A life and a legacy

Fintan O'Toole assesses the life and legacy of Charles J. Haughey, a man who can only be defined by his contradictions, and who always had the uncomplicated belief that the greater good was served by him getting what he wanted

In the decadent world of the Austro-Hungarian empire before the first World War, it used to be said that just as a prostitute who charged high prices became a courtesan, a politician who couldn't be bought for less than the price of a country estate was a statesman. In this sense, Charles Haughey was undoubtedly a great statesman. His tragedy was that he had the talent to have earned the title in its simpler, less ironic sense. By far the most gifted politician of his generation, he squandered his opportunities for greatness on luxuriant rhetoric and luxurious living.

If his death left many things unresolved, his life was such as to make any simple resolution impossible. He can only be defined by his contradictions: a patriot whose ultimate allegiance was not to Ireland but to the Cayman Islands; a preacher of family values who kept an expensive mistress; a lover of power who allowed himself to become a kept man; a product of the Catholic lower middle class who spent millions of pounds of other people's money in affecting the style of an Ascendancy gent; a man of the people who secretly sniggered at the people's credulity; a charmer who liked to cultivate an air of menace and warned his own bank that he could be a very troublesome adversary. A highly intelligent, extraordinarily able man disappeared into this yawning gap between appearance and reality.

In his last years, his dwindling band of friends liked to see him as he perhaps saw himself: a Gulliver beset by carping Lilliputians, a giant pestered by mosquitoes. In the course of time, they believed, his greed and dishonesty would be merely the minor blemishes that add character to a beautiful face. What they could not acknowledge was that Charles Haughey's image was ultimately destroyed, not by his critics, but by himself. He scuttled it in the hope of saving his skin.

The image Charles Haughey offered to the Irish public for decades was that of a man of extraordinary shrewdness and perspicacity. He was the man with his eye on the ball, the man who pulled the strings and knew all the secrets. He had a long memory, and a formidable grasp of detail. And if he was sly and ruthless, didn't we need a cunning rogue in our corner in the hard years of Ireland's underdevelopment? An essential aspect of his appeal to his followers was that all of this terrifying craftiness was being used on our behalf.

Yet, when he was stripped bare before the tribunals, he chose to present himself in very different terms, as a man with no head for details, no memory for events, no sense of what was going on around him. Far from having a mind of legendary sharpness, he could not even remember Ben Dunne coming to his house and giving him bank drafts worth £210,000. His recollection of events just a few years previously was, in his own words "increasingly remote and confused".

The mythic Haughey was a man of guile and cunning, willing to involve himself in the byzantine conspiracy that led to the Arms Trial.

The Haughey of the tribunals was as innocent and trusting as a babe in arms. He asked no questions whatsoever about the way his financial adviser Des Traynor was managing his money. He was like a child in its parents' household, vaguely aware that money was needed to keep the show on the road but blissfully indifferent as to where it might be coming from.

The mythic Haughey was watchful, sceptical, even at times paranoid. He wanted so badly to know what was going on that he was prepared to countenance the tapping of journalists' phones. But the Haughey who had secret offshore bank accounts was another person altogether, a trusting soul who did not know about the Ansbacher accounts held for his benefit in the Cayman Islands.

The mythic Haughey was a man of action, a relentlessly energetic figure, forever pushing things forward, meeting challenges, getting stuck in. He was the terrifying leader described by Seamus Brennan at the beef tribunal as liable to swoop down on an unsuspecting junior minister and demand to know what he had done to justify his existence that day. But the other Haughey was as acquiescent and passive as an ancient stoic. What did he do when he discovered the awful truth that his bagman had raised huge sums for him while he was in office? As he told the McCracken tribunal, I accepted it.

The mythic Haughey was a man of the plain people of Ireland, chatting to fruit sellers in Dublin's Moore Street, slapping fishermen on the back at the Dingle races. He understood the little people, shared their hopes and fears.

