Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (13 page)

Public disillusionment with the government became apparent in June when Fianna Fáil's vote dropped to 34.6% in the European elections. Down from the 50.6% of two years earlier, it was the worst showing in the party's 53 year history. As a result nervous backbenchers began to look for a change of leadership.

The record twenty-seat majority which Fianna Fáil won in 1977 really sowed the seeds of instability, because the party was left holding many marginal seats. Backbench deputies from those marginal constituencies became noticeably uneasy as things began to go wrong for the government. Fearing for their seats, they became restless for change.

Five deputies stood out in the movement for change. Dubbed ‘the gang of five', they were, Albert Reynolds, Seán Doherty, Tom McEllistrim, Jackie Fahey and Mark Killilea. Beginning with a slow, relentless campaign to secure Charlie's election as Lynch's successor, they soon found enthusiastic supporters in deputies like Paddy Power, Síle de Valera, Charlie McCreevy, Seán Calleary and Bill Loughnane. They started sniping openly at Lynch's leadership.

During a speech outside Fermoy on 9 September 1979 Sile de Valera delivered a veiled attack on Lynch's Northern Ireland policy. She was basically accusing him of deviating from the core values of Fianna Fáil. This was followed a month later by Tom McEllistrim making an issue of allowing the British military to overfly Irish territory.

In November Lynch suffered the humiliation of having Fianna Fáil lose two by-elections in his native Cork – including one in Cork city, his own backyard, after he had campaigned there personally. His electoral magic seemed to have deserted him.

The Cork setbacks were quickly followed by a further political attack by another of the party's backbenchers, Bill Loughnane, who accused him of lying to the Dáil about the government's security co-operation with the British. Lynch was in the United States at the time, and he called on Colley to have Loughnane expelled from the parliamentary party, but Colley had to settle for a compromise in which the deputy from Clare merely withdrew the accusation.

The dissidents next began circulating a petition calling for Lynch to step down. Deputies were asked to sign without being allowed to see the other names on the list unless they first signed. Although more than twenty signed, they were still well short of a majority.

Had Lynch wished to stay on as Taoiseach, there was little doubt he could have continued, but he intended to go in a few weeks anyway. He no longer had much stomach for the party in-fighting and he was persuaded by Colley and Martin O'Donoghue that the time was opportune to retire, because Colley would be elected to succeed him.

Colley should, of course, have seen the writing on the wall for himself when he failed to secure the expulsion of Loughnane, but he would later contend that he had been misled by some deputies who offered him their support while secretly intending to vote for Charlie. George was not the most perceptive of politicians.

On Wednesday, 5 December 1979, Lynch announced his impending resignation as Taoiseach. In a blatant effort to prevent Charlie organising a proper campaign, the meeting to select a successor was called with just two days notice. Hence the campaign was very short.

Colley's people apparently thought that Charlie would be caught on the hop, but Charlie had been preparing for the day ever since he withdrew from the leadership contest back in 1966. He was supremely confident, as there were few people on the backbenches for whom he had not done favours. Now he expected their backing in return. Sitting in his office he totted up his likely support and concluded that he would get 58 votes to Colley's 24.

‘Do you know,' Seán Doherty exclaimed, ‘you're the worst fucking judge of people I ever met.'

The contest was going to be much closer than Charlie expected. Most members of the cabinet supported Colley, but the backbench deputies were terrified lest his low standing in the polls would lead to a repetition of the party's poor showing during both the European elections and the recent Cork by-elections. Charlie, on the other hand, was riding high in the polls. He had been excluded from the government's major economic decisions but, as those had recently turned sour, it was a distinct advantage to him to be seen as an outsider within the cabinet.

Charlie's people cleverly set his bandwagon rolling with some announcements timed to give him a boost at the right psychological moments. First of all there was the announcement that Colley's parliamentary secretary, Ray MacSharry, would be proposing Charlie. This was followed at the eleventh hour by an announcement that the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Michael O'Kennedy (who was regarded as a likely compromise candidate), would be voting for Charlie. Suddenly Colley's supporters realised they were in trouble. Ministerial colleagues made frantic efforts to persuade deputies to support Colley by threatening to cut off funds already allocated for local projects. The campaign threatened to get dirty.

