We exacerbate the damage Charles J Haughey did in corrupting politics and public life by not squaring up to it, writes Peter Murtagh
It has been a good week for the Charles J Haughey fan club. Their hero may be dead but he has been given a send-off - designed in part by himself and funded by the taxpayer - appropriate to his stature as a great national leader and international statesman.
Haughey would have enjoyed the scene yesterday at Our Lady of Consolation Church at Donnycarney in Dublin. No mere consolation prize this but acknowledgment, proper and deserved, for services rendered.
He would not have bragged (he left that to others) but he would have thought, with quiet satisfaction, that a State funeral was no more than was necessary in view of his many sacrifices and outstanding contributions to the peace and prosperity we all now enjoy.
How could it be otherwise than to have such a grand send-off in the presence of the President and members of the Council of State, the Taoiseach and Cabinet, leaders of opposition parties, TDs, MEPs, councillors and aldermen, members of the judiciary, aides de camp, other top brass from the Defence Forces and the Garda Síochána, Fianna Fáil luminaries and thousands of the ordinary voters whose loyalty to him was tested through crisis after crisis but was not found wanting?
And rounding it all off, a graveside oration by his favoured successor, Bertie Ahern. Due honour for an honoured son of Ireland who was for a time the nation's chieftain.
Truly, this was the Boss's last great theatrical flourish.
Charles J Haughey always had a superb sense of occasion and his place in it. His mannerisms - the slow walk with measured steps, the half-wave of the hand, the slight tilting of the head towards one being acknowledged - were no ill-thought-out gestures. They were studied mannerisms.
You have to be well over 40 years of age to have a good memory of what it was like in the 1970s and early 1980s when Haughey's powers were at their height . . . and his dark side its most vibrant. Much of what has been written - and most of what has been said - since his death last Tuesday has been self-serving and careful to avoid recalling those years or the atmosphere of fear, threat and menace that pervaded Fianna Fáil and Leinster House.
This avoidance is only to be expected, and is quite correct, in the immediate aftermath of a person's death. But for Haughey's acolytes, this is the period they want forgotten for all time or diminished to the point of irrelevance: it does not sit well with the revisionist, quasi-deification process under way since before his death.
Rampant cronyism, a cult of personality and the promotion of second-raters over others with obvious talent is a pattern of behaviour few want to defend. They want to be associated instead with peace in the North and boom in the South, which they insist, even if others disagree, would not have happened without him, and with things such as Temple Bar, the IFSC and free bus passes for the elderly.
In 1983 when Joe Joyce and I were researching The Boss, the book which examined his disastrous, scandal-ridden 1982 government, one of our early introductions to the use of that name for Haughey concerned his February 1982 negotiations with the Workers' Party, then called Sinn Féin The Workers' Party. Haughey, with 81 seats secured for Fianna Fáil, needed support if he was to be elected taoiseach by the 166-seat Dáil. The Workers' Party had three TDs and there was Tony Gregory, then a new independent community-based TD in Dublin's north inner city.
Haughey, together with several members of his front bench, held talks with the Workers' Party president, Tomás MacGiolla. Meticulous planning by Haughey had him referring to MacGiolla throughout as "Mr President" - a formality deflated when Haughey's colleagues kept endorsing his words with interjections of "Yes Boss" and "Right Boss".
In subsequent meetings decorum was restored: Haughey's side kicks referred to him as "President", the office he held within Fianna Fáil, while he continued to address MacGiolla as "Mr President" - an early example of parity of esteem.
The sobriquet "Boss" we knew instantly was appropriate: it implied if not total control then ultimate responsibility. Above all, it was what Haughey's closest associates called him and it complemented the mafia-like atmosphere that surrounded him. It was how his friends defined him and he clearly had no difficulty with the title.
