Extolled in June as a great Irish patriot in Bertie Ahern's graveside oration, Charles Haughey is confirmed by the Moriarty report as a dishonourable, cunning and calculating crook, writes Fintan O'Toole
When the Moriarty tribunal asked Charles Haughey about the description by Allied Irish Banks of £110,000 he owed them as a "debt of honour", he replied that "much stress was being placed upon honour, and he did not know what significance the Bank attributed to it".
It was, from a man who consistently lied to, and withheld information from, the tribunal, an unusually honest answer. Reading the tribunal's report, it quickly becomes plain that its subject is a man who could never grasp the significance of the word "honour".
Though given a State funeral and hailed at his graveside by the serving Taoiseach as "a patriot to his fingertips", he stole large sums from the public purse, from Fianna Fáil, and from the funds raised for Brian Lenihan, a man he described at the tribunal as "closer to me than one of my own brothers".
His patriotic fingertips were in many people's pockets.
Here was a patriot who, in the midst of a terrible crisis in the public finances, when ordinary workers were paying penal taxes, the poor and the sick were suffering, and the nation's youth was heading for every available exit, insisted that the public should pay even for his little indulgences. In the midst of the report's forensic detail, a tiny vignette from the late 1980s serves as a perfect summary.
A parcel of shirts arrived at Government Buildings from the exclusive Paris tailors Charvet. Charles Haughey's secretary took the invoice and mentioned that she would send it on to his personal secretary at his mansion in Abbeville.
The Boss, however, told her to send the bill to the woman who was in charge of administering the party leader's account - funded by the taxpayer.
Contrary to the image promulgated by Haughey and his apologists of a great statesman too busy to be bothered by petty financial concerns, here was a man with a keen eye for other people's money.
Time and again, the report blows apart Haughey's absurd pretence that he knew nothing of his own finances, even while accumulating funds that were 171 times his gross salary as taoiseach. One of the most significant aspects of the report, indeed, is the way it shows Haughey actively and cleverly defrauding Fianna Fáil itself, organising cheques and accounts in such a way that he "manipulated the recording system that had been implemented by the Fianna Fáil Party to his own ends."
This is no carelessly extravagant, devil-may-care rogue, but a cunning, calculating crook.
And the report also dismisses the fallacy, trotted out by so many commentators at the time of his death, that Haughey did nothing in return for the €11.5 million he received from donors. It makes an incontrovertible case that he did at least two mind-boggling things. The great patriot sold Irish citizenship by doling out passports in return for a payment of £50,000.
And the man who supposedly got the public finances back in order did his best to keep the State's hands off the money of his biggest benefactor, Ben Dunne.
In finding that Haughey pressured the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners "in return for" the Dunnes payments, Mr Justice Moriarty affirms what common sense has always suggested - that there is no such thing as a free gift to a serving taoiseach. At a time when the most basic public services were being slashed, the settlement eventually offered to Dunnes represented a potential loss of over £22 million to the State.
It has to be remembered, moreover, that the report, as its author acknowledges, cannot tell the full story. There are still huge gaps in the account of Haughey's income from the late 1970s onwards.
We don't know who came up with £450,000 of the money he used to settle his massive debts with Allied Irish Bank in 1979. Haughey's staggering offer to AIB of a deposit of £10 million from the Iraqi Rafidain Bank, then controlled by Saddam Hussein, remains mysterious. The report, indeed, deepens the mystery, for it records Haughey as telling the tribunal "this was one of many instances in which persons came from places like the Middle East, and offered money at lower rates than were current in Ireland".
We are left with the extraordinary fact that the taoiseach was being offered control of "many" huge deposits from Middle Eastern sources.
We also don't know anything about Haughey's finances in the crucial year of 1988, when the bizarre beef industry scandals were at their height and he was using scarce Irish taxpayers' money to subvent the sale of beef to the Iraqis. Strangely, for this one interesting year, the tribunal's diligent efforts to trace the source of Haughey's lavish spending came to naught.
In one sense, the tribunal's valiant, and partly successful, efforts to link Haughey's actions in office to the payments he received, could never fully succeed. The single most valuable benefit a taoiseach has to bestow is one that may leave no tangible traces. It is information.
Haughey knew things that were, for some of his benefactors, hugely valuable. Many of those donors, for example, were from the banking and financial sectors. Knowledge of the timing of the devaluation of the Irish currency, or the nature of budgetary measures, could make them a great deal of money. We will never know whether such tip-offs occurred, and the most that Mr Justice Moriarty can say is that the identification of specific decisions that were influenced by corruption should not be read to mean that all the rest were pure.
More even than these directly corrupt actions, however, what justifies Mr Justice Moriarty's conclusion that Haughey "devalued the quality of a modern democracy" is the way the vague knowledge that The Boss was on the take corroded public institutions.
How could a State whose taoiseach received the equivalent of £390,000 from AIB act against a bank that was known to be conducting, in the Dirt scandal, a massive fraud on the Revenue?
How could a taoiseach who was at the pinnacle of the Ansbacher tax evasion scheme clamp down on the tax evasion that was bleeding the public coffers dry?
How could a crook like the developer Patrick Gallagher, successfully prosecuted and jailed in Northern Ireland, be brought to book for the same offences in the Republic when the taoiseach owed him £300,000?
How could the State stop the Irish Blood Transfusion Service from recklessly poisoning women and people with haemophilia when its chairman, Noel Fox, was, as the report details, arranging Ben Dunne's biggest donations to Haughey?
How could the councillors who were selling the future of a capital city to developers be stopped when The Boss was selling the entire country?
For the deepest damage done by Haughey's venality lay not in its secrecy but in its openness.
Judge Moriarty has done the State much service by mapping as much as can be known about Haughey's kleptocratic rule, and some of the figures - up to £200,000 stolen from the Lenihan fund, for example - still have the power to shock. But in the broader sense, the report tells us nothing we didn't know.
Anyone with a stim of wit knew that Haughey's openly flaunted lifestyle - the mansion, the stud farm, the private island, the yacht - couldn't possibly be supported on a public salary. The Revenue Commissioners even kept a file of press clippings on Haughey's lavishness. But they did nothing to reconcile his limited earnings with his obvious expenditure, and their failure tells us something about the atmosphere of public and institutional life.
Knowing that the man described at his funeral by Bertie Ahern as "the dominant public figure in the late 20th century Ireland" was at the centre of a network of corruption whose reach was never clear, people kept their heads down and avoided trouble. Even Bertie Ahern himself, no timid man, signed the blank cheques that, according to the report, "facilitated the misuse" of public money and never acted on the knowledge that Haughey had pocketed £85,000 of his own party's money.
At many levels of society, not knowing became an excuse for not wanting to know. The report shows conclusively that the cost of not wanting to know is a devalued democracy.