Reflections on a free-born Irishman

Postscript (2): Nuala O Faolain contributed this article to an Irish Times supplement published to mark the retirement of Charles Haughey in 1992 .

The only time I ever talked to Mr Haughey at length was before the last election, in his old office in Government Buildings. On the wall there was a watercolour of the ancient church of St Doulagh, which is near Kinsealy. I remembered it when it was overgrown and inaccessible. Now, Mr Haughey was telling me, through voluntary initiatives and FAS schemes it had been beautifully restored. He was as pleased as punch.

He knew all about the church and the saint, and he knew about Céide fields, and he knew about the old wooden roads across bogs which are beginning to be revealed, and he talked about the layer upon layer of the past that you can decipher when you fly low over Ireland in a helicopter.

I wrote something afterwards to that effect. And I could hardly believe the reaction - in print, from people who came up to me, from people who even phoned me at home. What kind of a fool was I, to be taken in by his fine talk? What kind of a journalist, to let him off the hook? And above all, how could I give any credence to his pathetic cultural pretensions? The implication was that I'm as much a vulgarian as he is. "But then, you're both from the Northside ..." one man said to me.

This was from the kind of people who live in biggish houses and who've had sons and daughters in the professions as long as there's been a Catholic middle class. Themselves, they wouldn't live in Georgian mansions or buy whole islands or plant rare trees or try to reintroduce eagles. They live cautiously, only breaking out the sherry when the son-in-law is appointed consultant. Their snobbery about Mr Haughey comes disguised as moral indignation. An indignation that extends to most of their compatriots. After all, they should be running the country. It is not just painful to them, but baffling, that Mr Haughey has been running it instead. The only explanation they can offer is that the majority of the Irish electorate is mad.

But their class analysis is perhaps a bit naive. For example, I associate Mr Haughey with my father. I first met him when I used to join my father in Groome's Hotel, a place which sheltered a rare collection of nightbirds. My father was maybe 10 years older than Mr Haughey, yet what they had in common seemed to me something to do with their generation, as if they were the first Irishmen to fully escape the austerity and puritanism and bitterness of the first decades of the State.

They had a zest for Ireland. They loved every last corner of it - including, emotionally, the North - and nothing about it, even the boring bits, could be boring to them. You would think they had invented the place, and were embarked on discovering all its possibilities.

They didn't have any class inhibitions. They didn't think of themselves as belonging to any class. Both of them came from quiet people with no money who were not long off the bog, and who lived respectable lives in rented houses in ordinary streets. But this didn't define them, the way it might in an older country. My father roamed around central Europe in the Thirties, and talked to us about things like Hungary and the Jews and learnt about music and bought prints by, say, Bonnard. Nobody had ever told him that as the son of a factory doorkeeper he wasn't supposed to have confidence in his own taste.

Similarly, I doubt that it every bothered Mr Haughey that he's not supposed to hang portraits of himself in his house. Aristocratic families have done that very thing for centuries of course, but in Mr Haughey it is irredeemably naff. So I've been told. But why is it? Why shouldn't a free-born Irishman do exactly what he likes, particularly in matters of taste? The snobs could forgive him if he'd built a hacienda with steers' horns on the gateposts - that's what they expect of peasants. But to live in Abbeville, to hunt, to enjoy M. Mitterrand, to appreciate Le Brocquy, to care about archaeology? When you're from Donnycarney? When your alma mater is Joey's in Marino and you did commerce in UCD and you're a Fianna Fail politician?

We were supposed to be discussing his political life, and he was characteristically chilly about that. But when the conversation could wander to painting or to archaeology or to anything that was Irish but had value in itself, then he warmed. It seemed to me that when he is at his widest perspective - when he stands right back - he has a huge idea of Ireland, and he knows what it is about Ireland that expresses this feeling for him.

Mr Haughey thoroughly subverted the neo-Anglo class system, not that anyone except the neo-Anglos care. But he subverted another system as well. He has been resolutely unbourgeois. Not for him the cosy certainties of GAA reunions and discussing everything with the wife. He hasn't been a hearth-and-home man at all, that I can see, except for purposes of opposing divorce. He hasn't worn golf-sweaters or done the First Fridays. He hasn't done anything, personally, to shore up the values by which the majority seek to control the rest.

This may count for more, in the long run, than anything he might have done politically. Insofar as he has any personal values which can be perceived by the outsider, they have to do with wit. His crack, for example, about not trusting any organisation that has the words "major" and "superior" in its title was as unwise as it was unfair to the Conference of Major Religious Superiors. But it was funny, and it was anti-pompous.

So are the people Mr Haughey is friendly with, or those few of them I'm acquainted with, - Terry Keane, Anthony Cronin, P J Mara - they're witty and they're anti-pompous. We were all supposed to reel in horror from the political implications of PJ's remark, "uno Duce, una voce". I thought it was one of the great one-liners. We shall not hear its like again.

His personality is beside the point, I'll be told. Look at the man's record, not his personality. But his personality is very much the point, as it is to all politicians and all political transactions in this country. Forcing politics to be personal is the reason both sides play at clientelism. If you listened to the people who crowded round him when he turned up on the steps of churches in his own constitutency during elections, it was the personal you heard about. That they knew his mother, or that they used to go to the library on the same day, or that their brother was at school with his brother, or that one day weren't they waiting at the bus stop and didn't this big limousine pull up and wasn't it him and didn't he give them a lift into town.

They're not afraid of him, where he comes from, though they like to think everyone else is. And they're not even remotely alienated by his wealth. I knew two little boys who were sent home early from the Gaeltacht for boldness. They thought if they could hide for a few days they could go back to the train station at the due time and their parents would never know. They walked out to Abbeville, and hid in Mr Haughey's stables. Mainly they did this because they'd once helped Eimear Haughey with the horses and they thought she would feed them. But I have often wondered how many English children would think of Mrs Thatcher's outbuildings as sanctuary, or how many German children Her Kohl's. Like all the great TDs, Charlie is not a politicain to his own people, but a chieftain of its concrete-dwelling tribe.

When my father was dying, Mr Haughey went to see him. He was Taoiseach at the time, and it can't have been easy for him to find the time to go to St James's hospital. I can't begin to say how much it meant to my father. How much it means to us. Every time I read about Charlie buried at the crossroads and the stake through his heart and the clove of garlic and all that, I think not just of Mr Haughey's kindness, but of his bravery in going to visit a dying man.

One isn't supposed to be influenced by such things, but of course I am. So I see the actions that have brought him to retirement as stemming from defects of his which were at other times qualities. Great qualities. I cannot imagine what will become of him now, because I can't imagine him as anything but formidable. But if I was right in thinking that he has a physical love for Ireland, then I hope that romance will continue. And that it will be enough for him.

But there was always something unappeasable about him, even back there in Groome's Hotel. Antiquarianism would be much too gentle for his restless heart and mind.