Haughey came to office, as we now know, broke but living like a lord. There was the Gandon mansion, the private island, the Château Yquem, the Charvet shirts, and dining in the Coq Hardi and Johnny Opperman's restaurant - all paid for not through his salary as a public representative or astute private investor (as his friends liked to imply at the time) but by theft from the Fianna Fáil coffers (which were filled partly by the taxpayer), by secret backhanders from vested interests in business and by cheating the taxman - robbing from the people Haughey insisted he served.
Perhaps the best explanation for the existence of the tax-dodging, off-shore golden circle that bankrolled Haughey came from one of them, Patrick Gallagher of the Gallagher construction group who in 1979 helped write off his £1 million (€1.3m) debt with Allied Irish Banks.
"Haughey was financed in order to create the environment which the Anglo-Irish enjoyed and that we as a people could never aspire to," he explained in a 1998 interview, demonstrating a somewhat narrow view of Irish history. "Everything was planned. Someone had to live in the big house . . ."
Unknown, until the McCracken (investigating Ben Dunne's payments to Haughey) and Moriarty (investigating payments to politicians) tribunals, was the extent to which Haughey needed to retain power: for without it, why would businessmen continue to bankroll him, as they did to the tune of more than €10 million that we know of? And without them, how could he continue living in the style to which he clearly felt entitled?
All of this led to a climate of fear and intimidation, with Haughey demanding, and for the most part getting, obsequious loyalty from those around him. (This week, Haughey's former secretary Catherine Butler said Haughey never demanded loyalty. Wrong. In October 1982 he insisted that every member of his Cabinet sign a written declaration of, as Des O'Malley, one of his dissident ministers and later founder of the Progressive Democrats, put it, "total, abject loyalty" to him personally.)
Haughey's character was laid bare in 1999 when the Moriarty tribunal probed his relationship with AIB. In 1976 AIB was despairing of getting him to repay the £1 million he owed. The bank threatened to withdraw his chequebook - a fact senior AIB officials lied about by denying it when asked by several journalists, including this writer in 1983.
According to a bank memo, Haughey became "quite vicious" at a meeting when the Dame Street branch asked for its money back. He threatened the bank saying he could be a "very troublesome adversary".
Eamon de Valera, Seán Lemass, WT Cosgrave, and other founders of modern Ireland as it were, had all lived modestly and given a lifetime's public service without material reward beyond their due. Their successor generation, epitomised in part by Haughey and his associates, would do it differently: they had decided that they would inherit the Earth.
Wrapped up in this mindset was a peculiarly Haugheyesque notion. He believed that once he was elected leader of Fianna Fáil, the position was his for life, or until such time as he relinquished it of his own volition. And as leader of Fianna Fáil, he and the party were one and the same thing. Indeed, the party was the people.
It is a short step from this to the notion that opposition to the leader, or opposition to the party, was opposition to the people, treason even.
So anyone who opposed Haughey was playing for very high stakes - not only were they against him, they were against Ireland too - and anyone who threatened in this way, would have to be dealt with.
The late Jim Gibbons found this to his cost. Gibbons, one of Haughey's adversaries from the 1970 Arms Trial (when Haughey, fired from the Cabinet by taoiseach Jack Lynch, was tried and acquitted of conspiracy to import guns), supported Charlie McCreevy's October 1982 leadership challenge to Haughey.
When Haughey won the vote and Gibbons was leaving Leinster House, he was attacked by a number of drunken Haughey supporters and forced to the ground where he was punched and kicked inside the precincts of the Oireachtas. A friend saw off the attackers but Gibbons suffered a heart attack subsequently which his family attributed to the attack.
Haughey loyalists sought other ways to protect their Boss's position. In 1982, the then minister for justice, Seán Doherty, took legal advice as to whether he could have a number of Fianna Fáil TDs or Senators arrested en route to Leinster House to prevent them voting against Haughey during heaves against his leadership. He was told that under Article 15.13 of the Constitution, members of the Oireachtas could not be so arrested.