Garret FitzGerald related an extraordinary story in his memoirs about some backbench deputies who said they were being intimidated by Charlie's supporters and wished to know if Fine Gael could ‘do anything to ensure a genuine secret ballot'. He learned, however, that booths were provided so that deputies could vote in private.

One Fianna Fáil deputy later told FitzGerald that ‘despite the polling booth arrangement some deputies had not felt that the privacy of the ballot had been ensured, because the voting papers when marked at either end of the room had to be deposited in a box near the centre of the room. Some deputies claimed they had been told that unless as they walked back to deposit their votes in the box they showed them to members of the Haughey camp they would be assumed to have voted for Colley and would subsequently be treated accordingly.'

No doubt FitzGerald was telling the truth; a member of Fianna Fáil had told him the story, but it sounded like so much sour grapes. Colley's supporters controlled the party mechanism at that stage and if this could have happened without them being forewarned, then they were even more out of touch with the rest of the party than anyone could have imagined. Colley had really outmanoeuvred himself by rushing the election.

The whole thing turned into a contest between the government and its backbenchers. ‘They were voting to save their jobs and we were voting to save our seats', was how one backbench member summed up the division. When the votes were counted Charlie had won by 44 votes to 38.

The ballot papers were immediately burned, and the resulting smoke set off the fire alarm in Leinster House. This was seen by his critics as a portent of things to come, but his supporters were absolutely jubilant.

‘Nixon's comeback may have been the greatest since Lazarus,' one of them said. ‘But there is only one resurrection that beats Charlie's'.

At the press conference following Charlie's election as leader of Fianna Fáil, members of the cabinet were conspicuously absent, as he surrounded himself with backbenchers. Reporters sought to question him on issues on which his silence over the years was interpreted as a sign of ambivalence. In particular, they were interested in his attitude towards the Provisional IRA.

He had not spoken out before, he said, because he had no authority from the party to speak on the Northern Ireland question. Now he was unequivocal. ‘I condemn the Provisional IRA and all their activities,' he declared.

Another reporter asked about the arms crisis, but this was a wound he had no intention of re-opening. ‘This is very much now a matter for history,' he replied. ‘I am leaving it to the historians'.

Would he help the historians? John Bowman asked.

‘I will write my own.'

While Fianna Fáil had a comfortable majority in the Dáil, the divisions within the party were so great and the bitterness between Charlie and Colley so intense that the new leader's election as Taoiseach could not be taken as a foregone conclusion. There were still some doubts about whether he could actually win the necessary confidence of the Daáil.

‘There were rumours of a split in Fianna Fáil,' Garret FitzGerald noted in his memoirs. ‘Possibly because of the rumours of a split that might prevent Charles Haughey's election by the Dáil', the Fine Gael leader did not begin to write his speech until the eleventh hour. He found the task a very difficult one.

‘Charles Haughey and I had known each other since the autumn of 1943, when we had met while studying several first arts and commerce subjects together in UCD,' FitzGerald noted. ‘Our personal relationship had always been friendly, although not close.'

FitzGerald's ensuing speech following Charlie's formal nomination for the post of Taoiseach on 11 December, should be seen partly as a play for the support of disillusioned Fianna Fáil deputies. ‘I must speak not only for the opposition but for many in Fianna Fáil who may not be free to say what they believe or to express their deep fears for the future of this country under the proposed leadership, people who are not free to reveal what they know and what led them to oppose this man with a commitment far beyond the normal,' the Fine Gael leader declared. ‘He comes with a flawed pedigree. His motives can be judged ultimately only by God but we cannot ignore the fact that he differs from all his predecessors in that those motives have been and are widely impugned, most notably but by no means exclusively, by people within his own party, people close to him who have observed his actions for many years and who have made their human, interim judgment on him. They and others, both in and out of public life, have attributed to him an over-weening ambition which they do not see as a simple emanation of a desire to serve but rather as a wish to dominate, even to own the state.'

