Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (30 page)

‘I will know when it is time to step down,' he said.

It was all reminiscent of his appeal to a similar meeting on 27 January 1983. As then, his remarks were interpreted as an indication that he intended to go in the near future, and as on the previous occasion, Ray Burke openly said that he believed that Charlie was about to step down. Ahern assured deputies that the Taoiseach would go after completing his political agenda, but the Reynolds camp saw the appeal as a sign of weakness. Charlie was mortally wounded and supporters of Reynolds were moving in for the political kill, just as Charlie would do himself in similar circumstances.

They argued that it would be best if he were forced out before there were any more damaging disclosures, but Reynolds was being out-manoeuvred by Charlie. Deputies were moved by his private entreaties to be allowed to go with dignity and not to be kicked out ignominiously after thirty-five years of service to the party.

There was similarities with events leading up to the abortive heave by O'Malley in February 1982. Deputies who had privately expressed a desire for change began to waver, and Ahern now seemed to be playing the role that Martin O'Donoghue had played in calling on O'Malley not to go through with the challenge almost ten years earlier. Ahern told Reynolds that he would not back a heave at this time.

‘He brought us right up to the brink,' one Reynolds supporter complained, ‘and then he opted out'.

Friday, 25 October, was to be the day for the challenge. When Charlie went to open a new shopping centre in his constituency that morning, he looked like a very worried man. His voice quivered with emotion as he began to address the gathering.

‘It's always good to be among your own when the going gets tough,' he said. Everyone knew what he meant when he said that this was likely to be one of the more pleasant duties he would have to perform that day. If Reynolds challenged him, he was obviously going to have to call for his resignation, but Reynolds lost his nerve. He announced that the challenge was being shelved to give Charlie an ‘honourable time frame' to complete his political agenda.

‘I am not interested in any way in bitter divisions opening up within Fianna Fáil,' Reynolds said. ‘I have long experience and sharp memories of that situation and I want no part of it ever again'. It was like an echo of what Des O'Malley had said when he talked to the press after calling off his challenge on 25 February 1982.

After the O'Malley heave collapsed in February 1982, Charlie was given a breathing space of some seven months before the McCreevy challenge, but this time he was not even given two weeks. By the following Wednesday he was back in the middle of a political storm.

The previous week he had indignantly refuted an intimation by Dick Spring that Bernie Cahill had not been asked to step aside from Greencore because he had too much on Charlie. Dick contended that it was Charlie who suggested to Cahill that NCB and his friend Pat O'Connor should be appointed as advisers to Greencore on its privatisation.

‘I reject that with contempt,' Charlie replied. ‘That is totally untrue and it does the deputy no credit to make those sort of unfounded allegations. I suggest to him on that score that he too await the outcome of the present investigation when he will find –'

‘The Taoiseach had no meeting?' Dick interjected.

‘I had no meetings. I suggest to him on that score that he too await the outcome of the present investigations when he will find that he will owe me an apology.' At the end of a further exchange, Charlie reaffirmed that ‘no such meeting took place'.

It quickly became apparent, however, that he had met Cahill and there was evidence to prove that on 26 May 1990 Cahill had flown by helicopter from his home in West Cork to Kinsealy. What was more the Irish Sugar Company had paid for the trip. Cahill admitted this at an extraordinary general meeting of Greencore shareholders on Wednesday, 30 October. At this meeting, he said, he showed Charlie the list of companies from which a stockbroker would be chosen to advise on Greencore's privatisation, but denied ‘any undue pressure' had been put on him to support the appointment of NCB. It was already on the list. Although pressed a number of times, he persistently side-stepped questions about whether Charlie had actually recommended NCB.

Many people thought that Cahill's confirmation was proof that the Taoiseach had lied to the Dáil, but Charlie denied this. ‘I did not say, as is now being suggested, that I had no meetings with Mr Bernard Cahill,' he explained. ‘What I said was that no meeting of the kind suggested by Deputy Spring took place.'

In the context of his initial remarks, however, what Charlie had initially denied was the suggestion that he had recommended the appointment of NCB to Cahill. If he had, so what? Charlie was Taoiseach and there was nothing wrong with recommending the best people for any position. Politicians of all parties regularly make representations on behalf of people or companies. So long as no undue pressure was applied, there was absolutely nothing wrong with making recommendations, and Cahill had confirmed there was no undue pressure in this instance. But Haughey's behaviour reeked of gross impropriety against the backdrop of essentially accepting a so-called interest free loan worth £75,546 from Dermot Desmond of NCB to refurbish his yacht. Charlie was seriously compromised by his acceptance of this loan.

As with the Carysfort controversy, Charlie had walked into trouble by denying involvement with Cahill. Whether he had actually lied may be open to question, but there was no doubt that he had deliberately tried to mislead the Dáil.

In the past this kind of dispute in the Dáil would have been quickly forgotten, but now there were television cameras in the chamber. The earlier part of his initial remarks, where he denied meeting Cahill, had been shown that night on television and were now repeated. Taken by themselves, these seemed conclusive that Charlie was saying that he had not met Cahill, but he did indeed subsequently qualify his initial denial by stipulating that there had been ‘no such meeting'.

Deputies know that the use of a word like ‘such' is pregnant with significance. But he should have remembered that he was going into homes all over the country through the medium of television. His subtle nuance had not been included in the edited highlights. Whether or not deputies had actually been fooled, there is no doubt that the viewing public was deceived, especially by the edited highlights. As a result there was further speculation about a heave within Fianna Fáil. It was ironic that such a fuss should have been kicked up over this affair. Charlie had been misleading the whole country between 1983 and 1987 with his criticism of health cuts, the Hillsborough Agreement and the Single European Act, and most of the party had gladly gone along with him.

