Haughey was not all bad, you know

This column is being written in an Internet cafe in the old city of Jerusalem beside the Jaffa Gate. Right outside the window is what is known as David's Tower, mistakenly believed for centuries to have been the site of the castle of King David, who came to Jerusalem 3,000 years ago.

Underneath the cafe is what were believed to have been the pools of Bethsheba, the beautiful wife of the general in David's army, Uriah. David watched her bathing from his tower, arranged for her to be brought to him, seduced her and had her husband killed.

David's Tower is the location of the palace of Herod the Great. Herod did the state some service in the magnificent building work he undertook and did it some disservice in the cruelties he inflicted on the Jewish population. His last days were a misery and are described by the Jewish historian, Josephus, writing about 60 years after Herod's death, which occurred around AD4.

Josephus says his illnesses were so severe because "God was inflicting just punishment upon him for his lawless deeds". He writes: "There was. . . an ulceration of the bowels and intestinal pains that were particularly terrible, and a moist, transparent pus about his feet. And he suffered similarly from an abdominal ailment, as well as from a gangrene of his private parts that produced worms. His breathing was marked by extreme tension and it was very unpleasant because of his bad breath and his constant breathlessness".

All of which leads me to note Charles Haughey's appointment with the Moriarty tribunal on Friday. As he does so, he must know the vast majority of the Irish people have already reached a verdict about him: guilty on all charges, whatever those charges. Herod would have stood a better chance 2,000 years ago.

Charles Haughey is vain, corrupt, deceitful and treacherous. But he is also generous, intelligent, funny, decisive, visionary, brave and patriotic. Yes, patriotic, for although subconsciously he may have identified the national interest in terms of his own self-interest, he was and is deeply committed to the national welfare and did indeed do the State some service.

The depictions of him as decisive, visionary and brave are controversial. His primary problem when he first became Taoiseach was that he was not decisive enough. He did not fire George Colley on the morning after the latter's Baldoyle speech in December 1979 when he (Colley) offered only qualified support to the new leader. He did not go for an election early in 1980 because he dithered disastrously. But he was decisive in his earlier career as minister for justice, agriculture and finance and he was decisive after returning to office in 1987.

He has not been brave in handling the revelations of his financial depredations, but he was brave in appointing Ray MacSharry as minister for finance in 1987, and afterwards Albert Reynolds (both of whom would be their own man with the crucial finance portfolio).

Visionary is a concept full of worthy blather - and he was well capable of engaging in that - but he had ideas about the environment and ecology which were worthy, and his detractors would acknowledge that what he did in the arts was also worthwhile.

He did the State some service on Northern Ireland and on the economy. It was he who was initially engaged as Taoiseach in the peace process, the gradual subsuming of the republican movement under a wider democratic initiative. With his heavy baggage he had a lot to lose if it had gone wrong and the initiative had become known.

And he did focus on rebuilding the economy in 1987, an economy he had done so much to destroy in 1980 and 1981 and while in opposition from 1982 to 1987. That took courage.

But hundreds of thousands of lives were damaged in the 1980s and he was largely to blame for that. True, the collapse of the world economy and the precipitous rise in international interest rates were crucial factors, but also crucial was the calamitous state of the public finances caused first by the government of Jack Lynch, then worsened by Charles Haughey's most catastrophic year as Taoiseach, 1980 (the GUBUs of 1982 were trivial by comparison). Then when the government of Garret FitzGerald tried to cope with the calamity it had been left with, he sabotaged it at every turn.

But he is not culpable alone for the devastation brought to the lives of so many Irish people in the 1980s and right through to today. It was not only he who saw the generation of more and more wealth as the national priority over and above the demands of fairness. It was not only he who has blame for the deprivation that afflicts such large areas of our society in the midst of such plenty.

Those crimes far exceed anything he will have to answer for at the Moriarty tribunal, and the corollary of that is that those of us who share culpability for those crimes of premeditated neglect have done far greater wrong than that for which Charles Haughey will be made accountable on Friday and next week.

No line in the sand can be drawn in Ireland's corruption map with the disposal of the Haughey matters: the Flood tribunal is testimony to that. But what about the little matter of Fine Gael's finances? How can it be that there is not a quiver of concern among the righteous legions that denounce Charles Haughey about the most spectacular enrichment ever undergone by any political party in office, as occurred in the first year of Fine Gael's return to power in December 1994?

In the midst of his pre-tribunal gloom, Charles Haughey may reflect that in his latter days King David suffered a rebellion launched by his own son but ended his days in the arms of a young lover.

It's not all bleak.