FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Charles Haughey was finally toppled as Fianna Fáil leader early in 1992 after his one-time justice minister Seán Doherty revealed that he had ordered the tapping of journalists telephones to try and identify their sources. His last day in the Dáil as taoiseach, before tribunals revealed the real secrets of his political career, was described by Mary Holland.
‘CÁ BHFUIL Iago?’’ The jeering question rang out from the Fine Gael benches and, of course, it drew a laugh. But on CJ Haughey’s last day in the Taoiseach’s front-bench seat it turned out to be as inappropriate as it was churlish.
It is difficult to imagine when we will have another Taoiseach (or a speechwriter) who looks to one of Shakespeare’s most sublime tragedies to sum up more than three decades in public life. Mr Haughey had quoted from the last scene of Othello:
“I have done the State some service; they know’t No more of that.”
Earlier, followed by his Cabinet walking in single file, he had come into the Dáil and taken his accustomed seat, just below the Ceann Comhairle. There was a short prayer and then Mr Haughey rose to speak, slowly and with great feeling. He talked of his affection for the Dáil over 35 years, his vivid memories of great figures ‘‘who have passed through its portals and who are no longer with us’’ and of important parliamentary occasions he had witnessed in this ‘‘democratic forum of the nation’’.
He thanked the people of Ireland for their support and affection. It was not a time to speak of his own achievements. If he sought any accolade it would be simply, ‘‘He served the people, all the people, to the best of his ability.’’
It says a lot about the heightened mood of a crowded Dáil chamber that nobody seemed to think this demand was excessive nor the language of the speech just a shade overblown.
True, Dick Spring , uneasy at Mr Haughey’s recent inclination to reach for an English playwright in times of crisis, said he had decided to bypass ‘‘Julius Caesar’’ in favour of Flann O’Brien’s comment on Finn McCool: ‘‘I am an Ulsterman, a Connachtman, a Greek.’’ The quote was a bit too clever for the occasion.
But of all the tributes paid to Mr Haughey, it was the Labour leader who seemed most inclined to take him at his own valuation, as a figure of great complexity who had never, perhaps, achieved the things of which he once seemed capable.
Dick Spring spoke of the ‘‘prodigious talents’’ combined with the ‘‘hunger for high office’’ which the departing Taoiseach had brought to public life. These meant that he had been central to ‘‘years of achievement and failure, of promise and betrayal, of hope and despair, of idealism and cynicism, of style and mediocrity, of triumph and disaster.’’
There were echoes of Maire Geoghegan-Quinn’s warm-up speech at the last Fianna Fáil Ardfheis.
Through this and other tributes Haughey seemed to draw, brooding into himself, the bruised features set like a mask carved in stone.
He nodded in recognition when deputies crossed the floor to shake his hand.
Then the Dáil moved to the nomination of a new Taoiseach and the vote. By the time most deputies returned Albert Reynolds was installed in the Taoiseach’s seat.
Mr Haughey, standing at the top of the staircase, looked for a moment bewildered, as though not knowing where to go.
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