Second paragraph of third chapter:
In 1960 Haughey’s constituency colleague, Oscar Traynor, the oldest minister in Lemass’s cabinet, was struggling with the workload in the Department of Justice. Seán Lemass decided that he would need some help to ease the burden and after some debate offered Haughey the job of parliamentary secretary to the minister, today a minister of state.⁶ Haughey said Lemass told him, ‘As Taoiseach I am offering you this appointment on behalf of the government, but as your father-in-law I am advising you not to take it,’ though Lemass would have known there was no chance that his advice, if serious, would be heeded.⁷ Haughey took the job, and immediately showed the flair, attention to detail and administrative skills that would characterise him throughout his career. He tended to identify discrete reforms that he could deliver, and which would be associated with him. Haughey engaged in a programme of law reform Lemass had requested.
⁶ ‘The Peter Berry diaries’ Magill, June 1980; Brian Farrell, Seán Lemass, Gill & Macmillan, 1991, p. 103.
⁷ Deaglán de Breadún ‘C. J. Haughey’s golden days’, Irish Times, 28 March 1984.
This book is by the son of the founder of the Progressive Democrats, Ireland’s liberal party from the 1980s to the 2000s; I knew him (the son, not the father) when we were both young political activists in the 1990s. Eoin is now a lecturer in political science, and not affiliated to any party. He was also involved with an epic trolling exchange with Ryanair a few years ago, back when Twitter was Twitter:
For those of you who don’t remember or weren’t born at the time, the rivalry between Fine Gael leader Garret Fitzgerald and Fianna Fail leader Charles J. Haughey defined Irish politics in the 1980s. My family were definitely Team Garret without apology; my parents knew him as a colleague at University College Dublin in the early 1960s, and were actually introduced to each other by Gemma Hussey, who ended up as a minister in the 1982-87 government which Garret led. There was also the rather important point of him not being a crook.
Today is the 100th anniversary of Garret’s birth. I met him a few times myself. He wrote the foreword to the book that my father had finished writing the week before his death in 1990, and gave the first of a series of annual John Whyte lectures – the title was “What Makes Politics Tick? Interests, Ideals or Emotions?” and it was a typically quirky reflection on his own time at the top. By a coincidence of timing, the day he delivered it in Belfast was the day that Margaret Thatcher resigned, and he leavened his text with some personal anecdotes (I remember one about them both being soaked to the skin while on a boat ride at the European summit in Corfu). Someone asked him how he thought Haughey, his enemy and successor, would deal with the recent election of Mary Robinson as president of Ireland. He gave his characteristic chortle. “The Taoiseach,” he declared, “is a pragmatist.” And so it proved.
A few years later, I met him at an Anglo-Irish political seminar for young activists (and older guests), and I told him about my past medieval history research. He pondered for a moment, and then asked me a rather unexpected question: “Do you know what the main means of goods transport over land was in France in the eighth century?” I shook my head in bafflement. Garret chortled, as ever. “The camel!” he declared. (I have no idea if this is true, and suspect that it may not be.)
When the much-missed Noel Whelan and I launched a hastily written book about the 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly election, Garret came to the Dublin launch, and immediately spotted that we had left one of the tables of election results blank. He sat down, got out a pencil, and filled in the missing numbers on his own copy.
The last time I met him was in 2006, when I was speaking about Eastern European conflict zones at Dublin City University; he turned up and asked me good and pertinent questions from the audience.
I had no personal links at all with Charles Haughey, but I recently read Frank Dunlop’s Yes Taoiseach, of which the best bit is the 1979-82 section covering Haughey’s first two terms in office. Like everyone else I read the newspapers, and deplored Haughey’s opportunism, though was impressed by the redemption that he achieved later in his career. I admit I was also annoyed on his behalf every time a British politician or newsreader pronounced his name “Haw-hee”.
