Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (24 page)

Some of the dissidents were upset at the almost dictatorial way in which Charlie was allowed to commit the party to his own policy without any discussion within the parliamentary party. They were particularly critical of the way in which he reacted to the publication of the report of the New Ireland Forum in 1984.

His critics were being told that they should voice any concern within the parliamentary party, but as far as Charlie was concerned, any discussion had to give way to electoral considerations. The regular weekly meeting after the publication of the report was postponed for him to be in Cork for the photo call as the party's candidates submitted their nomination papers for the upcoming European elections. By the time the parliamentary party met, Charlie had firmly pronounced the party line and any backtracking would lead to speculation about his leadership – this time in the midst of the European election campaign. He therefore moved a motion congratulating the party's representatives ‘on their splendid contribution to the purpose of the forum both in its work and the subsequent presentation of the report'. An amendment stipulating that the leader should only enunciate policy ‘after discussion with the parliamentary party' was roundly rejected, and the motion was then carried unanimously.

Following the three hour meeting O'Malley was openly critical of the way in which debate on the report had effectively been stifled. With the campaign for the European elections already under way, his remarks were widely resented in party circles and Charlie seized on the opportunity of calling for the expulsion O'Malley from the parliamentary party. The haste in which a meeting was convened – with little more than twenty-four hours notice – was in stark contrast with the two weeks taken to convene the parliamentary party meeting to discuss the Forum report. Charlie personally proposed the removal of the party whip, and his motion was carried by a sizable majority.

Uno duce, una voce!
P. J. Mara, the party press secretary, remarked facetiously to a journalist afterwards. ‘We are having no more nibbling at my leader's bum'.

Early in the new year when the FitzGerald government was confronted with an internal crisis while trying to legalise the sale of condoms and other non-medical contraceptives without a doctor's prescription, there was a real chance the government would be defeated. Some members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy vociferously opposed the new bill and a number of Fine Gael and Labour deputies threatened to vote against the measure. Much to the annoyance of opportunists within Fianna Fáil, O'Malley spoke out strongly in support of the bill.

Although he had already been expelled from the parliamentary party, he was still a member of the Fianna Fáil organisation. In view of that membership, he did not take the logical step of actually voting for the bill after speaking for it. Instead, he just absented himself from the Dáil while the vote was being taken.

Charlie seized on this to secure O'Malley's expulsion from the organisation ‘for conduct unbecoming a member'. Some people tried to intercede on O'Malley's behalf, but Charlie was adamant. ‘It's him or me', he said.

O'Malley was permitted to address the meeting of the party's national executive called to discuss his expulsion. He requested that the vote should be taken by secret ballot, but Charlie called for a unanimous decision. ‘I want it to be unanimous for the good of the party and the organisation,' he emphasised three different times. When it became apparent that this was out of the question, he demanded a roll call vote.

While the parliamentary party was free to establish its own procedure, the national executive was bound by the party's
Coru
, which stipulated that all votes should be secret. Yet none of the 82 members present dared to challenge Charlie on the issue. A roll call vote was taken and O'Malley was expelled by 73 votes to 9.

Interviewed on RTÉ radio the following morning, O'Malley said that his difficulties with Charlie went back to the time of the arms crisis. ‘I came to know in some detail about those events and all the details surrounding them and I inevitably began to form certain opinions then and quite honestly those opinions have never left me,' he explained. But he refused to elaborate. When he adopted the same approach some months later on the
Late Late Show,
Gay Byrne challenged him to ‘put up or shutup – stop saying these things, or else say what you mean'. But O'Malley still refused to clarify the matter.

In coming months he gave serious consideration to founding a new party. He still had not firmly made up his mind until Charlie became involved in controversy over the Anglo-Irish Agreement signed at Hillsborough Castle, near Belfast, on 15 November 1985. Charlie voiced strong objections against what he contended were the constitutional implications of the agreement. He vehemently denounced the very first article of the accord affirming ‘that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would only come about with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland'. He said that this provision was ‘in total conflict with the constitution and in particular, Article 2 of the constitution', which claimed sovereignty over the whole island.

‘For the first time ever,' he emphasised, ‘the legitimacy, which is contrary to unification, has been recognised by an Irish government in an international agreement ... From our point of view it gives everything away,' he said. ‘It confirmed that status of Northern Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom and it confirmed that there would be no change in the status without the consent of the northern Unionists.'

Charlie's constitutional arguments ignored Article 2 (b) of the agreement which clearly stated that ‘there is no derogation from the sovereignty of either the Irish government or the United Kingdom government'. While that clause may well have been inserted as a sop for northern Unionists, it also guaranteed the Republic's constitutional position because it meant there was no derogation of the Republic's
de jure
claim to sovereignty over the six counties. Admittedly the agreement contained a recognition of the fact that the area was under alien rule, but Article 3 of the constitution already recognised that fact.

FitzGerald had astutely anticipated Charlie's criticism and had carefully prepared a trap. The clause to which the Fianna Fáil leader took such extreme exception had actually been taken practically verbatim from the communique which Charlie and Margaret Thatcher had issued following their first summit meeting in May, 1980. Charlie suddenly found himself at pains to explain why the very words he had used five and half years earlier should now mean something different. If agreeing to those words constituted a sell-out, then it was he who had sold out in May 1980.

In an effort to depict the Hillsborough agreement in the best light possible, the government orchestrated a very successful public relations effort, which was undoubtedly enhanced from the Nationalist perspective by the hysterical reaction of Ian Paisley and the Unionists community in Northern Ireland. FitzGerald did not claim that partition was likely to be ended in the near future, as Charlie had intimated and Lenihan had indicated back in December 1980, but Paisley might just as well have said as much in his demagogic rantings. He described the agreement as the ‘process of rolling Irish unification'.

