Charles Haughey was "the one politician of them all who had a special relationship" with the former Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid. "And it was a mutual relationship," said the Dublin Diocesan Archivist, Mr David Sheehy, yesterday.
He was discussing research into some of the 700 boxes of Dr McQuaid's papers which are being released to historians. The first lot was released last summer and another tranche will be opened up this summer.
Yesterday Mr Sheehy and staff at the diocesan communications office met journalists to discuss papers of the former archbishop concerning his dealings with government, the Holy See and the Papal Nunciature, and correspondence with his fellow bishops.
Dr McQuaid's perception of Mr Haughey was that he was "a young man who would go far" while Mr Haughey in turn seemed enamoured of and impressed by the archbishop, Mr Sheehy said.
As parliamentary secretary at the Department of Justice in the early 1960s, Mr Haughey often visited the archbishop. Once he did so at midnight, unaccompanied by civil servants, during a dispute with gardai over their being allowed a representative body.
Monsignor Tom Fehily was mediating on behalf of Dr McQuaid. The midnight meeting culminated in the setting up of the Garda Representative Association.
However, a later Fianna Fail minister for justice, Brian Lenihan, had no dealings with Dr McQuaid at all, even before he relaxed the Censorship Act to allow for the unbanning of much contemporary literature.
Dr McQuaid's relationship with Eamon de Valera would also not appear to have been as has been assumed. Although de Valera is widely credited with helping to secure his appointment as archbishop, subsequent relations between them appear hardly warm, particularly after Dr McQuaid supported the national teachers when they went on strike against a Fianna Fail government in 1943.
But there were also temperamental differences. Archbishop McQuaid tended to record everything, whereas de Valera's communications with him tended in the main to be by phone, so as to avoid a record. A note by Dr McQuaid, in November 1944, makes his frustration in dealing with de Valera evident.
"This account [of a phone call with de Valera] - is, it will be noted, an unsatisfactory record; but it is an accurate record of a conversation that on Mr de Valera's side was most elusive and shadowy. I took notes of his conversation while he was speaking."
But for sheer unadulterated sycophancy nothing quite compares with the letters to Dr McQuaid from Joseph Walsh, Irish ambassador to the Vatican from 1944 to 1950. Mr Walsh had taught the archbishop French at Clongowes Wood College. During his tenure at the Vatican Mr Walsh, and staff at the Irish College, were the archbishop's eyes and ears.
In a letter of March 13th, 1950, Mr Walsh assures Dr McQuaid that he "can have no conception of the esteem you enjoy here." He congratulates him on the pastoral letter sent him, which he had "already carefully gone through" and "was delighted to see how much you relied on the Scriptures, and so little on speculative theology which has tended to distract the minds of the laity from the beauty and truth of the Bible."
The then Taoiseach "Jack" Costello had just been to Rome, and the ambassador recalled: "He told me so much about your extraordinary kindness to him, and to his family, and your readiness to see him at all times, that I felt back in the old atmosphere once more." Mr Walsh had been Secretary of the Department of External (Foreign) Affairs in "the old atmosphere".
At a meeting with Costello the papal under-secretary of state, Cardinal Montini (later Pope Paul VI), spoke of "the esteem in which he held Your Grace, and he could not say enough about your great work in the Archdiocese. T.G. we have such a wonderful Catholic at the head of the [Irish] Government," Mr Walsh wrote.
Dr McQuaid's true standing with the Vatican would appear to have been somewhat less adulatory, however. According to Mr Sheehy the archbishop had no personal relationship with any of the popes, and was deeply suspicious of the papal nuncios appointed to Ireland, whom he saw as "spies in the camp". Indeed, such was his attitude to the nuncios that they complained to Rome about their isolation in Ireland.
Ambassador Walsh's feelings about his immediate boss, Sean McBride, were, however, quite different:-
"I can say to Your Grace, in all confidence, that I had felt very miserable, almost a certain palpable lack of sympathy on the part of my own Minister in my regard . . . It is no use pretending to you, who always have been so exceedingly good to me, that I do not, and could not feel, anything in common with my present Minister."
Meanwhile the minister for health, Dr Noel Browne, was preparing what would become known as the Mother and Child scheme.