Since Abbeville came on the market, lurid imaginations have been peopling its past with notorious characters
SOMETIMES YOU can look straight through the most minor piece of news and see how myths are made. The claim that Margaret Thatcher and Muammar Gadafy had been entertained at the former home of Charles Haughey is completely untrue – and the subject of an apology and clarification requested by the Haughey family – but at the same time it makes perfect sense. Soon enough, we’ll hear that there was always a place laid for a stranger at the dinner table in Abbeville. Then we’ll hear that, one night in the Gandon ballroom, a cloven hoof was visible beneath the skirt of one of Mrs Thatcher’s Aquascutum suits.
You know how it is. We like all our baddies together; we’d like to think of Haughey, Thatcher and Gadafy splashing around in the Abbeville swimming pool, with hangovers. Well I would, anyway; as a fantasy it has a nice Christine Keeler-ish ring to it. Abbeville is well-situated now to become an infamous house, the Cliveden of its nation.
This plucky, if unconscious, attempt by the auctioneering firm trying to sell Mr Haughey’s former home at a mere €7.5 million, to turn Abbeville into the Hell Fire Club, is Irish legend-making at its finest. It is particularly notable that Savills assembled a triumvirate of baddies from the 1980s – a time which, presumably, its younger members of staff cannot remember and have only experienced through television.
Placing Mr Haughey, Mrs Thatcher and Col Gadafy in the one house is bound to happen if you’ve spent a lot of your school days watching that excellent archive programme, Reeling In The Years.
But it is going to become increasingly convenient for the rest us to think of Haughey as some sort of pantomime villain as well. His press secretary, PJ Mara, even called his boss El Diablo, according to Frank McDonald’s article on Abbeville in the property section of this newspaper last week. (His article did not contain any word of Thatcher or Gadafy as visitors, but rather a roll call of developers and businessmen). It was PJ Mara’s little joke to call his boss El Diablo, presumably, and now it suits the rest of us too. We’ve always dealt with our history this way, and it has worked great so far.
As a country we have never let reality stand in the way of a good story, particularly when it comes to the inhabitants of a house with a very long driveway.
Soon Haughey will have been said to have availed of his rights to the first night with the local brides: a legend one cannot help but suppose he would have enjoyed immensely. He had a sense of humour. He liked to be thought of as an outrageous and extravagant landlord.
Sad to say, his ambitions in that direction did not stretch beyond obtaining money for the shirts, the horses and, presumably, the house.
Unfortunately for the more romantic among us it seems that Haughey’s visitors were mainly large men in suits – and on one occasion a group of doctors – all looking for a good deal.
Haughey’s considerable love of glamour does not seem to have extended to decadent assemblies at his house; as a conservative and unimaginative Irishman he had a great fondness for the family home. The only person who has admitted to swimming in the Abbeville pool with a hangover is Vincent Browne. It’s not the same.
The strange thing is that Savills, in its attempt to make Abbeville an attractive prospect, chose to people the house with an appalling despot whose crimes against their own people were a byword for fascism. And Col Gadafy, who tried to help us out when he could, God be good to him.
In the mid-1980s, I was sent out to Abbeville, unannounced and uninvited, by the Irish Press. Inexperienced reporters, with no contacts or reputation to spoil, are often sent on these mad missions.
Mrs Haughey was having a charity lunch or coffee morning for some ladies. Anyone less suited to the task assigned to me would be hard to imagine; the photographer was much more able for the occasion. Mrs Haughey saw the two of us off in no time, and I limped to the car, on curled toes.
But you could see that Abbeville was like hundreds of similar houses around the country, where the family lived at the back, and called one room the breakfast room. This was quietly happening a lot in the Ireland of that time, and had been since the 1960s, where the houses of the ascendancy were bought by newly flush Catholics. But of course the people who moved into Georgian mansions and whose kids ran in and out by the back door and had ponies and a breakfast room kept quiet about it.
Mr Haughey was the only one whose house was photographed for the newspapers; his election photos with the family were always taken in the breakfast room.
Of course, this is not as interesting as Mrs Thatcher and Col Gadafy visiting Abbeville; it has the disadvantage of being true. But let’s not worry about that, because there will be another Hell Fire story about Charles Haughey coming along soon.