Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (38 page)

His use of the word ‘infidels' could be taken as a rather snide way of questioning FitzGerald's religious convictions, as he was an admitted agnostic. Haughey stampeded Garret into endorsing the wording for the Pro-Life Amendment in 1982. The Fine Gael leader then felt compelled to go through with the proposal, even though he publicly warned that the wording was so flawed that it could actually lead to the legalisation of abortion in certain circumstances. FitzGerald tried to change the wording but some of his party was so insistent that he had to let the issue be put to the people without amendment, and the proposal carried. This was seen as a victory for Haughey, but Garret was subsequently proved right in 1992, when the supreme court ruled that a teenage rape victim in what was called ‘the X-case' was entitled to an abortion in line with the wording of the Pro-Life Amendment. It was ironic that the only constitutional change that FitzGerald's government was able to implement was one that he did not want.

His greatest accomplishment was undoubtedly the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which he forced through despite Charlie's cynical opposition. Notwithstanding the success of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, however, FitzGerald was decisively defeated when he introduced a referendum to remove the constitutional proscription on divorce in 1986. He had set out to prove that the Catholic bishops did not rule the twenty-six counties, but it seemed that he merely demonstrated that they still enjoyed a virtual veto in Irish political affairs. By then the economy was in a shambles. Garret had tried to pursue the necessary economic policies but he was attacked at every turn by Fianna Fáil. Under Charlie's leadership the party famously proclaimed that ‘health cuts hurt the poor, the sick, and the handicapped', but then he implemented even more drastic health cuts on coming to power.

Faced with Fianna Fáil's dishonest and opportunistic opposition, FitzGerald was a virtual political prisoner of the Labour party in government. He felt unable to make the economic cuts that he realised were necessary to revive the economy. The country was therefore virtually bankrupt in 1987 when Haughey got back into power on the casting vote of the ceann comhairle.

‘It is important that the narrowness of the margin by which Deputy Haughey was elected should give rise to no doubts as to the possibility of the new government in this Dáil as at present constituted taking the steps that have become necessary in the national interest,' Garret told the Dáil following Haughey's election as Taoiseach. ‘None of us is or need to be in doubt about the gravity of the problems facing us or about the fact that they can only be overcome by an effort of political will involving a commitment and a degree of united effort on the part of all of us in politics which is outside the normal framework of what has in the past been secured or what has seemed possible to secure given the adversarial character of our parliamentary system,' Garret assured the Dáil.

‘It will not be easy for an opposition to support some of the measures the government will have to take,' he said. ‘Yet we will do so. It will not be easy for the government to take these steps but they must do so.' This was a piece of supreme statesmanship in which he placed the national interest ahead of his party and his own political position. He outlined the necessary policy and then stepped down as Fine Gael leader, leaving it to Alan Dukes to implement what became known as the Tallaght Strategy.

Within little over a decade just about all of the reforms that FitzGerald had advocated in the 1970s were implemented – the pluralist society, the deletion of the constitutional ban on divorce, eliminating the offensive implications of Articles 2 and 3, and ending the political interference of the Catholic Church were all achieved. Some of his former lieutenants especially Dick Spring and John Bruton, were in the political forefront in securing those changes. For instance, Bruton played a pivotal role in pushing through the divorce referendum, even though he had strong personal reservations, but he realised that it was an important step in demonstrating that the country had become a tolerant society. Various people got the political plaudits, but Garret was the person who had articulated the need for those changes and generated the enthusiasm and idealism to fire the cause.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century the Republic of Ireland underwent a virtual revolution that was much greater than the social or economic changes of the first half of the century. With the hindsight of history it is obvious that FitzGerald ultimately achieved what he set out to do. In his reserved, unostentatious way he was the political colossus of the latter half of twentieth century Ireland.

