Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (31 page)

Charlie argued that he was in opposition the last time. When he had been in government at the time of the McCreevy motion, it had been by open vote, which Reynolds and Flynn had supported.

The public was bombarded with cliches about democracy and the secret ballot. But surely it was not in the interest of democracy to facilitate gutless politicians who lacked the integrity to stand up for their own beliefs. A secret vote on the leadership issue would have been patently undemocratic in this instance. While it is vital that people should have a secret vote in choosing their representatives, it is equally important that the representatives should then vote openly so the people can assess how they are being represented. This is why all votes in the Dáil are taken openly.

After more than three hours of debate, the party voted openly by 44 to 33 for a roll call vote on the actual motion. Thereafter the eventual outcome was a virtual foregone conclusion.

When the meeting reconvened after a short break Reynolds was among the first to speak. He complained that ‘disinformation' had been circulated about him. There was an unfounded story, for instance, that Larry Goodman had loaned him £150,000 to keep one of his business interests afloat. In addition, he said that ‘a very prominent businessman' from Dublin had been investigating his business dealings going back to the late 1950s. His home in Longford had been under surveillance by people in a white Hiace van, and somebody had been acting suspiciously near his Dublin apartment.

Jim Tunney, the chairman of the parliamentary party, proposed a committee be set up to investigate the charges. This was agreed. Reynolds, John Wilson and Tunney being selected.

The atmosphere was electric as Albert went on to accuse Charlie of instigating the campaign of disinformation through the government information service, because of the rumours that Reynolds was preparing to challenge for the leadership. He denied that he was making a grab for power. Indeed, having lost the procedural vote, he clearly recognised that he was now involved in a lost cause. He said that he was throwing away power because of his principles. There was a deathly silence as he wound up. ‘It is enough for evil to prosper that good men do nothing,' he concluded.

The discussion on the actual motion dragged on for a further ten hours, well into the early Sunday morning. Much of the initial tension dissipated as critics were allowed the opportunity to let off steam.

Several people were critical of Haughey's arrogance. Senator Don Lydon complained that he had been summoned to the leader's office and bawled out for making a public speech on Northern Ireland without permission. Lydon said he was then contemptuously dismissed from the Taoiseach's office, but in his stunned state he could not find the door in the midst of all the new wood panelling.

After a while Haughey looked up at the bemused senator still in his office.

‘What are you doing here?' he asked.

‘I can't find the door, Taoiseach,' Lydon replied.

‘Then why don't you jump out the fucking window?' Haughey rejoined.

If Lydon had expected the meeting to be outraged at the Taoiseach's conduct, he must have been sorely disappointed, because the meeting erupted with laughter.

Pádraig Flynn waited until after midnight to speak. He reminded the gathering that it was now a quarter of a century to the day since Charlie's father-in-law, Seán Lemass, stepped down as Taoiseach. He had been party leader for seven years. Charlie had been for almost twelve years, but he still had no intention of accepting the invitation to quit.

Before the actual vote Charlie called on his supporters to ensure that there would be no triumphalism. He clearly did not want a repetition of the disgraceful scenes outside the Dáil in the aftermath of the McCreevy motion in October 1982.

As expected the vote on the amendment expressing confidence in Charlie's leadership was easily carried by 55 votes to 22. There was no triumphalism on the part of Charlie's supporters, but there was a disingenuous display by his ousted opponents congratulating themselves for supposedly standing on principle. ‘I made the ultimate sacrifice to be able to be free to go into the parliamentary party and say what I wanted to say and to vote no confidence in Mr Haughey,' Reynolds declared on returning to his constituency. ‘Everybody can take their own message out of that.'

If principle had been the motivating factor, however, surely he would have gone ahead with his challenge a fortnight earlier. His timing and tactics suggested that his move had more to do with ambition and poor political judgment. There was not even that modicum of self-sacrifice which should have required him to resign from the cabinet rather than force the Taoiseach to dismiss him in order to preserve the principle of ‘collective responsibility' required by the constitution.

