Charles Haughey

Charles Haughey

Charles Haughey was born in Castlebar, Co Mayo, on September 16, 1925. His father, Johnny Haughey, was from Derry and in 1922 had been involved in the smuggling of 400 British rifles to the IRA in Co Donegal. Haughey senior became a captain in the Free State Army, at first in Mayo and then in Dublin.
Charlie was educated by the Christian Brothers in St Joseph’s in Fairview. A scholarship funded his education, and he qualified as an accountant, studied law and was called to the Bar. He set up the accountancy firm Haughey, Boland with his friend Harry Boland in 1951. In the same year he married Máirín Lemass, daughter of the future Taoiseach Sean Lemass.
He entered politics as a county councillor in 1953 and after several attempts won a Dail seat in Dublin North East in 1957.
His first post was Parliamentary Secretary (junior minister) to the Minister for Justice, Oscar Traynor, ultimately replaced Traynor as Minister in 1961. He introducing an impressive body of legislation in the Government led by his father-in-law, Sean Lemass. These included the Criminal Justice Act (abolishing the death penalty); the  Extradition Act and the Succession Act (guaranteeing widows a minimum of half their husband’s estate, or one third if there were children).
Moving to Agriculture in 1966, Haughey delighted smallholders by introducing the so-called “farmers’ dole”, a device to pay unemployment benefit without deductions in respect of earnings from the land.
Haughey’s career stumbled when Lemass retired in 1966. A rival successor, George Colley, squared up to Haughey, and Jack Lynch emerged as a compromise candidate. Haughey, with characteristic adroitness, backed Lynch in a campaign in which Colley suffered a 51 votes to 19 defeat.
Haughey was rewarded with the Finance Ministry, and he impressed the public with largesse.  Pensioners were granted exemption from TV licences and telephone rental charges, and given free electricity and public transport passes. Writers, artists and composers were exempted from income tax on their creative work, a move which brought many high-earning and high profile artists and writers to Ireland in the short term.

Charlie Haughey and Neil Blaney at the time of the Arms Trial.

In the 1960s, Mr Haughey began accumulating assets including a farm in Meath, the island of Innishvickillaun off Co Kerry, and the 18th century house and lands at Abbeville in Kinsealy, north Co Dublin.
His wealth and standard of living, even then well beyond his apparent means on a political salary, became a source of great media interest. However, Mr Haughey refused to entertain questions about his wealth and always insisted his financial affairs were out of bounds for journalists.
Despite a glittering early ministerial career throughout the 1960s during which Haughey was seen to represent a new breed of Fianna Fail politician, his political life came to a dramatic and thundering standstill in 1970. Mr Haughey, along with Neil Blaney, was sacked from Jack Lynch’s government after they were accused of using a fund established to aid the nationalist community in Northern Ireland to import guns for the IRA
Cleared by the subsequent Arms Trial, Haughey was cast into the political wilderness. While Blaney and Kevin Boland left Fianna Fail in the wake of that crisis, Haughey bided his time on the backbenches and relentlessly toured Fianna Fail branches throughout the country rebuilding his support at the grassroots level, speaking at dinners on what he called “the rubber chicken circuit”.

Around this time he was interviewed by journalist Gerry O’Regan, later to become editor of the Irish Independednt. Haughey was particularly liked for his charm, graciousness and humour. “But those close-hooded eyes,”  recalled O’Regan in 2011,  “scarcely concealed that hint of menace for which he would become notorious throughout his political life. And so it was that the mood changed in a heartbeat when I asked him to comment on a remark made by one of his arch political enemies at the time, writer and Labour Party activist Conor Cruise O’Brien. ‘O’Brien has said there are enough stories about you to make you into a kind of legend. What have you got to say to that?’ I remarked nervously. The eyes seemed to narrow even more and his body coiled in scarcely concealed rage.”

“If you’re not careful, I’ll f*ck you through the f*cking window. And that’s off the record,” he retorted.

