In the last issue I reminded everyone that former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds was brought down by a mishandled child abuse case.
As you opened the page to read it his predecessor Charles Haughey passed away and was buried in north Dublin after a state funeral. His passing was marked by sadness and tributes from many and by cold assessments by others. Knives that had been sharpened for years were either used or laid in store for later use. Haughey himself was known for forgetting nothing and forgiving even less and his detractors show every sign of being just the same.
Like him or not, he was a remarkable individual. There’s an archetypal Dublin Fianna Fáiler and s/he’s often also a Hill 16 Dub. Haughey, notwithstanding that he claimed roots all over the country, was one.
For all the arrogance and self-belief, in many respects he was a northside boy who made good in the classic manner, school success, studying for accountancy exams, marrying well and above all working hard.
Yeah, yeah, you’ll say, but others worked even harder for him and that’s true. The scale to which this was the case has only revealed itself in recent years.
People always wondered. There were rumours. Mostly, they said oboy oboy, he was a cute one, fol-de-diddle-i-doh, he was a cute one I’ll tell you. People thought he had played some smart game that he could live as he did and many thought that, Jaysus, given the chance he’d do it for Ireland as well.
As it happens, they were sort of right. He played some smart game all right – others paid for his lifestyle – and under his Government of the late 1980s a range of changes were brought in that ultimately led to the Celtic Tiger. But whether Haughey himself had any idea where it might go is moot.
We could continue for weeks totting up the good things and the bad. Among the former are the IFSC, Temple Bar, the artists’ tax exemption, the first support for the peace process and the stuff he did for pensioners. Among the latter are the French pretensions, the corruption, the culture of land speculation (alive and kicking as we speak) and the hypocrisy (he invented the phrase ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’). We could even mention the tawdry revelations by and about Terry Keane. But we won’t.
Thing is, we know so much, and it’s all thanks to Charlie. The other Charlie, that is. Little if any of the detail of his extraordinary financial arrangements would be known had Ben Dunne not gone to Florida and snorted more coke than he could handle.
It was a sensation at the time but only because of its principal player. The real sensation followed, years later. In a sense, it came down to the outrage felt by members of Dunne’s family and their desire to assert control over the family firm. As it unfolded, certain things emerged. Thanks a million big fella…
It’s ironic, isn’t it? Charlie undone by Charlie. Well, there you go. Another irony is that as Haughey lay dying, the other Charlie was laying waste to his native city and, in turn, others – most of them archetypal Dubs and indeed many of them northsiders like Haughey – were laying waste to each other over ill-gotten gains.
They should have taken a leaf out of the original Charlie’s book – he knew how cronies should behave towards each other: keep the main chance in mind.
Haughey’s legacy isn’t what he would have had us think. For sure he did many good things, the best of them in his Ministries and not as Taoiseach. And artists knew that he was a friend and, in general, to this he was true.
But here’s the rub – we also know about the extent of the corruption that pervaded this country under his cloak (not all of it in Fianna Fáil, by the way). We have the tribunals, we had the great windfalls from the various tax amnesties and investigations and we have the CAB which continues to be one of the few really effective entities in the war on organised crime.
Haughey would have wanted to be remembered as a statesman, as a great European player like Delors or Mitterand. That he had the capacity to be these things is not in dispute. But he let too much get in the way. He found paymasters other than the people. He got diverted, literally and metaphorically.
Well, that can happen. As the dust settles, I’ll say this: he had a whiff of sulphur off him. He was always a bit, you know, rock’n’roll. In a time of smallness, he larged it more than most.
That’s not to justify having someone else pay all his bills and then lecture the rest of us about living beyond our means. No, it’s just to acknowledge that in his pomp he was a rogue and in his weakness he was a wretch.
And we all have at least a bit of the rogue – and the wretch – in us, don’t we?