Charlie used the occasion of the dismissal of the two cabinet ministers to make his most extensive cabinet reshuffle of the four different governments which he had set up. Among the eight changes he announced the introduction of two new ministers – Noel Davern as Minister for Education and James McDaid as Minister for Defence. The latter's nomination provoked a storm and landed Charlie in an unprecedented controversy. Some 20 months earlier McDaid had been photographed coming out of the Four Courts with James Pius Clarke, a convicted member of the Provisional IRA. The supreme court had just ruled against a request for Clarke's extradition to Northern Ireland.

McDaid had taken a personal interest in the case because he knew that Clarke had not been involved in an attempted murder for which he had been convicted in Northern Ireland. They had both been members of the same Gaelic football club and on the night of the crime, Clarke and McDaid had both been at a stag party in Letterkenny. Under the circumstances he felt he had a moral duty to defend Clarke, but he obviously got caught up in the euphoria of the moment after the supreme court found in Clarke's favour. One of the photographs taken outside the Four Courts showed McDaid smiling broadly with his hand on Clarke's shoulder.

Neither John Bruton nor Dick Spring made any reference to the press photographs in their addresses. It was Proinsias de Rossa, the leader of the Workers' Party, who first raised the issue of McDaid's presence outside the court. This was like throwing a bone to Fine Gael wolves. Jim O'Keeffe and Michael Noonan launched into bitter attacks. The latter produced newspaper clippings of the Clarke case with a photograph of McDaid in the background. Looking directly at Des O'Malley he intimated that O'Malley should have followed George Colley's example by insisting on a veto over the appointments of Ministers for Justice and Defence before agreeing to serve in Charlie's government.

O'Malley, who had raised no objection to McDaid's appointment in advance, had not been aware of the incident outside the Four Courts. He withdrew from the chamber to read up on the Clarke case.

As the storm began to gather momentum McDaid went to Charlie's office at about 6.45 that evening. ‘He said that he had expected the attack but didn't expect anything as abusive as this,' McDaid said afterwards.

The
Irish Times
took this as an admission that Charlie had been aware of the photograph before he made the nomination. But what he had actually been expecting was the normal critical reaction from the opposition. No matter whom he selected he was likely to be criticised in the charged personalised atmosphere prevailing in Leinster House, even if he had selected a member of Fine Gael.

McDaid naturally felt aggrieved. ‘I explained my involvement in the James Pius Clarke case and suggested that any other TD in the same circumstances would have done the same for a constituent, especially for somebody he believed to be totally innocent,' he explained.

Charlie arranged for McDaid to meet O'Malley and Molloy. He told them what had happened and emphasised that he had no sympathy whatever for the Provisional IRA.

‘I sincerely believe he is in no way supportive of the Provisional IRA or any other violent organisation,' O'Malley explained afterwards. ‘But I had to say to him that he had compromised himself, unfortunately.'

Molloy, who was a former Minister for Defence, explained that somebody wishing to join the army as a mere private would not be accepted, if he had been photographed with members of the IRA.

‘You didn't have to be a psychiatrist to realise that they were having a major problem with the situation,' McDaid admitted. ‘They made it clear that in any other portfolio, except Justice, there would have been no problem at all.

‘Making a long story short,' McDaid continued, ‘when I was going out the door I was under no illusion but that they could not see to my appointment.'

He went back and reported what had happened to Charlie, who said that he would talk to the Progressive Democrats again himself. McDaid then withdrew to his own office to prepare a statement for the Dáil to explain his involvement in the Clarke case.

‘It was at that point I made my mind up there was never going to be any peace for me in the role of Minister for Defence and took the decision to go into the chamber and announce my withdrawal,' he explained. ‘I went back to the Taoiseach and told him. He agreed my decision was the correct one and I went into the chamber.'

