A man convinced he was born to rule: ThePost.ie


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A man convinced he was born to rule
Sunday, June 18, 2006 - By Diarmaid Ferriter
O’Brien continued: ‘‘He was at any rate better, or at least more intelligent and interesting than most of his colleagues. He was considered a competent minister and spoke in parliament with bored but conclusive authority. There were enough rumours about him to forma legend of sorts.”

This assessment is still relevant to any obituary of Haughey - 37 years on - despite it being written before the Arms Trial, Haughey’s leadership of Fianna Fail and his emergence as taoiseach.

He was more intelligent and interesting than most of his colleagues and he was a talented minister in the justice and finance portfolios in particular. He did occasionally create the impression that he regarded the Dail as an imposition and an irritant. He clearly believed he was the best of the best, and ultimately, it was this selfobsession that cast a shadow over his political career and legacy, and ironically, left him pathetically dependent on other people’s largesse and money. It also ensured he was prepared to hang on to power at any cost and with a considerable degree of ruthlessness.

One of his biographers, Peter Murtagh, wrote in 1999 that Haughey was ‘‘a dangerous, self-obsessed narcissistic bully’’, but he also observed that ‘‘there is no doubt but that history will be kinder to Haughey than are today’s commentators, myself included. It is ever thus: being so close to events means one cannot determine the dross, the irrelevancies, the things that only the passage of time can discard as useless.”

Despite the perception of him being politically charged and driven from a young age, Haughey was by no means predestined to be a politician, and had considered the priesthood and the army.

Even when he arrived at UCD he had made no career choice and was only persuaded to study commerce and start an accountancy apprenticeship after bumping into Harry Boland. Maureen Lemass, his future wife, was in the same class. It was also Boland who later persuaded him to join Fianna Fail in Dublin North East, where he worked closely with Boland and George Colley.

He failed to be elected to the Dail in 1951 and 1954,but garnered a better vote in a by-election in 1956 and set himself up for a successful election the following year, taking Harry Colley’s seat, though George Colley was not unduly concerned at this stage, as he had not decided on a career in politics.

Haughey’s maiden Dail speech focused on wealth creation and social justice, and during the 1960s he remained interested in these, providing free travel for old age pensioners against the wishes of TK Whitaker, the secretary of the Department of Finance.

As minister for justice, he was also associated with the Succession Act, which had been pioneered by Brian Lenihan, safeguarding widows at a time when there was a 50 per cent intestacy rate. He impressed the secretary of the department, Peter Berry, who recorded that, not only was he a pleasure to work with, but ‘‘the longer he stayed, the better he got’’.

The truth of this assessment is reflected in the impressive legislative record he left behind, including the Guardianship of Infants Act and the Criminal Justice Legal Aid Act. As minister for finance, he introduced the artists’ tax exemption scheme, widely regarded as a creative, original and positive development.

There may have been snobbery within the party about the rise of the Donneycarney boy, but there was also a sense that he lacked principle, a worry enunciated by people such as George Colley, Oscar Traynor and Frank Aiken.

Haughey was to the fore of the party at a time when they were courting business, and whatever about the rhetoric, were not taking redistribution seriously, so much so that Kevin Boland wondered had they begun to lose their way. Boland was accused by his colleagues in the 1960s, when he questioned the growing gap between rich and poor, of trying to ‘‘wreck’’ economic expansion.

The definitive history of the Arms Trial has still not been written, and perhaps never will be. The messengers, such as Captain James Kelly and Colonel Michael Hefferon, were humiliated, while the liars, including Haughey, cam e out the other side and got second chances.

There is no doubt that Haughey lied about his knowledge of the plan to import arms, but history will record that Jack Lynch’s indecisive leadership and failure to control his cabinet was of more significance than Haughey’s lies. More intriguingly, there was never any clear explanation of why Haughey got involved.

There may have been a general sense of wanting to wrest control of the ‘‘national question’’ from those squaring up in the late 1960s to take control of it, but Haughey’s motivation remained oblique and he was certainly not associated in the 1960s with the sort of fundamentalist republicanism ascribed to Neil Blaney, who sat contemptuously at cabinet meetings while Lynch was taoiseach.

Haughey’s comeback after the Arms Trial was remarkable, not least because he cam e to the leadership without the backing of the Fianna Fail cabinet, carefully working the grassroots network. In that sense it was a truly democratic victory. During his tenure as leader, internal party votes became associated with fear, intimidation and loathing. Indeed, Garret FitzGerald, when reflecting on his infamous ‘‘flawed pedigree’’ description of Haughey, recalled that he was speaking not just for the Fine Gael party he led, but for those in Fianna Fail who were too scared to speak out.

There has been a certain revising of this fear question recently, but it was a fact of Fianna Fail life under Haughey, and it impacted beyond the party and affected journalists, as recalled vividly by journalist Geraldine Kennedy and others.

At a press conference during one of the elections of the early 1980s,Vincent Browne repeatedly demanded to know the source of Haughey’s wealth. Haughey dismissed his questions as he had always done when it came to his personal finances. So, more worryingly, did the other journalists, with the exception of RTE’s John Bowman, who firmly pointed out to Haughey that he was there to answer the journalists’ questions. Since he had established the current affairs magazine Magill in 1977, Browne had kept a list of the stories he wanted done more than any others, and top of the list were two words that remained relevant to Irish politics for 40 years: ‘‘Haughey’s wealth.”