After the runaway Fianna Fail general election success of 1977, Lynch appointed Haughey as Minister for Health, where he created a high profile with a public health education campaign, even temporarily abandoning smoking and drinking in pursuit of his new image.
He solved the government’s peculiar contraception dilemma with what he cynically described as “an Irish solution to an Irish problem”. The Supreme Court had legalised contraception, but the Catholic Church had demanded regulations governing sales of prophylactics. Haughey restricted sales to married couples, and only on prescription.
In 1979 Mr Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch as leader after a bitter battle with his old political rival George Colley.
Haughey’s famous exhortation to the electorate as Ireland spiralled into a prolonged economic crisis in 1980 that we were living “way beyond our means” later came back to haunt him as tales of his own high living gradually emerged from the tribunals, including the McCracken tribunal and the Moriarty tribunal.
The Moriarty tribunal  heard estimates from the Revenue Commissioners of Mr Haughey’s spending from 1977 to 1997, ranged from a maximum of £9.9 million to a minimum of £6 million.
In negotiations, the Revenue and Mr Haughey’s agents arrived a figure of £6.9 million, which they agreed could be viewed as representative of the total gifts he had received in that period.
Some £1.3 million was paid to Haughey by Ben Dunne alone and the politician racked up massive bills at expensive restaurants and buying designer clothes, including thousands spent on shirts custom-made for him in Paris.
When the Dublin Evening Press published details of Haughey’s £1 million overdraft, AIB hotly denied the report, describing it as “outlandishly inaccurate”. That was true, but only because the bank had already voluntarily written off much of the Haughey debt.

In spring of 1982 he led Fianna Fail into government after reaching agreement with the Independent TD fo Dublin Central, Tony Gregory. The Gregory Deal, as it became known, involved a 100 million punt urban renewal plan for Gregory’s inner city constituency.

The word GUBU – coined by Conor Cruise O’Brien in 1982 – was to become permanently attached to Haughey’s political legacy. Its origins lay in Haughey’s reaction to the disclosure that on-the-run murderer Malcolm MacArthur had been found at the apartment of then Attorney General Patrick Connolly. Upon hearing the news, Haughey famously described the unfolding events as grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented, which almost immediately led to the acronym that became shorthand for the many controversies of his administrations.
Haughey bitterly attacked the Hillsborough Agreement on Northern Ireland when it was signed by Garrett FitzGerald in 1985, but administered it happily when he regained power in 1987, despite reservations about what he called “its constitutional aspects”.
Charlie Haughey’s close friends always testified to his charm, generosity and affability, as well as to his accurate judgment. Those outside that firmly-drawn circle saw only a diminutive figure (he was just 5 ft 5 in tall, and wore Cuban-heeled shoes to add height) with a hooded expression and a conspiratorial manner, coupled with a quite remarkable degree of self-control under pressure. Cruise O’Brien caustically noted his “sulphuric charm”.
In 1992, Former Fianna Fáil Justice Minister Sean Doherty appeared on the late-night chat show on RTE television. In an apparently off-the-cuff interview Doherty discussed the phone-tapping at length. At a subsequent press conference, Doherty contradicted a decade’s denials and admitted that Mr Haughey, while Taoiseach in 1982, had known about the phone tapping. Doherty also confirmed that he had personally given Haughey transcripts of the tapes.
On his final day in the Dail as Taoiseach, on February 11, 1992, Mr Haughey quoted from Othello: “I have done the State some service; They know’t. No more of that.”

Mr Haughey was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1995.

When Haughey was prosecuted in the Dublin Circuit Court in June 2000 for obstructing the McCracken Tribunal of Inquiry by hiding evidence of his offshore bank accounts, the judge decided that it would be impossible for him to receive a fair trial in view of statements by the Tanaiste, Mary Harney, who had called for jail penalties for corrupt politicians.
The trial was adjourned indefinitely. A £2 million retrospective income tax assessment was settled by Haughey for half that amount.

Mr Haughey consistently topped the poll in his Dublin North Central constituency, where he remained extremely popular, particularly with older voters, despite the continuing revelations about his lavish lifestyle.
Charles Haughey died on June 13, 2006, and was survived by his wife Maureen, his daughter Eimear and sons Ciaran, Conor and Sean.