Taoiseach failed to tackle legacy of Haughey era

Political analysis:The Moriarty tribunal's damning indictment of Charles Haughey's behaviour while he was leader of Fianna Fáil and taoiseach has implications for the party and its current leader, no matter how much they may seek to avoid it

. While the report deals with the past, it raises uncomfortable questions for Mr Haughey's successors.

For a start there is the question of how Mr Haughey became Fianna Fáil leader and stayed in that position, despite the fact that there were serious questions about his integrity from the beginning.

Those doubts prompted a succession of upheavals in the party - all of which Mr Haughey survived, with the support of Bertie Ahern and some other members of the current Cabinet.

Even after all the details of his finances were exposed during the public sessions of the tribunal, excuses continued to be made for Mr Haughey by his former colleagues. No effort was made by Fianna Fáil to try and recover the large quantities of money, from public and private sources, intended for the party which were misappropriated by Mr Haughey for his own personal use.

One of the most despicable acts perpetrated by Mr Haughey was that he appropriated for himself an enormous amount of money collected for one of the most loyal and best-loved servants in the history of the party, Brian Lenihan.

"The tribunal is satisfied that a sizeable proportion of the excess funds collected was misappropriated by Mr Haughey for his personal use," the report says.

All of the evidence about Mr Haughey's behaviour has been public knowledge for the past few years, since the dramatic public hearings of the tribunal in the late 1990s.

Yet when delivering the oration at the former taoiseach's graveside earlier this year, Bertie Ahern felt confident in saying: "Charles Haughey brought to the office of taoiseach a wide array of talents and skills, perhaps unmatched in the modern era. His period there defined our times. I saw him at first hand. He was a consummate politician. He exhibited grace under pressure.

"He had an incisive mind, superb parliamentary skills, a proud identity with Ireland, all of Ireland. A profound respect in victory and defeat for our democratic institutions. As well as a political talent, Charlie had the discipline of a tremendous work ethic. The definition of a patriot is someone who devotes all their energy to the betterment of their countrymen. Charles Haughey was a patriot to his finger tips."

Even allowing some latitude for the requirements of the occasion, Mr Ahern's tribute to his former leader was surprisingly extravagant. While Charles Haughey certainly did devote some energy to the betterment of his countrymen, he also devoted a lot of it to the betterment of himself and that was abundantly clear long before the publication of the tribunal report.

One of the staggering figures in the report is that between 1979 and 1996, Mr Haughey received the equivalent of €45 million in today's terms. This truly was corruption on a vast scale and it is something which cannot be excused or ignored no matter what political achievements are cited in his defence.

The report firmly nailed the widespread assumption in Fianna Fáil that, regardless of the substantial amounts of money Mr Haughey received from wealthy business people, he did not give any favours in return.

The tribunal found unambiguously that "inescapable conclusions must be drawn that he received a wide range of substantial payments falling squarely within the tribunal's terms of reference and that certain of the acts or decisions on his part while taoiseach, were referable to some of those payments".

The report went on to say that while the number of acts falling into this category was limited "this cannot and does not give rise to a finding that all other acts or decisions in public office on the part of Mr Haughey during the relevant years were devoid of infirmity".

In other words it raises the possibility that there were many more favours done in return that we will never know about.

"Apart from the almost invariably secretive nature of payments from senior members of the business community, their very incidence and scale, particularly during difficult economic times nationally, and when governments led by Mr Haughey were championing austerity, can only be said to have devalued the quality of a modern democracy," the report says.

Mr Ahern and his colleagues can claim to have put in place a raft of ethics requirements and procedures that should make similar behaviour impossible in the future but they have failed to tackle the legacy of their former leader's behaviour in terms of their own party's history. That is not something that would be easy to achieve but the effort to deal with it has been minimal.

In terms of Mr Ahern's own behaviour during the Haughey era, the tribunal did administer a carefully worded reprimand, but a reprimand nonetheless, on the issue of the signing of blank cheques from the party leader's account which ended up being spent by Mr Haughey for his personal use.

One of those cheques, which was signed on the day after the 1989 general election, ended up being made payable to cash for the sum of £25,000 and went into Mr Haughey's personal accounts

The tribunal concluded that by pre-signing cheques from the party leader's account, "Mr Ahern undoubtedly facilitated the misuse of the account by Mr Haughey.

"This is a practice which has to be viewed as both inappropriate and imprudent having regard to the nature of the account (being one used to administer funds provided from the public purse), the skills and experience then possessed by Mr Ahern, and the absence of any internal or external audit of the account."

The Taoiseach has formally welcomed the report and said the Government would be studying it in the coming weeks while the Opposition has demanded a Dáil debate early next year, claiming that the tribunal has revealed a culture of corruption in Fianna Fáil. The Government appears willing to have a debate on the subject buoyed, no doubt, by the ease with which it came through the controversy over the payments to Mr Ahern back in October.

Whether the renewed debate over Mr Haughey's legacy will have any impact in election year is a moot point but it does raise all sorts of uncomfortable issues for his political heirs.