At the time, however, Charlie was widely considered the more accomplished politician. He played his part in the changes. He was the first one to get legislation enacted legalising the sale of artificial contraceptives. He was a brilliant operator who essentially took FitzGerald's political clothes when they suited him, with the result that he appeared to be the winner – the shrewd political operator not only outplayed and defeated FitzGerald but also had earlier replaced, if not ousted, Jack Lynch, the most popular Irish politician since Daniel O'Connell. Haughey was also the virtual personification of ostentation in Irish politics. He went to Paris to witness, if not share in, Stephen Roche's victory in the Tour de France in 1987. He also went to Rome to see Ireland play Italy in the quarter final of the soccer World Cup in 1990, when he invited opposition leaders to join him, thereby muting the kind of criticism that had surrounded his earlier trip to Paris. He enjoyed the trappings of power.

His aide P. J. Mara would go ahead to announce that ‘An Taoiseach is coming.' He would tell the people not to refer to him as ‘Mr Haughey', but as ‘Taoiseach'. He could be very conscious about the dignity of his office, but there were others times when he showed scant respect for the office.

An American couple wandered into a Dingle bar where Charlie was clearly enjoying himself one evening. A local Fianna Fáiler brought them over to introduce them to the Taoiseach. Haughey promptly complimented the woman, grabbing her bottom and squeezing. The locals watched in amusement as the Yanks fled in a mixture of horror and indignation.

Charlie once rounded on Dick Walsh of the
Irish Times
for persisting in calling him Mr Haughey, rather than Taoiseach. ‘Have you no respect for the office?' he asked.

Walsh replied that it was precisely because he had so much respect for the office that he persisted in calling him ‘Mr Haughey'.Yet, Charlie did try to build bridges to his critics and enemies. He visited Walsh in hospital on one occasion and brought him a copy of Andrew Boyle's bestseller,
The Climate of Treason
. Of course, it was a joke, but not to be outdone, Walsh asked Charlie to autograph it. Haughey declined – his sense of humour was not as good when he was on the receiving end.

In the early days, Haughey helped to build an aura of success around himself by exhibiting the trappings of wealth. He lived regally in a magnificent mansion set in palatial grounds. He engaged in horse-racing, the renowned sport of kings, as both an owner and a breeder. He owned his own yacht as well as his own island off the coast of Kerry, and he helped set up his son in the helicopter business.

Charlie affected the studied gestures of Napoleon and frequently behaved in an imperious manner towards those around him. He courted publicity by a variety of means, as he clearly loved the limelight. He entertained lavishly. He had a reputation for generosity to the point of profligacy. He was known as a soft-touch for hard luck cases. He was one of the people caught in the ‘Dear Mary' scam by the
Sunday Independent
, which sent out begging letters to prominent people, supposedly from a single mother, looking for the price of bringing her young son into Dublin to see Santa Clause. Haughey responded with a £30 contribution. On another occasion while canvassing, he noticed that the fireplace in the home of an old woman living alone was damaged, so he paid to have it repaired. On learning that a family in Donneycarney had lost their carpets and furniture due to a fire, Haughey instructed that the carpets and furniture were replaced, and he again paid the bill.

Of course, the cynics might say that it was not really his money, that other people had given it to him. It was a case of ‘easy come, easy go'. No doubt, the recipients of those gestures welcomed the kindness. Charlie was prepared to help people and be generous, even where there was no political advantage to be gained.

‘Come off it,' Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote in the
Sunday Independent
, ‘it surely ought to be obvious that the “enormous popularity, especially in his own constituency” was precisely “the political advantage to be gained”, and that Charlie Haughey duly gained it.'

‘I had the rather unpleasant but instructive experience of sharing a constituency (Dublin North East) with C. J. Haughey and I saw his machine at work, at close quarters,' Cruise O'Brien continued. ‘He had lots of money to throw around and he duly threw it in copious free drink at election times and multiple small handouts between elections ... Haughey was the legendary Robin Hood, taking from the rich, in order to give to the poor. Of course Haughey got a lot more from the rich than he ever gave to the poor. But the poor readily forgave that, and admired him for what he could get away with.'

