Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (3 page)

He was prepared to help people and be generous even when there was no political advantage to be gained. This side of him has not been generally recognised, except by those who know him. It helps to explain his enormous popularity, especially in his own constituency.

As a minister he adopted the same facilitory attitude towards deputies looking for his assistance. He was always available to backbenchers and he made a particular point of making them feel welcome. This applied not only to those members of Fianna Fáil who might one day help him to realise his ambition for power, but also to those on opposition benches.

During his early years in politics Charlie somehow assembled a personal fortune. He has persistently refused to explain how, or to talk about his private business affairs, but he has flaunted his wealth. He moved into a palatial mansion on a 240 acre estate in the outskirts of Dublin. It had served as a summer residence for the British viceroy in the late eighteenth century. Charlie also bought an island on which he built an expensive holiday home off the south-west coast. He has owned yachts, and has gone in for breeding and racing horses – the so-called sport of kings. He also set up one of his sons in a helicopter business.

‘Coming to terms with Charlie Haughey is like making your confirmation or losing your virginity,' according to Anne Harris of the
Sunday Independent.
‘He has a way with women. Young women and matrons alike ache for him.'

He exuded a mesmerising charm with his uncanny ability to make even a woman he just met in a crowded room feel that he thought that she was the most interesting person in the place. He flattered many women by flirting with them.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, one of his most trenchant critics, wrote that people have liked Charlie ‘for lending some colour to life in a particularly drab period'. He had become an inspiration for Irish people wishing to fantasise about money, power and the good life.

Those that Charlie liked got sworn at ribaldly with no expletives deleted. He demanded an unwavering personal loyalty from his friends and tended to regard any questioning of his motives or actions as a betrayal. Although he got on great with photographers, his relations with reporters were frequently strained.

‘I could instance a load of fuckers whose throats I'd cut and push over the nearest cliff,' he told one interviewer. In particular he singled out the pontificating breed of knowall political commentators. ‘They'll say something today and they're totally wrong about it – completely wrong – and they're shown to be wrong about it. Then the next day they're back pontificating the same as ever,' he said. ‘I suppose if anything annoys me, that annoys me.'

He was often the victim of unfair media criticism, with the result that his relations with reporters were difficult. When an
Irish Times
reporter approached him in the street one day, Charlie took the offensive. ‘Who writes the
Irish Times'
editorials, anyway?' he asked. ‘They read like they have been done by an old woman sitting in a bath with the water getting cold around her fanny!' With that he walked off.

Charlie was a man with real
charisma
, which should not be confused with charm or popularity. The charismatic leader, in the true sense, is one whose followers believe him to have superhuman powers. In his case, these have been demonstrated in his extraordinary ability to survive politically.

For over forty years he was involved in a whole series of controversies. Some of the scandals have been of Watergate proportions. Although written off many times, both by his political opponents and the media, he has managed to extricate himself each time. After one escape in which the media was virtually unanimous in writing him off, one writer noted that the chastened press would wait for three days after Charlie's death before reporting the event – just in case!

In October 1988
The Cork Examiner
had a sensational report that Charlie's heart had stopped in the midst of a severe bout of coughing. His doctors were able to confirm his denial of that story, because he had not suffered a cardiac arrest, but a respiratory arrest. He had stopped breathing for a short time before being revived. That was but another of his many escapes against seemingly impossible odds.

In June 2003 there were further rumours of his imminent demise from prostate cancer. All of the newspapers prepared pages covering his career and RTÉ made arrangements for programmes covering his anticipated death, but he rallied to confound those who were again writing him off prematurely. It all added to the aura of Charlie – the Great Survivor.

Shortly after talking over as Minister for Justice on 11 October 1961, Charlie found himself in at the deep end. He was faced with a virtual mutiny within the garda síochána.

Over the years the force had become demoralised as a result of low pay, poor promotional prospects, and a feeling that its leadership was out of touch with the problems of the rank and file. The garda commissioner was invariably drawn from the civil service, rather than from the force, with the result that the men on the beat felt that he had little appreciation or understanding of their problems.

When a request from the garda representative body for a pay increase was turned down, some discontented elements began holding meetings in Dublin stations. These were banned by the commissioner, Daniel Costigan, under the force's disciplinary code, so a meeting was arranged for the Macushla Ballroom, Amiens Street, Dublin on 5 November 1961.

Charlie directed Costigan to issue a circular to members of the force warning that attendance at unauthorised meetings was a serious breach of discipline warranting dismissal. A total of 815 gardaí ignored the warning, but the inspectors outside only recognised 167 of the men, and they only got the name of one of 30 leaders on the stage.

The
Irish Times
depicted the dispute as ‘undeniably the most serious of its kind to have faced any government since 1922'. Haughey insisted that disciplinary proceedings be taken against the 167 gardaí who were identified. They were to be fined and transferred from Dublin within four weeks. Some disgruntled gardaí decided on a ‘go slow' campaign.

Dublin traffic was thrown into near chaos as gardaí stopped directing traffic and refused to give out parking tickets. Costigan responded on 8 November by asking Charlie to dismiss eleven of the ring leaders. He duly complied, but was smart enough to open the door for possible negotiations by issuing a statement emphasising his willingness to enquire into garda grievances ‘on receiving an assurance from the commissioner that discipline had been fully restored throughout the force'.

