12 Charles J. Haughey

There is a phrase from Ben Dunne’s testimony to the Dunne Payment Tribunal that goes some way to explaining the scale of the cultural phenomenon that once was Charles J. Haughey. Dunne, son of the eponymous founder of Dunnes Stores, told the tribunal about his understanding that there had been a plan by those seeking to raise money on Mr Haughey’s behalf to approach a number of businessmen with a view to obtaining donations of perhaps £150,000 from each. Mr Dunne said that, when approached, he volunteered to meet the target of £1 million in full. He recalled for the benefit of the tribunal his reactions at the time: ‘I think Haughey is making a mistake trying to get six or seven people together. Christ picked twelve apostles and one of them crucified him.’

That a leading businessman should in 1997 make a connection between a top politician and the Son of God would in practically any other country be enough to discredit his testimony as the ramblings of a lunatic. But in Ireland the reference resonated something in the cultural perception of Charles Haughey in a way that made it slightly less than ridiculous.

Irish politicians have not until recently been mere human beings. They were, in the past, Gods, Devils, Chieftains, Popes and Anti-Christs. This condition of political quasi-superhumanness was one of the things the modernizing forces sought to erase, and was the main reason why Charles Haughey came so often into their sights. That battle was played out in issues like the North, the economy or the liberal agenda, but the succinct truth is that Haughey became the most controversial figure in twentieth-century Irish politics because he alone on the Irish political landscape played to the old culture. He was the last great tribal chieftain of a people being dragged into what was tendentiously termed ‘the modern world’. Nobody was as adept at playing off the two worlds, at tapping into the sensibilities of both. Charles Haughey lived and ruled through an era when old values were being dissolved and turned into money. Bereft of a personal vision, he tried to simulate the appearance of a visionary by aping ancient values and their adherents, even while he was up to his oxters in the green slime of the material world. He used money to create the illusion of magic.

Like the fat chieftain whose reputation for qualities of leadership rests on the irrefutable evidence that he is able to feed himself and will therefore be able to feed his tribe, Haughey played to the deep insecurities of his post-colonial people by suggesting that what he could do on his own behalf, he could do on theirs. We looked at his (metaphorical) ample belly and felt reassured. This was the ‘secret’ of Charles Haughey’s political success: because he was rich, we imagined, sneakily and at the back of our minds, he could make the rest of us rich as well.

He delivered, too – up to a point. If our previous financial embarrassment bore a passing resemblance to Mr de Valera’s notions of frugal comfort, our subsequent Celtic Tiger-period shut-your-face-and-take-a-look-at-my-wad style of prosperity was undoubtedly closer to Charles Haughey’s brass-necked approach to the management of money.

When Haughey walked into Government Buildings in February 1987, Ireland was on the verge of bankruptcy. A decade later, the Irish economy was the envy of Europe. It scarcely needs pointing out that this turnaround in the national fortunes had far more in common with the manner of Charles Haughey’s own enrichment than with the careful, muddling husbandry of his political rivals.

Charles Haughey did to the public finances in office – particularly from 1987 to 1992 – what the McCracken Tribunal would reveal he had been doing to his private finances for several decades. Consider the following key elements of the strategy employed:

(1) Borrowing: The strange thing is that Mr Haughey was a late and reluctant convert to adapting this particular methodology to the running of the national economy. In 1974 he warned that ‘We should be very conscious however of the fact that we must not come to accept budgets which are, as a matter of course, going to finish up with a deficit which has to be borrowed.’ It was actually his great arch-rival, Dr Garret FitzGerald, who first promoted the idea of national borrowing on a grand scale. In 1966, a deficit/GNP ratio of nearly 1 per cent was regarded as a serious crisis; eleven years later, the ratio was roughly ten times that figure and Dr FitzGerald was fretting publicly that we might not be borrowing enough. Following that infamous January 1980 TV appearance, in which he lectured the public about living beyond its means, Mr Haughey took a leaf out of his rival’s book and settled into running the country along much the same lines as he ran his personal finances: borrowing from Peter to pay back Paul.

(2) Begging: On reclaiming office in 1987, Haughey found his borrowing options considerably circumscribed and diverted his energies to adapting his private talents for begging to the global economic arena. In consequence, in each year of the 1990s, Ireland Inc. received transfers from the European Union amounting to an average of 7 per cent of GDP.

(3) Inducements: During this period also, foreign industrialists and bankers were offered irresistible inducements to locate here rather than someplace else. Thus was Ireland Inc. transformed into a money-laundering operation for multinational capital.

It’s a most peculiar thing that, even in the prosperous Tiger years, we seemed only too delighted to accept the benefits of Mr Haughey’s philosophy and efforts in the public sphere, and yet excoriated him for the time he spent perfecting the arts of begging, borrowing and stroking in private before he came to be in a position to exercise these talents in our interests.

There was always a sense of the miracle of the loaves and fishes about Haughey’s wealth and status. The baskets flowed over and gave no sign of being diminished by extravagant consumption. For many years, when confronted with the implausibility of his material circumstances, he would bluff, stonewall, make jokes and quote Shakespeare. This created a sense that he was either totally clean or utterly impervious to detection. If you were to ask some of his most steadfast supporters whether they would have preferred their leader to be honest or invincible, they would have said that they would prefer him to be invincible. That he for so long gave the impression of such imperviousness suggested itself also as a form of magic.

But magic, in a modern society, is no match for the law, or for the rational gaze of the determined modernizer. In the end, the Last Fat Chieftain was finally exposed, not by a Judas but by a disciple named Ben who feared the duplicity of others and thus led his hero into the final, fatal trap. The mystery was solved. The source of Haughey’s wealth was sordid and pitiful. There had been nothing magical about it.

And this, indeed, was the source of the greatest disappointment with the Fat Chieftain: the discovery that he accumulated his own riches not by wizardry but by supplicating.

His unmasking as a clumsy conjurer was merely a prequel to the exposure of a far greater illusion: the Celtic Tiger, which he had tweaked into being with his sleights-of-hand. And this in turn rendered us even more disappointed – not just with Haughey, but more fundamentally with the very idea of our becoming wealthy. Perhaps our first instincts had been right: we were not cut out for this sordid business of acquisition. And perhaps this is why there is no hope now, for the very name of Haughey reminds us of that shameful time when we were naïve enough to believe in magic.