In November 1940 a Luftwaffe seaplane with five German airmen made a forced landing off Innisvicillaun, the island that Charlie later bought. They waited on the island hoping for help. While there they killed a sheep for food and lit a fire, but after five days nobody had yet noticed them, so they made their way in a couple of rubber dinghies to the Great Blasket. Having bought the island, Haughey heard the story and traced the five men. He met them in Luxembourg and invited them to spend a holiday on the island together. There were no votes in that for him, and he never sought any publicity for the gesture.

‘Every aspect of his character attracts curiosity,' Bruce Arnold declared. ‘No man so dominated his period, in and out of power.'

In time, it would become apparent that much of his money was borrowed or bummed. For those who saw his wealth as the proof of his success, that success would prove ethereal and they would come to see him as a great failure. He was roundly condemned for his performance before the McCracken tribunal when he exposed himself to the charge of consistently lying. But, ironically, the findings in relation to receiving money from Ben Dunne should not have hurt his place in history.

Daniel O'Connell – arguably the most famous and influential Irishman of all time – lived beyond his means for much of his life. He lived extravagantly in the confident expectation that he would inherit an uncle's fortune, but the uncle lived to the ripe old age of ninety-seven. Having entered politics in the 1820s, Daniel gave up his practice at the bar and financed his lifestyle out of public subscriptions. He managed to support his extravagance with the help of national subscriptions from ordinary people amounting to about £13,000 a year, but on one occasion shortly before the outbreak of the Great Famine, it amounted to around £50,000. Charles Stuart Parnell also lived beyond his means and was the beneficiary of a public subscription of some £20,000 in 1882.

Unlike those who accepted money from people living in a state of virtual subsistence, Haughey got much of his money from a fabulously wealthy person in Ben Dunne. Nobody has shown that Dunne received any kind of favouritism, other than being invited to family occasions. Other famous men also built up great debts. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and arguably the father of modern democracy, was in so much debt when he died that his heirs had to sell off his property to pay those debts, and Winston Churchill was so profligate that he was heavily dependent on the support of some wealthy admirers.

Ever since 1967 when George Colley complained about ‘low standards in high places', Fianna Fáil bumbled from one scandal to another, and never cleaned up any of them. The arms crisis was essentially covered up, only to be raised again ten years later when Vincent Browne published the Berry Papers in
Magill
, showing that serious issues had been glossed over in Jack Lynch's handling of the whole affair.

Likewise with the telephone-tapping, there was no real inquiry and it was resurrected almost ten years later to force Haughey to resign as Taoiseach. The most serious aspect of the arms crisis was the conspiracy subverting the constitution in which Jack Lynch was involved, either wittingly or unwittingly, because he turned a blind eye and thereby ignored his sworn obligation to uphold the constitution. If he did not know what was going on, it was because he chose to ignore what was happening. Haughey stated that he did not know himself but even his sworn testimony on the matter was unbelievable.

If he had only said, ‘I did it, so what?' He would still have been acquitted at the arms trial, and the telephone-tapping could not have been resurrected to haunt him in 1992, because the opposition had also tapped journalists. If he had admitted that he had received money from Ben Dunne, the real issue would have been whether Dunne had received any undue favours. It would seem that he did not, and it was noteworthy that he continued to give money to Haughey after he was out of office and out of politics. Had Charlie come clean about the Dunne money, he might have avoided the most damaging revelations at the Moriarty tribunal, such as the misappropriation of the money intended for Fianna Fáil and for Brian Lenihan's operation. His behaviour in accepting money from people with whom the government was doing business was at best irresponsibly reckless because it left him wide open to the suspicion of corruption by betraying the public trust for his own selfish gain. As an accountant Haughey had to have known that he should have kept the Lenihan money separate from the leader's fund, but this would have created difficulties when he helped himself to what was left over, and even got some more by pretending that more was needed.