With a crisis looming, Charlie turned to the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, for help. As parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Justice, Haughey had been in charge of the department's legislative programme and he visited McQuaid frequently, possibly to clear the legislation with the archbishop who had been exerting a virtual veto on legislation ever since the Mother and Child controversy of 1951. McQuaid liked Charlie and recognised him as a young man who would go far. Now when Haughey came for help, the archbishop gladly intervened. He announced publicly that discipline would be restored, if garda grievances were investigated by the Justice Department.

‘The fact that the guarantee has been given by the archbishop is good enough for me,' Charlie announced on 13 November. ‘I am satisfied that full discipline has now been restored to the force and the commissioner agrees with me.'

The eleven dismissed men were reinstated and disciplinary proceedings against others were dropped. Charlie assured the Dáil that there would be no victimisation of those taking part in the affair. ‘The dismissed men express their gratitude and appreciation to the archbishop and complimented Mr Haughey on his readiness to accept their guarantees to his grace.'

‘May I thank you for the bigness with which you handled the garda settlement,' McQuaid wrote to the Taoiseach on 15 November 1961. ‘The minister has achieved something that could not otherwise have been obtained – a genuine loyalty. And it will help him at the beginning of what, please God, will be a most successful term of office.'

In the end, the Macushla Affair, despite its threatened gravity, turned out to be little more than a storm in a teacup.

Prior to Charlie's appointment as Minister for Justice, charges against prominent politicians or their friends for things like drunken driving would never get to court, but he adopted a different approach. Those who approached him were told they would have to go into court and face the music, but he was ready to help them by ensuring the case would not be reported in the press.

As all district justices were political appointments, a friendly one could be found to rise at five o'clock in the evening and go to his rooms. Journalists would naturally leave for the evening, thinking that their work was done for the day, and the judge would then return and hear the case. The politician would plead guilty, accept his punishment, and that would be the end of the matter. In this way the needs of justice were served without subjecting the accused to damaging publicity. Charlie was satisfied, and in fairness to him, he had some justification. At least it was better than fixing the case so that the accused got off scot free.

'He didn't see his secret courts as a piece of smart-assery in which he exploited the known habits of the court reporters and that he ran his secret courts at the professional expense of the reporters', one Dublin editor later wrote. In any public challenge in the Dáil the reply would make the media look, at worst, as accomplices who might have taken a backhander to kill the case or, at best, people who were slovenly and lacked basic contacts in the building in which they worked for half a lifetime. As far as Charlie was concerned, it was a just a case of helping someone in trouble.

‘As editor of a Sunday paper,' the late John Healy recalled, ‘I had heard three of four instances where Fianna Fáil bigwigs dodged the press punishment by way of extra early or extra later sittings by obliging district justices.' These went unreported until one of the accused got a bit too greedy and tried to fight a case. As a result it was postponed and the press were ready when it reconvened.

That should have been the end of the so-called ‘secret courts', but of course it wasn't. ‘When the next one was held,' Healy noted, ‘I was editing the
Evening Mail.
I got a tip from the courts. Charlie had pulled the wool over our eyes again.'

Donagh O'Malley, parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Finance, had been quietly prosecuted for drunken driving the previous evening. He had pleaded guilty and was fined and put off the road for six months.

He had been stopped while driving the wrong way on O'Connell Street.

‘Did you see the arrows?' Garda James Travers is reported to have asked him.

‘Arrows!' O'Malley exclaimed. ‘I'm so drunk I couldn't see the fucken Indians.'

It was characteristic of his cavalier attitude towards the law. There was another celebrated story of a night that a garda raided a bar in which O'Malley was drinking after hours, and he reportedly asked the garda if he would ‘have a pint or a transfer'.

‘I remember the sense of frustration of the morning,' Healy wrote more than thirty years later. The board of the
Irish Times
had just informed him that it was closing the
Evening Mail.
He assigned a reporter to investigate the O'Malley case, and the reporter came back with the story, which Healy passed to a sub-editor with instructions to put it ‘on page one where people will see it … I was still in the boardroom working out details of the funeral of the paper when the first edition was brought down to me,' he continued. ‘We spread the drunken drive charge, which was not even the day's news, across the front page as a lead story. In the shoulder, under the banner head was a single column saying the
Mail
was going to die.'

‘It was so wrong,' he went on. ‘You rarely lead an evening paper with a drunken driving court case. A strong single column would have done it. To make it worse it looked as if we were, in our death throes, trying to bring down a politician with us.'

‘Are you the fucker that crucified me in the
Mail
?' Donagh O'Malley asked Healy when they next met.

The editor said he was unapologetic. ‘We weren't crucifying O'Malley,' he later told Charlie to his face. ‘We were crucifying you and your secret courts.' According to Healy that ‘was the end of the
Mail
, and the end of Charlie's secret courts.'

It made a fascinating story, but unfortunately Healy embellished it out of all recognition. He was friendly with both Charlie and O'Malley and he possibly liked to think that he had broken the story, but the banner headline on the front page that evening actually read: ‘“Mail” Publication will be Suspended'. The story about O'Malley's arrest and the secret court was true all right, but the
Evening Mail
did not report it in that edition or any other before finally folding.

John Healy may have been confusing it with the ‘Backbencher' column, which he started along with Ted Nealon in a sister paper,
The Sunday Review.
The following Sunday, Backbencher reported that the Fine Gael knives were out for Charlie. ‘I cannot see the minister with all his resourcefulness come out unscathed,' he continued.

The case took a particularly unseemly turn shortly afterwards when James Travers, the garda who had arrested O'Malley, was transferred to new duties. Contending that his transfer amounted to victimisation, the garda – a six year veteran – refused to move. He was then given the option of resigning voluntarily or being dismissed from the force. In the circumstances he resigned.