Dublin Report For Haughey, no last hurrah, but a limp goodbye

By John Kelly

It’s a new animal, this Celtic Tiger. Maybe it’s even more Christian in a funny sort of a way. Maybe people are more moral, more angry, a lot less tolerant about what is and what went before.

Or, maybe it’s just the realization of an opportunity to let off good, genuine socialist steam.

Maybe, just maybe, former Taoiseach Charles Haughey was a little like that when he led a gang of budding republican students from UCD to remove the hated, Butcher’s Apron, the Union Jack.

Perish the thought. But could Haughey possibly have been an angry young man?

A good few years back, he might have stood in a crowd like those who stood before his State car in the upper yard at Dublin Castle last week to throw coins at it.

Maybe he would have even shouted, "Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, Jail, Jail, Jail!"

That is precisely what a very young crowd did when he arrived for his first appearance at the Moriarty Tribunal at 9:13 a.m. last Friday. Presumably, the young protester’s got their pennies’ worth. The rest of the small crowd just stood and watched in silence, almost like mourners at a funeral. It had that atmosphere.

One felt that an era had died. It was an era of great expectations and some grave disappointments. The innocence it seemed to project, the innocence of young idealistic Christian Brothers with downy cheeks and priests intent on saving the world for Christendom, had been buried beneath mountains of the most unsavory, hypocritical sleaze.

We now know the terrible facts about some of the priests and some of the brothers, admittedly a tiny minority, but no less disgusting and disappointing because of that. We have grown up to a height where we can see past and present in the mirror of life.

Some of us, just like those young socialists, don’t like the reflection one bit.

Haughey seemed to have it all. There was a glamorous sniff of cordite about his personality, a barely controlled abrasiveness that could explode in a gurrier-type tantrum beneath all of the superficial sophistication.

He was a patriot, wasn’t he? He had proved it during the Northern crisis in the early 1970s when Catholics were threatened with pogroms. There was a hint of criminality about him too, the "fixer" mentality that seemed capable of overcoming problems even before they arose.

Finally, there was also the hint of illicit glamour. There were stories about champagne parties, barely concealed sexual liaisons and assignations, always linked with the name "Terry."

He was a bit of a lad, our Charlie was. But was he really just a Charlie in the end?

Last week, he faced the jeers and the pounding coins. There was only a small crowd to meet him when he arrived, a fraction of the attendance on hand to cheer and clap him when he arrived six days short of the third anniversary of the McCracken Tribunal when last he sat in George’s Hall to give evidence.

Haughey has disillusioned too many people. He has disappointed the faithful. He has helped to destroy the image of ourselves as we though we were.

Not even the regular followers were there to greet him when, as a frail 74-year-old, recovering from prostate cancer, he arrived for what is going to be almost certainly his last public hurrah.

Certainly, there was few known Fianna Fail supporters among the attendance. One who was there was Jimmy Guerin, brother of the slain crime reporter Veronica Guerin, gunned down by drugs suppliers. Presumably for very good reasons none of his family chose to accompany him. It was a solo expedition for the aging ex-taoiseach who has just finished a yachting holiday off the French coast.

Haughey’s legal team put up the statutory objections to his having to answer a shoal of questions about his lengthy dealings with AIB bank. Within a few years, he managed to build up an enormous debt with the bank, amounting to more than £1.2 million in the early ’70s.

Then, a million was a million in Ireland. Now, it’s just an average home in Ballsbridge.

Come to think of it, £750,000 was a lot of money too — and that’s what Haughey managed to get together to keep the wolf from the door. How he got it, who he got it from, and, most importantly,, what he did for it, are questions that might yet be answered as the result of this tribunal.

But it did not start auspiciously. Haughey suffers from a problem that has afflicted many who appeared before it, people like the department store tycoon Ben Dunne. His lapse of memory was the result of a traumatic accident, he told the tribunal.

It seems Dunne was using cocaine frequently at the time and perhaps thought that there was water in the family swimming pool when he jumped. He came out of hospital in a wheelchair. Apparently, he went right on sniffing.

And he was driven out to enjoy a pleasant lunch in Haughey’s charming mansion of Abbeville, near Malahide, in north Co. Dublin. Perhaps it was then that he gave the Haughey family a casual little gift of £20,000. He can’t remember. He can remember very little about those times.

But, he’s off the coke now, he assured the tribunal. Still, let’s hope he stays away from hotel balconies.

Haughey had no problem with cocaine, at least none that we know about. But his memory is bad. He is hazy in many of his recollections. He remembers having to borrow from Peter to pay Paul. He even remembers regular conversations (confrontations?) with bank managers but does not recall who they were.

They were just other people who skipped through his life while he managed "Ireland Inc." A different Ireland, it was. And a different man, Haughey is. When he finally left Dublin Castle on Friday, it was not so much a last hurrah as a limp goodbye. There may be better times ahead. We can only live in hope.