Sick societies normalise at the top, pretending wellness where there is nothing but disease.
When a society is debilitated following radical interference by outsiders, much of the pretence takes the form of aping the occupier. Reducing itself to the largest entity capable of passing itself off in this way, the elite creates a version of reality as deluded as it is exclusive. This is civilisation. We are the civilised. We don't understand this talk about colonisation. We don't know why all those starving peasants can't catch themselves a few fish. And as for those reprobates threatening to overthrow the so-called occupation with guns . . . we are horrified and ashamed.
This is the context in which the story of Charles Haughey must be seen.
But precisely because of the tenacity of the delusions, the truth eludes. Because we depend on the former occupier for words, and on the elite of settled natives for logic and an ethical framework, discussion drives us deeper into delusion. Everyone hated Charlie Haughey except the people. Yes, but his enemies hated him to begin with precisely because of his empathy with the people, whom they hated far more.
Haughey was a subversive - his enemies were right about that. He sought to subvert the delusions of post-colonial Ireland, to manipulate the iconography of wealth and power so as to deliver himself and us to our potential. The enemies were right, too, when they called him a thief. He stole Ireland back from the elite who had stolen it for themselves - by aping their pretences and self-importance and exposing the inadequacy of their charades; by creating a new drama of elitism: spectacular, attainable and democratic. Haughey's legacy is the story he told us about ourselves, the way he told it and the way it recreated life's textures and tones. He showed us a way we might live, by living it himself. That this emerged as another illusion was part of its value. Think loaves and fishes. His life was manifesto and lived-installation, a representation of the possible. Everything about him - his history, house, fortune, disgrace - became codes by which we discovered ourselves. He supplied the narrative for an otherwise inscrutable journey.
Being perhaps unable to achieve release from the cocoon of post-colonial illogic, you will "point out" that he was himself the prime beneficiary of his own dramatisation. This was unavoidable and therefore morally unexceptionable. There was no other way of demonstrating the possibilities. In the story he dramatised, the iconography of pretence lay side by side with the facts: famine, enforced ignorance, squalor and the bloody hangovers of history. Haughey did not turn away from the facts, but neither did he confront them in a way that would have permitted him to be patronised as honourable failure.
He sought to lead us from the swamp of history, not with a rhetoric of egalitarianism but a programme of action and a drama of attainment.
He refused to settle for less than his own due, so refusing on behalf of the dispossessed; the men of no property; the women of less property; and the citizens who wouldn't have minded their telephones being tapped if, back in the grey and wireless reality of early-1980s Ireland, they'd had telephones worth tapping. To the people of flawed pedigree, Charles Haughey said: anything is possible, poverty is not natural, and you do not have to accept your place. This exercise in subversion was successful, except that, by virtue of its methodology, it left many of the governing delusions intact, allowing the deluded not simply to forget what it had been like but to deny the meaning of what had happened and what we had become.
Haughey's enemies demand, without irony, "Can you imagine this being tolerated in Germany?" Elitist fancies in which we are compared to nations that have plundered half the globe live on to beguile the survivors of an attempted systematic extermination into thinking that morality can be imported and all that is there now can be taken for granted.
Tribunalism is born of the same delusion. Doing the State some service was the least of Charles Haughey's contributions. His fingerprints are all over the transformation of Ireland, but the explanation is too complex and amazing for easy acceptance. Before he came, we were poor: now we grow rich. Before he came, there were hovels, now a housing boom. Before he came, there were dirt tracks, now motorways and flyovers. Before he came, we were afraid to speak in whispers; now we proclaim our worth to the world. Charles Haughey was the Fat Chieftain who promised to make his people as plump as himself.
He delivered. Left to get on with things, he might have delivered 20 years earlier.
To deal with such a legacy by counting "good" and "bad" and weighing the difference is simple-minded and pointless. At its best, politics steers closer to magic than logic. To calculate the impact of Charles Haughey, we must add positives to negatives, hate to love, to know the sum of what he inspired and what he overcame to make the impossible banal.