Other equally unsubtle methods were adopted however. There were three major heaves against Haughey's leadership of Fianna Fáil: February 1982, October 1982 and February 1983. Haughey loyalists had a simple twin-track approach: first they insisted that the vote at a meeting of the parliamentary party must be by roll call (ie those against the Boss would have to show themselves) and secondly, they engaged in intense phone lobbying of wavering TDs, often throughout the night, threatening them with dire consequences if they voted against Haughey.
When bullying and intimidation inside the party failed wholly to quell dissent, Haughey looked elsewhere. In early July 1982, he tried to get the late Hugh McLaughlin, then proprietor of the Sunday Tribune, to obtain the phone records of political correspondent Geraldine Kennedy (now Editor of The Irish Times). Haughey wanted to know who inside Fianna Fáil was calling Kennedy, and vice versa, and McLaughlin asked the then Tribune editor Conor Brady for help.
Brady refused and so McLaughlin tried another route: he told the Tribune telephonist to make a note of Kennedy's calls. Before the month was out, however, Doherty had initiated illegal Garda taps on Kennedy's home telephone. The home telephone of Bruce Arnold, a journalist with the Irish Independent, who was also a conduit of information from the dissidents, was being tapped illegally from May 1982.
By mid-year, the Garda was thus being used as an instrument of party political power - Haughey's power. Apart from the illegal tapping, some dissident Fianna Fáil politicians were also put under Garda surveillance but within the force, dissent was growing. There were other disturbing incidents such as a broken bottle being placed on the windscreen of Kennedy's car and unexplained workmen turning up outside TDs' homes. People felt they were being watched.
The illegal tapping was revealed by The Irish Times in December 1982 and when confirmed by the new Garret FitzGerald-led coalition government in January 1983 (which also revealed that Haughey loyalist and minister for finance Ray MacSharry had used Garda eavesdropping equipment to bug a conversation with education minister and Haughey opponent Martin O'Donoghue), Haughey's response was to castigate "the irresponsible activities of the present government in the area of security".
This Alice-in-Wonderland world was closer to George Orwell's 1984 or Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon than the Ireland of Celtic mist, saints and scholars in which Haughey liked to cloak himself.
Twenty-four years later, it remains my view that Haughey's 1982 government represented the most serious threat to Irish democracy in my lifetime, possibly since the end of the Civil War. Another commentator, Vincent Browne, says it was "potentially the best government the country had had". Well, each to his own but this seems more like attention-seeking perversity than judgment based on evidence.
So is Haughey's legacy all black? No, of course not. But it is very, very dark in parts and we exacerbate the damage he did in corrupting politics and public life by not squaring up to it. By honouring him, as was done yesterday in the name of the people of Ireland, a signal was sent that the very great wrongs he committed were somehow not really all that serious.
I don't believe most people share that view, but some do and will continue to highlight the pluses and smother the rest in Haughey and Mara jokes and what a gas time it all was. I think most people want high standards of probity and integrity in public life and want governments to uphold such standards.
On the day of Charles Haughey's death, his former press secretary Frank Dunlop was explaining to the Mahon tribunal further details of his extraordinary career in the 1990s handing out money to Dublin councillors on behalf of developers. This tribunal and the others are part of Haughey's legacy, as are the various laws and procedures designed to expose conflicts of interest among public representatives, as well as the more generalised climate of openness and accountability in public affairs.
The way we view Haughey in the decades hence will depend on the sort of society we fashion for ourselves. If we admire cronyism, backhanders, golden circles, political strokes and absence of principle in public affairs then we will admire Haughey greatly, for he was the master of all of that.
But I think as a society we have already travelled down a different road, a better road and we are not for turning back. And what values are there to admire in a man who took money from a liver transplant charity fund he set up to help save the life of the late Brian Lenihan, his best political friend?
Peter Murtagh is co-author with Joe Joyce of The Boss: Charles J Haughey in Government (Poolbeg Press, 1983) and an Irish Times journalist