Operation Armageddon, the planned 1969 Irish invasion of the North

donaghs · 18-05-2015 8:41am

Maybe writing up this plan was just a sop to Boland and Blaney in the cabinet. Give them the impression that something might be done, and keep cabinet unity, while not actually doing anything. Same as Jack Lynch saying we can "no longer stand by".

clear thinking · 19-11-2015 2:32am

From reading the article this was desk based exercise that had a one liner saying 'we'll lose, stick with politics' in response to the invasion question. So the speculation here is based more on fantasy than what was actually discussed.

The rest of the desk based exercise seems equally mad - train up a load of nordies in the FCA. If british intelligence picked that any number of 'northern' FCA reservists, lets say 100-1,000, training for a month, and they would have, I doubt there would have been any question as to which state would be launching an attack on the other. Although it may have been possible a low level of this may have been tolerated by the british to develop intelligence in the south.

Peregrinus · 19-11-2015 2:53am

meathstevie wrote: »

Personaly speaking I find it even hard to believe that an allegedly sane government instructed the top brass in the Irish Defence Forces to even examine the possibility of such an operation that could only end in swift failure.

Well, of course, very often the main or only reason for examining an operation that can only end in swift failure is to document that it can only end in swift failure, thereby taking it off the table as an option.

I don't think anybody - not even Boland or Blaney - imagined for an instant that the Irish defence forces would be anything other than pasted in a conventional encounter with the British forces. If there genuinely was anybody who favoured a military intervention, it will have been as a way of "internationalising" the conflict, and thereby putting pressure on the UK government.

Yes, the UK forces could have taken and occupied the whole of the Republic, but it's unlikely that they would have - they had tried holding Ireland by military force before, remember, and the political cost proved to be too high for the strategy to be sustainable. Plus, invading and wholly occupying the Republic, even in the legitimate exercise of the right of self-defence, would have massively internationalised the situation, so in a sense that would have been a good outcome for the Blayneys and the Bolands.

I think the British would have repelled the incursion, and stopped at the border. There might have been some punitive raids on military installations or government facilities within the Republic, just to make the point that they could do much more if they were pushed to.

Ren2k7 · 13-02-2016 11:43am

Any suggestion of an outright invasion of the North would have obviously been disastrous for the DF. We simply didn't have the capability to intervene. Not then and certainly not today. History has taught us that we don't fight on our enemy's terms. We saw this illustrated when the Irish Vols were destroyed during the Easter Rising when they fought the British on conventional lines. The Irish War of Independence however was more successfil because we fought the Brits on OUR terms, using guerrilla and hit and run tactics. The IRA in the North were also surprisingly effective utilising such methods and that's why the Irish state should have provided more backing for the IRA instead of trying to fight them. Covert training camps and arms shipments to the IRA would have give them increased capabilities fighting the British and over time the Irish in the North could have established 'liberated' zones like what we saw in the Bogside, South Armagh and West Belfast, areas denied to the British security forces.

Alas what we got was a southern Govt more sympathetic to loyalists, with psychos like The Cruiser more interested in going after Republicans and pushing extremist laws like Section 31 to deny them a voice on Irish airwaves. FGLAB in the 70's did so much for the British that it's quite likely the Brits had a spy at the Irish cabinet table. Certainly there are strong indications that at least one former FG Taoisigh was a British agent. The Gardai, army and political establishments were and still are riddled with British informants and double agents. We're our own worst enemy.

Operation Armageddon, the planned 1969 Irish invasion of the North

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