The other Haughey, however, was, on his own evidence, a creature from another planet. We know that during the years 1989 to 1991, for example, he had outgoings averaging £300,000 per annum. In one year (1991) alone, he spent £16,000 in one clothes shop (Charvet in Paris) and £15,000 in one restaurant (Le Coq Hardi in Dublin). But as he told the tribunals "I didn't have a lavish lifestyle ...

There was no room for an extravagant lifestyle. Money was not a very major concern to me." Since most of the money was other people's (including in the case of the Charvet and Le Coq Hardi bills that of the plain people of Ireland), why should it concern him?

In retrospect, it became clear that much of his apparently formidable personal style had evolved out of his need to appear indifferent to the obvious gap between his income and his expenditure. The spell-check on most word processing systems refused to recognise his name and proposed haughty as an alternative. He probably would have accepted the proposal, for he tried above all to affect the airs of a high and mighty aristocrat.

Even before he had such particular reasons for doing so, he liked to pretend that he was far too grand to think about such menial matters as money. When, for example, Mary Rose Doorly was writing a book about his mansion and estate Abbeville and wondered whether the upkeep of the place was not very costly, he dismissed such questions as dreary. It would, his manner implied, be as well to ask Louis XIV about the cost of running the kitchens at Versailles.

For he had mastered over many years the difficult art of hiding in plain sight. Instead of seeking to conceal the scandalous truth that he had accumulated great wealth from what was supposedly a life of public service, he had made it so obvious that it became simply an accepted aspect of Irish reality. So his wealth became at the same time entirely open and utterly mysterious. It could be seen, but not spoken about, observed but not explained. Like the weather or the internal combustion engine, we took it for granted without ever knowing how it really worked.

It is a trick that can only be pulled off when it is not consciously a trick at all, when it arises from deep personal conviction. And this is what is now most obvious about Charles Haughey's naked display of unexplained wealth. He flaunted it because, in his own eyes, he had a right to it. So deeply did he believe in his own greatness that it seemed simple justice that he should have whatever he wanted. He could act so shamelessly because in the world that he had constructed, he had nothing to be ashamed of. His one genuinely heroic quality was his brazenness. In 1986, when the first divorce referendum was called, he returned from a weekend in Paris with his mistress Terry Keane to broadcast what he called a purely personal statement of his unshakeable belief in the importance of the family.

Three years later, he called a general election rather than tolerate a Dáil motion to establish a fund to help haemophiliacs infected with HIV by the State. The proposed amount of the fund was roughly what he himself was spending every year on Charvet shirts,fine dining, gorgeous wines and the upkeep of his seigniorial lifestyle at Abbeville.

Where did he get the nerve to carry on these gross hypocrisies with such apparent indifference? In the absence of any honest testimony from the man himself, we can but speculate. What seems clear is that he had somehow convinced himself that he was doing us all a favour by accepting so much money.

As Terry Keane put it, Charlie always had the uncomplicated belief that the greater good was served by him getting what he wanted. At some level, he really believed that what was good for Charles Haughey was good for all of us.

How could a highly intelligent man come to think this way? Greed and ambition can be powerful narcotics, producing, like any drug an altered state of consciousness. But in his case, peculiar circumstances of nationality and class undoubtedly contributed to the monstrous identification of his private desires with the public good. Since, in the demonology of his youth, the people who lived in houses like Abbeville were the national enemy, the occupation of such a house by a lower class Catholic like himself could be seen as a revolutionary gesture. Since in the mentality of many of his followers, the Establishment was always Dublin 4 toffs in pinstripe suits, his own cronies could imagine their golden circle, in the words of his benefactor Dermot Desmond at the Flood Tribunal, as purely Northside chaps helping each other.

In that sense, the pictures of Haughey posing on his horse in front of Abbeville, riding crop in hand and black boots as shiny as his well-scrubbed face were in his own mind ludicrously transformed into the triumph of the Gael. He could not have imagined that in time to come people would look at them and see nothing more than a beggar on horseback.