Charlie’s devils: how Haughey era poisonous culture lives on

Forty-eight hours on, the nausea triggered by 90 minutes of Charlie still lingers. It may be a generational thing. Some aged under 45, say, with no memory of the Haughey era, will have been drawn in by the resurrection of Nidge, aka Duracell Mara, in a suit and black-rimmed spectacles. Many over-45s, having perhaps just waved off an emigrant child, or who were dreading the return to post-Christmas reality, might have required more willpower to stay with it.

Charlie is the opposite of Sunday-night escapism. The series covers the decade from 1979, one the continuity announcer described as "fascinating". That may work to describe a piece of history or drama. But for those of us who were on those enormous marches, living with 60 per cent PAYE tax, 15 per cent price inflation, 14 per cent unemployment and mass emigration, any reminder that we were the groundlings in Charlie's corrupt, thuggish little power play will always elicit other adjectives that begin with an emphatic F.

Even 35 years on, Charvet Charlie, his bagman, his stately home, his befurred, entitled mistress, his grovelling Uriah Heep ministers, the phone-tapping, the tails, the threats, all remain too close, too familiar, too infuriating to be classified as fascinating or entertaining, especially at this point in our history, when it is all too clear how the seeds of that poisonous culture would re-erupt like ragwort, again and again, across the decades.

It helped to have put in some training for the viewing. A reading of Dessie O’Malley’s memoir did the trick, a book permeated with Charlie’s shade and full of terms such as “sinister” and “malignant force”. “I came from a different sort of period in a sense,” O’Malley said in a recent interview with this newspaper. “The great dividing point is the beginning of December 1979 [when Haughey won the Fianna Fáil leadership] . . . All the rules and conventions that existed prior to that changed overnight.”

Which happens to be the central event in the first episode of Charlie. A quick character wrap is delivered in the charged vignette of Charlie and his mother marching along the corridors of Leinster House towards the Dáil chamber and his destiny as Taoiseach, while snatches of speeches about him are heard from political opponents : Garret FitzGerald ("flawed pedigree"), Labour leader Frank Cluskey ("a total lack of scruples . . . of either personal or business integrity"), Dr Noël Browne ("I think he will do anything to hold power").

The point is that, in 1979, everyone was on a warning, both inside the Dáil and out. They may not have known the full extent of Charlie’s corruption, but there was no shortage of signals. Hard truths were being delivered, out loud, even then.

No likable characters

What is interesting and even more oppressive about

Charlie

– and made it peculiarly inappropriate Sunday-night viewing – is that its creators do not attempt to make anyone remotely likable. Anyone at all. Not even a weak, dithery Brian Lenihan, who, as even Charlie admits to his face,

was

likable. Not even Charlie’s widowed mother, played as an implacable, bitter old Ma Baker of Donnycarney, revving up her chippy little Napoleon by moaning on about his nine years of post-Arms Trial humiliation at the hands of Jack Lynch, who was “making a Hackballscross of his country”. Haughey placates her by peeling a few large banknotes off an eye-wateringly fat wodge and insisting she use them to buy a hat (for his coronation, of course).

Another woman with a major role is fearless Geraldine Kennedy (though with The Irish Times then, not the Tribune), who tends to materialise like an apparition, narrowing her eyes to ask things such as "So you want to be taoiseach?" . Then there is Terry Keane, the judge's wife turned "king's mistress", who also specialises in sudden appearances, but only to take her clothes off and listen to Charlie's speechifying (or what sounds like speechifying from Aidan Gillen, of which he does an awful lot, even in bed, not a post-coital hair out of place). And there are the besotted ladies of Donnycarney, shiny- eyed recipients of Charlie's large hams – and, in one case, several pound notes (extracted from a brown envelope). "Are you holdin' an election?" the beneficiary, a young shop assistant, asks sweetly. We all know who she's going to vote for, don't we?

That famous Haughey style is distilled in the respectful, French-accented calls from Charvet and in scenes at magnificent Abbeville, vulgarised by ruffians showering themselves with champagne into the dawn after the coronation, while Charlie passes imperiously through the wreckage. There is also a mention of the Timotei affair, when Charlie erupts over the supermarket toiletries left in Thatcher’s room and has them replaced with Man of Aran and a pretty flower. The man had vision and knew how to put on a show – but you knew that too, didn’t you?

Layered production

The value of the production is that we also see other layers alongside: the naked expectation cash will follow coronation and solve Haughey’s problems; the sense of entitlement to bank writeoffs; the indifference to tax evasion; the use of criminal threats and bribes to get support in the leadership vote; the shredding of collective government responsibility and the start of what O’Malley calls the “deification” of the office of taoiseach, which continues to this day.

And even as the IMF is measuring up the country (O’Malley says it was “very imminent” in 1985, one of the reasons for the founding of the PDs), we see the union lads in their sheepskin coats gearing up for a fight for a 20 per cent wage increase – then accepting, slackjawed, Haughey’s counter-offer of 34 per cent in return for keeping him in power. The bells, the bells.

Yes, it’s beyond depressing, and I remain to be convinced by Aidan Gillen. But you have done the State some service, RTÉ. I hope you know’t.