Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (33 page)

Even John Bruton paid a glowing tribute. ‘Over more than the twenty years I have known him, I could never fault him for his courtesy and commitment to working in the Dáil,' Bruton said. ‘Charles Haughey would probably not thank me for fulsome tributes; neither would his supporters or mine. But I must say I would be sorry to see him leave the Dáil. We would miss his style and shafts of wit.'

Yet there could be no doubt that Charlie's political style had got him into endless trouble. Some of his principal opponents had great style. They were good, decent men who got on great with the media, but there was little substance to their political achievements. Charlie, on the other hand, had a brilliant legislative record, but he was the man the media loved to hate.

‘He did more than his critics ever did,' former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave remarked.

People liked Charlie ‘for lending some colour to a particularly drab period,' Conor Cruise O'Brien once wrote. But, of course, there was much more to it than that. He put the bureaucrats in their place and told the media where to go. He wanted to be loved by people and so he tried to give them what they wanted in the short term, which all too often was not what they needed in the long term.

‘It is going to be a damned boring scene without Charlie to kick around,' his longtime critic Charlie McCreevy acknowledged. The gutting of Charlie Haughey had been one of Ireland's greatest spectator sports for more than a quarter of a century.

Although Haughey remained as a member of the Dáil for the next ten months following his resignation as Taoiseach, he essentially bowed out of active politics. He was indirectly in the news in August 1992 when it was reported that his son Conor had been given a loan to pay for refurbishing of the yacht,
Celtic Mist
, which was in his name. The loan had been authorised by Dermot Desmond, who had power of attorney over the account of the Isle of Man company, Freezone, which had been involved in selling the controversial building to Bord Telecom.

That story was a portent of things to come, but it did not set any alarm bells ringing at the time. Haughey was gracefully slipping into retirement. Even Bruce Arnold had some nice words to write about him.

‘Charlie Haughey achieved a great deal. And it is grossly unfair to him that there should now be a sense of relief at his not being there,' Arnold wrote in the
Irish Independent
on 22 August 1992. The former Taoiseach had vast experience going back to the time of the First Programme for Economic Development in 1958. ‘He was brilliant on that, and on the economy generally over the years since then, and the legacy lingers on, marred by other things,' Arnold wrote. Nobody could doubt that Haughey had left a flawed legacy, but some of his critics seemed unwilling to give him any credit for anything he had ever done.

The Fianna Fáil National Executive hosted a dinner in Haughey's honour on 1 October 1992. He was presented with oak carvings of Leinster House, Government Buildings and Dublin Castle, to mark his years as a Dáil deputy, as Taoiseach, and as president of the European Council of Ministers in 1990. In his address, he paid tribute to his friends by quoting from Yeats:

Think where man's glory begins and ends

And say my glory was I had such friends.

His failure to mention his successor Albert Reynolds even once during the speech was rather pointed. Reynolds did refer to Haughey in his speech, but there was no danger that he was going to be accused of being effusive. ‘The greatest tribute we can pay to the achievements of Charles Haughey is to be able to say in a few years' time that his government laid the basis for a long period of Fianna Fáil rule, even if there had to be a few years of Fianna Fáil-led coalition in the middle.'

Reynolds was obviously still smarting over Fianna Fáil's coalition with the Progressive Democrats, which he had dismissed as a ‘temporary little arrangement'. Just how temporary would become apparent little over four weeks later in the drama of the Beef tribunal.

Haughey began four days of testimony at the tribunal on 13 October 1992. For the first time in 133 days of testimony, the hearing room was full at Dublin Castle. The proceedings turned into virtual theatre, as the former Taoiseach was tough and combative, much to the amusement of the spectators. He seemed to relish being at the centre of attention again. The proceedings were compared to a testy Dáil question time.

‘This is not Dáil Éireann,' the chairman Liam Hamilton remarked at one point.

‘Although some may be forgiven for thinking that now,' Haughey replied, evoking laughter from the public gallery. ‘May I say, sir, that you would have made a big contribution to Dáil Éireann,' he said to Hamilton, who had actually been an unsuccessful candidate for the Labour party many years earlier.