We suspected it at the time, but it is now well documented that he was a crook. O’Malley doesn’t go into this, but the evidence is clear. The most sickening example was his outright theft of around Ir£200,000 from funds raised for his colleague and friend Brian Lenihan, who needed a liver transplant in 1989. Over the course of Haughey’s career, he was paid many millions of pounds by private business, mostly but not always Irish, and while it’s difficult to make a direct case that these payments led to specific acts of corruption, none of the money was properly accounted for – and Haughey was a qualified accountant and a qualified lawyer, so he knew exactly what he was doing.
Eoin O’Malley’s book takes the two leaders in parallel – born within five months of each other, Haughey 100 years ago last September, Fitzgerald 100 years ago this very day, studying at University College Dublin at the same time, both with family links to an older political generation (Fitzgerald’s father was a minister in the 1922-1932 government, Haughey’s father-in-law was Sean Lemass, the Taoiseach from 1959 to 1966), both also with family links to Northern Ireland (Fitzgerald’s Ulster Protestant mother, Haughey’s uncle and cousins in Swatragh).
Fitzgerald became leader of Fine Gael in 1977, and Haughey became leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach in 1979; their rivalry lasted until Fitzgerald resigned after losing the 1987 election. Just reading the facts of what happened during those crazy years is fascinating enough, even though I lived through them at the time. The most extraordinary incident was when the perpetrator of a couple of notorious murders in Haughey’s second term was arrested while staying in a flat belonging to his friend who happened to be Haughey’s Attorney-General. That was hardly Haughey’s fault, but it seemed symbolic.
But on the other hand, even we who liked Garret have to admit that he was pretty disastrous in government. He was a catastrophically bad people manager. His ‘constitutional crusade’ to make the Republic more Protestant-friendly by liberalising legislation on social issues crashed and burned. The country’s financial situation got worse and worse. The successful campaign to add a ban on abortion to the constitution saddled the country with a legal and ethical mess that took decades to sort out. (A mutual friend who saw Garret a few weeks before he died reported to me that going along with this was his biggest political regret.)
The one big success was the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which Margaret Thatcher was somehow charmed into signing. I would love to know the full story behind how this happened. I have seen one account which gives John Hume most of the credit; he is barely mentioned by O’Malley, who puts the UK cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong in the central role. In any case, it regularised the Republic’s relationship with the UK with regard to Northern Ireland, and pushed Unionists (after their initial impotent fury) to realise that a stable long-term solution was going to look more like Sunningdale than the old Stormont. Haughey (a pragmatist, as I said earlier) condemned it bitterly in opposition and operated it smoothly in government.
Haughey won the election in 1987 by running against Fine Gael’s drastic plans for economic reform, which Fitzgerald had typically failed to sell to voters, and then astonished everyone by adopting the Fine Gael programme and implementing it, leaving Fine Gael no option but to support his government. Haughey was a good coalition-builder, and succeeded in getting buy-in from both unions and business. Even more astonishingly, it actually worked, and laid the foundations for the years of economic growth that became characterised as the Celtic Tiger. O’Malley makes the point that while Haughey actually did it, it was Fitzgerald’s plan; they both deserve credit, and the difference between them was more style than policy substance.
Haughey was a crook as previously mentioned, but O’Malley makes a strong case that he was effective and impactful once he finally got to a fairly stable position of government in 1987, and that in a weird sense he owed this success to Fitzgerald.
Though I do wish that O’Malley had spent a bit more time looking at the 1971 Arms Trial (also not really addressed by Frank Dunlop). With the passage of time, almost twenty years after his death, is the balance of analysis that Haughey was actually guilty, or not? And what was the real effect on the ground in Northern Ireland, if any?
The book was flagged up to me by a review from mutual friend (and another former PDer) Jason O’Mahoney, in which he also makes the interesting suggestion that Irish (and other) people should be kinder to their politicians. He has a point. You can (and should) get Charlie vs Garret here.