The questions began in the early 1960s and were still being probed in the 21st century. Where did the money to purchase mansions come from and how did land that boosted the value of Haughey’s property get planning permission? As the late Dick Walsh used to comment, the party and the leader, seeing the nation and itself as one, felt they had no need for programmes or rules. There have been suggestions recently that to keep focusing on these negative aspects is to purge humanity from politics. That is not the case.

Haughey’s career simply made it very difficult to define his humanity, or indeed to find ideological consistency. Very early in his career, in a letter to Sean Lemass for whom he had a great fondness and respect, Haughey insisted on the need for Fianna Fail to refer to Fine Gael as ‘‘a right-wing conservative party’’, while later, he also referred to socialism as ‘‘an alien gospel’’ that was inherently un-Irish.

He had no qualms, it seems, about free loans for himself, and one of the greatest mistakes of his ministerial career, often overlooked, was a ridiculously generous deal for hospital consultants when he was minister for health in 1978, allowing them to use public hospitals to carry on their private practice on their own terms.

‘‘We have great and aspiring social objectives’’was a phrase he usedmore than once, but he did not deliver on these in any comprehensive way. Had he remained a reforming minister, he may well have been able to deliver more, but winning the leadership of Fianna Fail in 1979 ensured his priorities lay elsewhere.

Throughout the 1980s, Haughey desperately sought an overall majority and came very close. It proved elusive because he inspired devotion and hatred in equal measure, could never quite tip the balance in his favour, and because of a temporary surge in support for Sinn Fein in 1981 after the hunger strikes, when they won two seats and denied him the victory he craved.

Notwithstanding, under his leadership Fianna Fail polled exceptionally well, managing 44-47 per cent of first preference votes, a figure his successors could not come near. He appealed to particular groups: he was the northside Dublin boy made good, a man with roots in the West (Mayo),a champion of the Kingdom (Dingle), a friend of the artists and he drove the women wild with his roguish charm.

Even the late Mary Cummins, feminist and Irish Times journalist, admitted to his appeal in this regard. On the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1995, she wrote: ‘‘There are damn few men who can make your heart flutter at 11.30 in the morning so that you float along on cloud nine all day. Such a man is Charles J Haughey.”

In terms of government policy, he discovered fiscal rectitude late in life (but only in relation to the national finances after 1987, and much credit must be given to Alan Dukes for supporting the policies as leader of the opposition), and historians of the future will point to the reduction of the national debt in the late 1980s and early 1990s as being a crucial turning point and laying the groundwork for the Celtic Tiger boom.

But the creation of a more solvent and ultimately wealthy society was not matched by any determination to redistribute those riches or tackle the fundamental inequalities of Irish society, which can legitimately be seen as Haughey’s greatest failure. He had to resist heave after heave within the party, which diverted his attention from effective government until the late 1980s. A measure of how divisive a figure he was in his own party was the vote of confidence in his leadership in February 1983, which he won by only 40 votes to 33.

He inherited Jack Lynch’s 1977majority, but after 1981 was never able to govern without the support of independents or coalition partners. His critics will cite that fact as evidence that the people did not trust him on his own, but it is also the case that the political instability of the 1980s was not all of his own making.

Many of his contemporaries simply could not, or would not, accept his leadership, and some of them too, contributed to the nastiness of the politics of this era, as they did to the culture of corruption by demanding and accepting large sums from businessmen. It is also worth stressing, in the words of Peter Murtagh, that ‘‘lots of people who really knew the depth of Haughey’s corruption - close personal associates, bank officials and accountants to identify just a few - all covered it up and lied for him’’.

Haughey decided in 1989 to enter coalition with the Progressive Democrats, having called an unnecessary general election, and showed his determination to cling to power at all costs by firing Brian Lenihan during the presidential campaign of 1990. This was a sign of an insecure man who was constantly distracted and capable of utter disloyalty. Many will see the creation of the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) in the Dublin docklands as an important legacy, but his contribution to Anglo-Irish relations was arguably of more significance.

He presided over important initiatives in Anglo-Irish relations while Margaret Thatcher was British prime minister, and crucially, managed to put these relations on a better footing, by establishing the principle of two sovereign governments working on a par with each other. His initiative in regard to authorising dialogue with the IRA in the late 1980s will be seen as historically important, as will the idea of a Joint Declaration by the British and Irish governments to kick-start a peace process.

But his utterly cynical opposition to the Anglo-Irish agreement in the previous decade could be cited in the same breath. Most of the time, Haughey playing the green card was simply not convincing, or based on any depth or vision. In the first of the recent Haughey documentaries, his close colleague, PJ Mara, remarked that from the very beginning of a remarkable life, Haughey ‘‘had a great sense of himself’’. That took precedence over any great vision for the country.

In wanting to be seen as the best of the best, he compromised himself and others, including the many he lied to about the Ben Dunne payments. His greed showed the huge gulf that existed between the civil war generation of Irish politicians and their successors. One of Eamon de Valera’s greatest fears in his twilight years was that his state income would not be enough to provide for the cost of healthcare for himself and his wife.

Haughey failed to do what gives most people dignity: to go out and earn an honest living. He only partially delivered on his huge potential, and contributed enormously to a cynicism about Irish politics and politicians. Diarmaid Ferriter lectures in modern Irish history at St Patrick’s College, DCU. His book, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, was recently published in paperback by Profile Press