‘If that was the case you might not have been Taoiseach,' Hamilton replied.

‘And if I had chosen the courts, I might have ended up as president of the high court,' said Haughey.

The two main issues that Haughey had to deal with were his involvement in both the abortive Goodman Plan and the re-introduction of the Export Credit Insurance Scheme. His involvement in both was only peripheral, according to himself.

He reaffirmed his complaint that the former deputy leader of the Labour party, Barry Desmond, had tried to sabotage the Irish beef industry. He said that the allegations made against himself by Desmond and Tomás Mac Giolla of the Workers' Party ‘were absolutely absurd and recklessly made.' He was equally caustic about the Progressive Democrats, who, he said, were accurately anticipated in the poem, ‘Leaders of the Crowd,' by W. B. Yeats:

They must keep their certainty accuse

All who are different of base intent,

Pull down established humour; hawk for news:

Whatever their lose fantasy invent.

When someone pointed out that it was Haughey himself who appointed Des O'Malley as Minister for Industry and Commerce, the former Taoiseach conceded with mock humility, ‘Nobody's perfect'.

Adrian Hardiman, then a well-known member of the Progressive Democrats and now a supreme court judge, and Diarmuid McGuinness were representing Des O'Malley at the tribunal. As McGuinness was cross-examining, Haughey asked him, ‘Are you a PD?'

‘Unlike Mr Hardiman, who underwent a voluntary conversion, and my client who underwent a forcible conversion,' McGuinness replied, ‘I am not a PD'.

Although Haughey was often entertaining in the witness box, he was only minimally revealing. He was intent on denouncing the allegations made against him. ‘At the end of the day,' he argued, ‘they don't amount to a row of beans.' And the allegations against the Irish beef industry did not amount to much more, in his view. ‘If there had been breaches of regulations in the Irish beef trade, they are only trotting after what has been perpetrated in other countries,' he said. ‘I don't know what we're all doing here.'

He was especially critical of the ‘yellow press type of television programme', which suggested that he and Goodman were long-standing friends, whereas, in fact, he had never even met the man before 1987. In all the two of them had fourteen meetings between then and 1990.

‘We met exclusively to deal with official matters,' Haughey explained. But he took no notes at any of those meetings, and he was particularly vague about what they discussed.

On the other hand, he said there were documents to suggest that there was ‘a very substantial correspondence' showing that Goodman had been much closer to FitzGerald. But the tribunal was told at that point that FitzGerald wished it to be known that – notwithstanding a report on the files by one of his staff that he had met with Goodman ‘on a regular basis' – he had, in fact, only met him ‘at most' on three occasions.

The main thrust of Haughey's evidence was that Goodman came up with a plan that had great economic potential for the beef industry in Ireland. ‘It was not a question of the government wanting to advance Mr Goodman's companies, rather than it wanted to advance the interest of the economy and the Goodman Company would be the vehicle for that,' the former Taoiseach explained. ‘Here was a proposal based on an indigenous industry, based on the beef industry and on a company with a proven record of success. It would have been lunacy not to decide yes,' he emphasised.

He gave a contradictory explanation for his involvement in compelling the IDA to drop a performance clause that would have required the Goodman companies to produce a certain number of jobs before receiving any grant. He admitted that he was ‘almost certain' that he discussed the performance clause with Goodman four days before it was modified by the government, but he denied instructing the secretary of the Taoiseach's Department, Pádraig Ó hUigínn, to intervene.

ÓhUigínn had already testified that he had, indeed, talked to the IDA on his own initiative. It was just a pure coincidence that he had made the call shortly after Goodman's meeting with Haughey.

James Nugent, counsel for John Bruton, was sceptical about this testimony of Haughey and Ó hUigínn. ‘I have to put it to you that his evidence and your evidence are not credible,' he said.

‘I don't think defending your client justifies your right to make such an allegation,' Haughey snapped. ‘I won't take it from you.'

