Catholic areas from further mass loyalist attacks. Ironically, this intervention would lead to Bloody Sunday in 1972, when fourteen Catholic civilians were killed in the Bogside by British soldiers.

Interim Report of Planning Board on Northern Ireland Operations

In September 1969 an Irish Army document was drawn up called the Interim Report of Planning Board on Northern Ireland Operations. It outlined their concept for feasible military operations within Northern Ireland. The army's planners accepted that it had "no capability to engage successfully in conventional, offensive military operations against the security forces in Northern Ireland" to protect the Catholic minority from loyalist mobs.
The plan called for units of specially trained and equipped Irish commandos to infiltrate Northern Ireland and launch guerrilla-style operations against the Belfast docks, Aldergrove airport, the BBC studios and key industries. The campaign would start in Belfast and the northwest, so as to draw the bulk of security forces in Northern Ireland away from the border areas and turn their attention to the guerrilla campaign. The Irish Army would then invade with four brigades operating in company-strength units to occupy the Catholic-majority towns of Derry and Newry, and attack any remaining security forces in those areas. The Irish Army Transport Corps did not have enough resources to transport all of the necessary forces to the conflict zone, and the plan suggested hiring buses from CIÉ. For political reasons, the Republic would not formally declare war when the operation started.
Only 2,136 troops out of 12,000 in the army were at actual combat readiness. The operation would leave the Republic of Ireland exposed to "retaliatory punitive military action by United Kingdom forces". The plan included a warning that: "The Defence Forces have no capability of embarking on unilateral military operation of any kind … therefore any operations undertaken against Northern Ireland would be militarily unsound."

Critique

The 2009 documentary If Lynch Had Invaded interviewed a number of academics, former civil servants and Irish Army officers, and they put forward a number of theories:
Historian Diarmaid Ferriter considers that the operation would have been popular at the time, given the strong emotive feeling in the Republic about the situation in Northern Ireland.

Arms Crisis

Subsequently some more actively nationalist Irish government ministers were tried in 1970 in the Arms Crisis trial, where the defendants included an Irish Army officer. It emerged that a secret Irish government fund of £100,000 had been dedicated to helping the refugees, but some of it had been spent covertly on buying arms for paramilitary groups. Ministers Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney were sacked from their posts.