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'Irish solutions for Irish problems'
Haughey's Social Policies: He did things which were good, things which were bad and things which were brave. Padraig O'Morain looks at Charles Haughey's social policies.
Over the years, people who found themselves under pressure while seeking to defend Charles Haughey had one sure thing they could reach for in the end: "He got us the free travel."
"Us" in this case is the old age pensioners for whom Mr Haughey secured free travel during his period as Minister for Finance from 1966 to 1970.
Mr Haughey took the view that the Exchequer was subsidising CIE anyhow and that by switching part of that subsidy to the social welfare budget he could finance a popular free travel scheme for pensioners.
Whether he would want this to have been the sole defence remaining to his supporters in the 21st century is another matter.
There is no doubt that free travel has been a boon for pensioners - but Mr Haughey did much more than that in the area of social policy and some of those other things were far more important.
The most important achievement to his credit was instigating the passage of the 1965 Succession Act through the Oireachtas. Up to then it was possible for a vindictive man to cut his wife and children out of his will - and some did.
The Act made it impossible to do this and also provided that the wife and children had to get a defined share of the estate if the man died without leaving a will.
At this remove it may seem like an obvious thing to do - but the amount of misery which the Succession Act has prevented is enormous.
Legalising the sale of contraceptives may also seem, at this remove, like an obvious thing to do. But there was nothing simple about it. Mr Haughey legalised the sale of contraceptives in a restricted way which pleased no-one but which, at least, was a start.
In 1968 the Papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae, reasserted the Catholic Church's opposition to artificial contraception. In an Ireland in which more liberal attitudes to sex were gaining ground, Humanae Vitae posed a serious problem to anyone who wanted to translate that more liberal attitude into a right to sell contraceptives.
At this stage chemists could not sell contraceptives even to married people. The official attitude appeared to be that sex was for the procreation of children inside marriage and other than that nobody, married or single, had any business having sex at all.
Then, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled, in the McGee case, that married people were entitled to obtain contraceptives for personal use.
A battle ensued with the church opposing contraception (except by the rhythm method) and family planning clinics dispensing contraceptives in return for donations. The donations enabled them to get around the law against selling contraceptives.
In 1979, Charles Haughey as Minister for Health introduced a family planning act which allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives, including condoms, for bona fide family planning purposes or for medical reasons.
To pro-contraception campaigners the notion of having to go to get a doctor's prescription to get a packet of condoms was pretty outrageous - especially since the doctor might well refuse to give the prescription and, if he did, the only chemist in town might refuse to fill it.
Still, Mr Haughey could have dodged the issue in the same way that Governments now dodge the issue of abortion but he didn't.
It was not until 1985 that the sale of condoms without prescription was legalised.
By now the country was in the grip of an extended winter of dealing with the spending policies of Jack Lynch's 1977 to 1979 government. The country was sunk in debt. Health was a prime target for cost-cutting. Health cuts were a feature of the 1980s. Cuts introduced by the Fine Gael/Labour coalitions were opposed by health boards dominated by Fianna Fáil. Mr Haughey's Fianna Fáil came to power in 1987 on the basis that it would protect the poor, the sick and the handicapped.
Instead it fiercely intensified the Fine Gael/Labour cuts which it had previously opposed. Today the health system is still trying to recover from these cuts.
The health cuts suggest that Mr Haughey was driven by opportunism and not by principle. Yet he also played an important part in the campaign against tobacco smoking and it is doubtful if he gained a vote or, indeed, a shilling from doing so.
Charles Haughey gave the pensioners free travel, instigated the Succession Act, pushed forward the legalisation of contraception and took on the tobacco companies.
But he also cut thousands of beds out of the health services when he had promised the opposite.
It is impossible to discern an overall social policy in his political actions. All we can say is that he did things which were good, things which were bad and things which were brave.
And perhaps not every politician can say as much.
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