‘Don't try to bully me,' said Nugent.

‘And, don't you try to bully me,' Haughey shot back. ‘Don't think you can question my credibility. I won't take it.'

They clashed a number of times during the former Taoiseach's testimony. Nugent seemed to be playing the media. At one point in his cross-examination of Haughey, he appeared to be addressing the reporters.

‘I don't like talking to the back of your head,' the former Taoiseach complained.

‘I am here to ask the questions,' Nugent snapped at another point. ‘You are here to answer them!'

‘You are trying to make mysteries out of straight-forward facts,' Haughey protested. ‘If you are intent to lecture me on my role, I may presume to lecture you.'

He was particularly dismissive when asked what he thought of Bruton's accusation that he had hassled the IDA into giving Goodman the deal of a lifetime. ‘I would be inclined to be apoplectic, if I were not a sane person,' Haughey replied, and he went on to characterise the Fine Gael leader as ‘the Admiral Stockdale of Irish politics'. When he was complimented afterwards on using this comparison, Haughey reportedly asked, ‘Just who is this Stockdale character?'

Admiral James Stockdale was Ross Perot's running mate in the on-going American presidential election campaign. Stockdale had recently showed up as a kind of bumbling individual, almost totally out of his depth in a television debate with the other two vice-presidential candidates, Dan Quale and Al Gore.

During his testimony Haughey seemed to admit that he may actually have gone too far in putting pressure on the IDA, but if that was the case, he thought the civil servants should have rectified it. ‘The government from time to time takes decisions and afterwards departments point out, ‘look, you can't do that,' he explained. ‘So formulae are found which make them workable – that's the job of good officials.' It was his way of cutting through bureaucratic red tape and getting things done.

‘We took our decision at government and that was the end of the matter as far as we were concerned,' he said. ‘But, in all these circumstances, it is the duty of the officials, secretaries of the government departments to clear up any of these sort of legal difficulties, which government decisions may give rise to.' He was contending, true to form, that if he had made a mistake, it was somebody else's fault!

By law, the IDA had the right to determine the extent to which it would facilitate the Goodman plan and undue government pressure was not only improper but also illegal. Although cross-examined by seven barristers, none of them was able to make more than a coincidental link between the timing of Haughey's meetings with Goodman, and the subsequent pressure put on the IDA to adjust its terms for supporting of the company's plan. Yet the weight of those coincidences became overwhelming, in the last analysis

‘It was obvious that “the Authority” would not have deleted the clause were it nor for the intervention of the government', Liam Hamilton concluded in his report. The government had exceeded its authority in directing the IDA to remove the performance clause, and ‘this direction was made either at the instigation of the then Taoiseach or the secretary of his department.'

Even though the government did bend over backwards in trying to facilitate the Goodman Plan, this was somewhat academic, as it was never implemented because Goodman did not get it all his own way. The whole thing did ‘not cost the Exchequer a penny,' Haughey argued. In a sense, he was right, but it cost the country a small fortune on legal fees inquiring into the whole thing in order to placate his critics.

On the re-introduction of the Export Credit Insurance Scheme on the beef for Iraq, which was a costly
faux pas
, Haughey sought to dump all the responsibility on the head of Albert Reynolds, whom he accused of re-introducing the scheme without his knowledge or approval. ‘All I can say to you is that Mr Reynolds was an experienced businessman aware of the complexities of international markets and trading and aware of all the pitfalls,' Haughey said. ‘It was just another on-going departmental scheme administered by the minister in the department without reference to me.'

‘Goodman states that he would have discussed all matters that were of importance to him whenever he got the opportunity but had no clear recollection of discussing Export Credit Insurance with the Taoiseach on any specific occasion but emphasised that he would have discussed it whenever he got the opportunity', Hamilton noted in his report. Haughey could not remember discussing it, but he appointed Reynolds as Minister for Industry and Commerce, with the result that he bore ultimate responsibility for the mistakes made by him, whether he discussed the scheme with him or not.