Before McDaid could make his statement, however, he had to endure a vitriolic attack from the Fine Gael spokesperson on defence, Madeline Taylor-Quinn. ‘I wonder now, given the proposed appointment,' she asked at one point, ‘will the terrorist organisations of this country be privy to very secret matters?'

There was utter indignation in the Dáil. The word was already out that McDaid was withdrawing, but Taylor-Quinn had not yet heard it. Her attack added considerable insult to the injury already felt on the Fianna Fáil side.

McDaid made a dignified statement: ‘In view of the attacks made on me and to avoid the slightest suspicion, however unwarranted, attaching to the Minister for Defence, and in the broader national interest, I have requested the Taoiseach to withdraw my nomination as a member of the government.'

There was outrage on the Fianna Fáil benches. People had never before seen such indignation in the chamber. Many deputies demanded a meeting of the parliamentary party the following morning. Charlie was willing, but Jim Tunney realised that time was needed to allow tempers to cool, as such a meeting would be much too divisive in the circumstances.

Charlie undoubtedly made a mistake in selecting McDaid for his Minister for Defence. He essentially admitted as much himself the following day when he said that it would not have been ‘appropriate, in the circumstances, to proceed with the appointment.'

There is no room in that sensitive ministry for even the slightest suspicion of any kind of ambiguity towards the Provisional IRA. McDaid had compromised himself outside the Four Courts, though not to the extent of justifying the deluge of invective, some of which was a flagrant abuse of parliamentary privilege. He had been a victim of clear character assassination.

Only a week earlier John Bruton had caused uproar in the Dáil with his accusations that P. J. Mara was a character assassin, because of his little ruse over Dick Spring's supposed association with Pat Doherty. Yet what P. J. did in that instance was very mild in comparison to the conduct of Fine Gael representatives in McDaid's case. Of course, Fine Gael was not really going after McDaid at all. The whole thing was part of the on-going effort to gut Charlie and, like the IRA, they did not give a damn whom they hurt in the process.

What was Charlie's mistake this time? That he didn't see or remember a face in the background of a photograph on the front pages more than a year earlier, neither did O'Malley, Bruton, or Spring. Charlie knew McDaid was not an IRA sympathiser, and his failure to remember the incident was therefore as understandable as it was unfortunate.

Nevertheless the whole thing did him incalculable harm. In recent months his authority was being undermined by a handful of brash, young, backbench dissidents who were shouting their mouths off in public from within his own party. They were affording critics fodder with which to berate him. The size of his vote of confidence would normally have allowed him to enforce a more rigid discipline, had he not been undermined by his blunder in the McDaid affair.

Charlie was castigated not only from the opposition benches, but also in the lobbies by members of his own party, especially Reynolds supporters who accused him of ‘gross misjudgment' because of his failure to stand up to the Progressive Democrats. For them it was another case of the tail wagging the dog. Lyndon B. Johnson, the former American president, was fond of a particularly crude saying: ‘When you got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow'.

The Progressive Democrats had Charlie, and when they put on the squeeze, he submitted and the Reynolds gang screamed.

A number of political fuses were lit at the Beef tribunal in December 1991 and the new year began with predictions that one of those would lead straight to the Taoiseach's office. Documentary evidence had been presented to the inquiry that Donal Creedon, the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, had ‘advised' Charlie on 25 January 1988 of a serious fraud involving one of the Goodman companies claiming EC export subsidies. When asked in the Dáil about this fraud in the spring of 1989, Charlie declared that he had ‘no official knowledge' of the matter, and he proceeded to accuse Barry Desmond, the deputy leader of the Labour party, of national sabotage for raising the question.

The fraud really had nothing to do with Fianna Fáil. It occurred before Charlie's return to power. It was an abuse by a Goodman company exaggerating weights on documents claiming EC subsidies from the Department of Agriculture. This had been detected while the Fine Gael–Labour coalition was still in government.