Now, however, Charlie McCreevy challenged Haughey to ask for a vote of confidence in his leadership at the next parliamentary party meeting, but the challenge was brushed aside as the Taoiseach took the offensive by suggesting that Spring was deliberately deflecting attention from the Greencore scandal by his attacks on the government.

P. J. Mara then pulled a little stunt on Charlie's behalf. He set the press up by suggesting that Spring had been associated with the property developer Pat Doherty, who claimed to be the principal owner of Hoddle Investments, the company which ultimately sold the controversial building to Telecom Éireann. ‘If we are going into guilt by association,' P. J. told reporters, ‘one of the things that will emerge in the Dáil will be the association between Mr Pat Doherty and Mr Dick Spring.' He was very careful with what he had to say. In order that there would be no confusion, he actually read the single sentence from a piece of paper.

The press swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker. The whole thing made front page headlines suggesting that Charlie believed he had the dirt on Dick, who was worried enough to go scurrying through his diaries.

The ruse worked. The press turned the spotlight on Spring, though there was nothing to the whole thing. Doherty announced that Dick had once been introduced to him at a function in the Irish embassy in London, but he doubted that the Kerryman even remembered the introduction.

Charlie was making no apologies. He asked how many questions the opposition would have tabled, if somebody had told the press that the Taoiseach had once met Pat Doherty. Nobody needed to answer that!

The media were outraged. They had been made to look stupid. Charlie was accused of misleading the people and Mara was denounced for ‘acting as a professional character assassin'.

Next day, Seán Power – one of the ‘gang of four' backbench dissidents who had criticised Charlie back in September – proposed a formal motion calling for Charlie's removal as leader at the next meeting of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party. Reynolds announced his support of the motion next day The sense of drama was heightened as Reynolds was about to be interviewed on RTÉ television's evening news. Gerard Collins seemed near to tears during an interview in the Dáil studio. He accused Albert of ‘frightful political immaturity' and made an emotional appeal to him not to go through with the challenge. ‘You will wreck our party right down the centre and burst up the government,' Collins said.

This had been the first real political crisis since the introduction of television cameras in the Dáil. The highlights in recent days had been depicting a most unruly setting with politicians trying to score cheap points off each other. On top of all this came the tear-jerking appeal by Collins. The whole thing was beginning to look like a bad political play in which ham actors were turning a tragedy into a farce.

‘For some time now there has been considerable political instability, which has led to an erosion of confidence in our democratic institutions,' Reynolds declared. ‘This uncertainty must not be allowed to continue.' He added that the country needed ‘strong and decisive leadership', with the result that he would be supporting the motion.

As Article 28 of the country's constitution enshrines the concept of collective cabinet responsibility, Albert should have resigned from the government. When he did not, Charlie was obliged to ask for his resignation, but Reynolds refused. The Taoiseach therefore asked the president to remove him.

Albert was apparently hoping his dismissal would provoke the kind of sympathy that Lenihan received a year earlier. Pádraig Flynn followed the same path in forcing Charlie to have the president dismiss him after coming out in support of Power's motion, but eleven other ministers came out strongly for Charlie, as did Brian Lenihan.

On Friday, the eve of the parliamentary party meeting, Charlie gave an extended lunchtime interview on RTÉ radio. He denounced the whole thing as a ‘power grab'.

‘When Albert talks about political stability and wishing to avoid political instability that seems to be very much like a bookie complaining about gambling,' he said. ‘This is just a new type of campaign directed, I believe, quite simply, not so much at getting rid of me, as a campaign to install Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach.'

It was ironic that Charlie's opponents should be turning to Albert. After all he was one of ‘the gang of five' who claimed credit for pushing Jack Lynch and organising Charlie's rise to power in 1979. Indeed it would seem that he was more than just one of the gang, seeing that he was only one of the five who was immediately appointed to the cabinet.

Reynolds appeared to be moving with a precipitate haste by being unwilling to await the results of the various investigations. His supporters argued that it was necessary to get Charlie out before there were any more embarrassing disclosures. Everyone expected political sparks from the Beef tribunal, but Reynolds was liable to be dragged into that himself in a way that would raise questions about his much vaunted fiscal prowess. This may well have had something to do with his impatience. It was a case of now or never.

Financial mistakes had undoubtedly been made by the Haughey government, but the biggest mistake of all was probably the re-introduction of export insurance on beef exports to Iraq after these had been suspended by the FitzGerald government. This monumental blunder could cost the state well over £100 million and Albert was the individual minister responsible for its re-introduction. When the money involved in all the other scandals was added together, it amounted to only a fraction of the state's potential exposure under the Export Credit scheme.

The media seemed to be touting Reynolds on his own terms without even questioning his overall record, which was distinguished more for its style than its substance. He had avoided taking a stand on a whole range of issues – on contraception, education, divorce, women's affairs, or even Northern Ireland. He had nothing to say in the debates on some of the most momentous issues of the past decade – the Pro-Life Amendment, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Divorce Referendum, and the Single European Act. Most of his political contributions had been confined to economic and financial matters.

By the eve of the parliamentary party meeting on 9 November Charlie was confident enough to have his own people put forward an amendment calling for a vote of confidence in his leadership, which was something he had pointedly refused to do when challenged by McCreevy earlier in the week. The media, which had been predicting his demise suddenly began to hedge. Having got it wrong so often in the past, the political pundits did not actually write off him this time. They said he might survive in an open vote, but he would be defeated in an secret ballot.

The first part of the parliamentary party meeting was taken up with a procedural debate on whether the vote on the motion should be secret or open. Haughey's opponents contended that it should be secret, as he had been elected by secret ballot. He had also had his position confirmed by secret vote during the last heave in February 1983.