There was dramatic drop in Fianna Fáil's public support and, for the first time in sixteen months, FitzGerald squeaked ahead of Charlie as the popular choice for Taoiseach. It was at this point that O'Malley launched the Progressive Democratic party along with Mary Harney, who was still a member of the Fianna Fáil organisation at the time.

The new party flourished initially, drawing considerable support from disillusioned Fianna Fáil voters and floating voters who had supported Fine Gael in November 1982. But there was little comfort for Charlie because satisfaction with his performance dropped to the lowest point since the black days of 1983. He actually trailed both FitzGerald and O'Malley as the people's choice for Taoiseach in a poll published on 18 January 1986.

There were two further defections from Fianna Fáil in the following weeks, as Pearse Wyse and Bobby Molloy joined the Progressive Democrats. Of the 22 deputies who had voted against Charlie's leadership in October 1982, only nine were still in the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party a little over three years later.

The most vocal of those critics were all outside the party with the exception of Charlie McCreevy, whose vulnerability was dramatically exposed in the run up to the local elections in 1985 when he was denied a party nomination to run for the Kildare County Council. There was no doubt whatever that Haughey had a firm grip on the party leadership at the time of the next general election in February 1987.

Eamon de Valera had failed to secure an overall majority in his first five general elections following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Three of those general elections were as leader of Fianna Fáil. But this was generally overlooked by the media as they regularly decried Charlie as Fianna Fáil's greatest failure as a leader. In February 1987 he became the first leader of the party to fail to gain an overall majority in four consecutive general elections. Just three seats short of a majority, Fianna Fáil was very unlucky. With a total of less than 500 extra votes spread over eight specific constituencies, the party would have won 89 seats, which would have been very a comfortable majority.

Charlie was again blamed for the failure; this time with real justification. After all he was responsible for driving Des O'Malley out of Fianna Fáil, and he was thus indirectly responsible for the formation of the Progressive Democrats, who won fourteen seats. Four of those were former Fianna Fáil deputies and at least another half dozen were former members of the party. There could be little doubt that the advent of the Progressive Democrats had denied Fianna Fáil an overall majority. As Charlie sought to form a government, the media again concluded that he was fighting for political survival. If he failed to cobble together a government, it was generally believed that he would be toppled as party leader.

Realistically Fianna Fáil was the only party that could form a government. This time Charlie made it clear that he would not deal with anyone. He did offer to support the re-election of the speaker, Tom Fitzpatrick of Fine Gael. When the offer was described as stroke politics, he indignantly refused the suggestion.

‘It would enhance the standing and the prestige of the office,' Charlie said. ‘It was the tradition in previous years that the outgoing ceann comhairle was re-elected by the incoming Dáil.'

Fitzpatrick would have been willing to stay on, but he was instructed by Fine Gael to decline the offer. Fianna Fáil therefore approached Seán Tracy, an independent deputy, and he jumped at the offer.

Charlie felt he could depend on the support of Neil Blaney in the vote for Taoiseach, which meant that all eyes turned to Tony Gregory again. He was ready to make a deal, but Charlie insisted that there would be no deal this time. Gregory therefore told the press that he would not support the Fianna Fáil leader, which raised the unprecedented spectre of a hung Dáil.

John Kelly, the former Fine Gael minister, suggested a power-sharing arrangement between the two major parties, but Charlie ruled that out. ‘Fianna Fáil is not interested now – nor will it be in the future – in arrangements of that kind,' he said. ‘If need be,' he added, ‘there will have to be another general election.'

On the eve of the Dáil meeting, the main story in the
Irish Times
was a report that Fine Gael sources were contending, if the Dáil failed to elect anyone, that Garret FitzGerald ‘would not necessarily have to report to the president'. He could postpone his resignation for a couple of days in order to allow further consultations to find a candidate who would win a majority vote in the Dáil. John Murray, the attorney-general in Charlie's last government, argued however, that the Taoiseach would have to resign immediately under article 28.10 of the constitution.

At the time the whole thing looked like an invitation to flush out an alternative candidate from within Fianna Fáil. Back in 1948 Richard Mulcahy, the leader of Fine Gael, had been unacceptable to some of his party's potential allies in the Dáil. Fine Gael therefore put forward John A. Costello for Taoiseach and he was elected with the blessing of Mulcahy, who remained as party leader. Thus there was a precedent for having other than a party leader as Taoiseach.

Although four men – FitzGerald, Haughey, O'Malley and Spring – were nominated for Taoiseach, only Charlie had any chance of winning. The whole thing seemed to depend on Gregory, with the result that there was a distinct air of tension when he rose to speak in the Dáil.

He had waited in vain, he said, for the right wing parties to act responsibly in getting together to form a government. ‘They are motivated by petty party self-interest and personality difference and have sought to divert attention from their irresponsibility by isolating me, as if the burden of responsibility rested with me alone,' he continued. Rather than precipitate another election, he said that he would abstain from voting. This was greeted with some applause and an audible sigh of relief from all sides of the house.

Charlie had successfully called Gregory's bluff. The voting ended in a tie – 82 for and against Charlie's nomination. He was then elected on the casting vote of the speaker. FitzGerald immediately rose to congratulate him and went on to say that Fine Gael would not attempt to bring down the government, if it sought to introduce the necessary corrective measures for the economy. Although FitzGerald resigned as leader of Fine Gael next day, his successor, Alan Dukes, pursued this policy as part of what became known as the Tallaght Strategy.