Nowhere in the speech did FitzGerald make any specific charges as to why Charlie was unsuitable for office. All he made were vague insinuations and then cloaked those with the pretence that he could not be more specific ‘for reasons that all in this House understand'. But, of course, all remarks made in the Dáil are privileged, so there was no justification whatever for his underhanded approach. If, as he implied, he had reasons for saying what he did, then he should have had the gumption to substantiate his charges.

‘It will be for the historians to judge whether placing my views bluntly on the record at that point was counter-productive, or whether it may have contributed to my opponent's failure to secure an overall majority at any of the five subsequent general elections', FitzGerald argued years later.

Whatever about the years ahead, his ‘flawed pedigree' speech certainly set the tone for the opposition that day. Others like John Kelly and Richie Ryan of Fine Gael also made caustic comments, as did the long time maverick Noel Browne, who described Charlie as a dreadful cross between former President Richard Nixon and the late Portuguese dictator, Antonio Salazar. ‘He has used his position unscrupulously in order to get where he is as a politician,' Browne told the Dáil. ‘He has done anything to get power; does anybody believe that he will not do anything to keep power?'

Even back in 1932 when the political climate was still poisoned by civil war bitterness, Eamon de Valera had not been subjected to such abuse. Throughout most of the invective, Charlie sat alone on the government benches, treating his tormentors with contempt by refusing to reply, and restraining others from replying on his behalf. His actions were a silent assertion that the charges were so ludicrous as not to merit a reply.

Since Charlie's family, including his seventy-nine year old mother were in the public gallery, the attacks were seen as most ungracious and were resented by the general public. FitzGerald's own genial image was tarnished, and there was a lot of sympathy for Charlie – even among people who had serious reservations about him. Some of them might have agreed with the sentiments expressed, but they thought the occasion most inappropriate.

Following his election as Taoiseach Charlie went to great lengths to bind up the wounds within Fianna Fáil by reappointing most of the outgoing cabinet, even though only one of them, Michael O'Kennedy had supported him openly. Ray MacSharry, the minister of state who had nominated Charlie, was also rewarded by being elevated to the cabinet.

Albert Reynolds was the only member of ‘the gang of five' who had orchestrated Charlie's campaign, to be given a cabinet post, but the others were all appointed ministers of state.

Four ministers were dropped – Jim Gibbons, Martin O'Donoghue and Bobby Molloy were the most notable. Although Colley was appointed Tánaiste and was given a virtual veto over the appointments of the Ministers for Defence and Justice, he was still far from placated.

On 19 December 1979 Colley told Bruce Arnold of the
Irish Independent
that he and his colleagues believed that Charlie was ‘dangerous, should have been blocked from the leadership, and should be got out as fast as possible.' Arnold later contended that Haughey began subverting the country's constitution from the moment he took over as Taoiseach, but Arnold's own biography of Charlie would seem to indicate that it was Colley who was guilty of this behaviour. He had extracted unprecedented concessions from the Taoiseach for his support, but then, even though he was constitutionally pledged to the concept of collective cabinet responsibility, he essentially began conspiring against the government.

Earlier that day, the Tánaiste had told a cabinet meeting that Charlie had misrepresented him when he told the press conference after his election, that Colley had pledged loyalty and support. In view of the campaign that Haughey's supporters had waged against Lynch, Colley indicated that he no longer felt bound to give loyalty to the Taoiseach.

‘Must you?' Haughey asked.

‘Yes,' Colley replied.

If Colley was telling Arnold the truth about this exchange in cabinet, it was a clear breach of cabinet confidentiality. ‘Since Haughey had been campaigning, or supporting campaigns on his own behalf, for the previous five months,' Arnold argued, ‘it was Haughey, not Colley, who had changed the rule about party loyalty within Fianna Fáil.' No evidence has ever been produced that Haughey was actively engaged in the campaign against Lynch.