Feckers

by John Waters

  There was always a sense of the miracle of the loaves and fishes about Haughey’s wealth and status. The baskets flowed over and gave no sign of being diminished by extravagant consumption. For many years, when confronted with the implausibility of his material circumstances, he would bluff, stonewall, make jokes and quote Shakespeare. This created a sense that he was either totally clean or utterly impervious to detection. If you were to ask some of his most steadfast supporters whether they would have preferred their leader to be honest or invincible, they would have said that they would prefer him to be invincible. That he for so long gave the impression of such imperviousness suggested itself also as a form of magic.

  But magic, in a modern society, is no match for the law, or for the rational gaze of the determined modernizer. In the end, the Last Fat Chieftain was finally exposed, not by a Judas but by a disciple named Ben who feared the duplicity of others and thus led his hero into the final, fatal trap. The mystery was solved. The source of Haughey’s wealth was sordid and pitiful. There had been nothing magical about it.

  And this, indeed, was the source of the greatest disappointment with the Fat Chieftain: the discovery that he accumulated his own riches not by wizardry but by supplicating.

  His unmasking as a clumsy conjurer was merely a prequel to the exposure of a far greater illusion: the Celtic Tiger, which he had tweaked into being with his sleights-of-hand. And this in turn rendered us even more disappointed – not just with Haughey, but more fundamentally with the very idea of our becoming wealthy. Perhaps our first instincts had been right: we were not cut out for this sordid business of acquisition. And perhaps this is why there is no hope now, for the very name of Haughey reminds us of that shameful time when we were naïve enough to believe in magic.

  13 Garret FitzGerald

  In a 2010 speech criticizing the Taoiseach Brian Cowen in the wake of what he called a ‘botched’ reshuffle, the Fine Gael front bench upstart Leo Varadkar chose as an unfavourable comparison not one of Cowen’s Fianna Fáil predecessors, but the man who had been a legend in his own party. Cowen, having doubled the national debt, he said, was not a Lemass or a Lynch, but a Garret FitzGerald. Varadkar went on to predict that the Taoiseach would end up writing ‘boring articles for the Irish Times’.

  The outrage that followed was of an ecumenical nature. Members of every political party, and none, sprang to the defence of the now octogenarian former Taoiseach. Varadkar came under pressure to apologize, but seemed to hold his nerve. He later announced that he had written to FitzGerald ‘explaining’ his remarks. As likely as not, there was some petty personal reason for Varadkar’s tirade. But, still, the very passion of the response he provoked seemed to speak as much about the truth of his observations as anything else.

  FitzGerald is a deeply admired figure in Irish society. Indeed, he has come to be loved and respected by almost everyone, not least because of his extraordinary energy, humility and approachability since leaving office. He continues writing his weekly Irish Times column, which, contrary to Varadkar’s assertion, is not always boring. (Although once, the same copy was inadvertently published two weeks running and not a single reader contacted the newspaper to complain.) He is a regular guest on radio and television panels discussing politics and economics. Often, nearing the end of a seminar on some vital public matter, when the time comes for questions from the floor, Garret stands up and delivers himself of a detailed analysis of the merits and shortcomings of everything that has been said. Sometimes, strangers gaze at him in wonder and declare: ‘That guy is fantastic! He should go into politics!’

  Garret FitzGerald was for nearly five years, between 1982 and 1987, the leader of the Irish government, and in that time, as Leo Varadkar said, he doubled the national debt. But nobody really blames Garret for that. It was really all Charlie Haughey’s fault. If Haughey had kept his promises, Garret wouldn’t have inherited such a disaster of an economy to begin with. In the 1980s, there was only one game in town, and that was the drama of Garret the Good versus Charlie the Great National Bastard. It is possible to state this in a way that seems ironic, even sarcastic, at Garret’s expense, but the fact of the matter was that, of the two men, FitzGerald was by far the more likeable and the more morally upright.

  But he was also a disastrous politician. He spoke constantly of why he had ‘come into politics’. In fact, he spoke constantly, period. He talked and talked until the donkeys of Ireland were entirely bereft of hind legs. Garret is a deeply intelligent and interesting man. He reads voraciously: history, economics, theology, philosophy, poetry. He is truly brilliant. He likes listening to classical music. He loves his wife and children. Coming to power at a period when, for the first time in nearly 150 years, a generation of young people was able to think about staying in Ireland, he attracted the hopes of both the young people and their parents, thus ensuring that Fine Gael gained, under his leadership, the highest number of seats in its history. Since his departure as leader, the party has come nowhere close to a similar achievement.

  U2 singer Bono was among those who became briefly infatuated with Garret, whom he invited down to a recording session in Windmill Lane. In return, Garret appointed him to a body set up to look at issues affecting ‘the youth’. Bono, realizing the whole thing was just a talking shop, slipped away after the first meeting.

  On the face of it, Garret seemed to be the perfect leader for a new country coming out of the mists of a blighted history. He had charisma, intellect and boundless energy. He had been a working journalist, so he understood how the media worked. He surrounded himself with savvy advisers, who understood things like image and communication strategy. He had vision – he wanted to usher in a non-sectarian, pluralist Ireland as a way of reassuring unionists across the border that Rome no longer ruled the roost. He had courage: he was not, generally speaking, afraid of bishops. He attracted women and young people into Fine Gael. But there was something missing, and this something missing became the tragedy not just for Garret but for all those who placed their hopes at his door. He was absent-minded, but that wasn’t it. His absent-mindedness simply added to his professorial persona – like the way he emerged one day in public wearing unmatched shoes. He explained that he had put them on in the dark because he hadn’t wanted to wake his wife by putting on the light. It was all so Garret.

  He talked and talked. Cabinet meetings went on interminably as he argued and debated with himself. One colleague at the cabinet table at that time was quoted thusly: ‘He has an extraordinary mind, but it has no filter, no perspective, no defence mechanism against all the interesting but irrelevant details which come to distract him.’ He had an obsession – no, a love affair – with figures. It was he, really, more than anyone, who identified the scale of the problem with the Irish economy in the early 1980s. But he was unable to do anything about it except make it far, far worse.

  When, as a guest on the Terry Wogan show on BBC television as his administration shuddered towards its apocalyptic conclusion, the Limerick-born host asked him if things at home were not truly abysmal. Garret grinned and said that, in fact, Ireland was now producing more computer scientists per capita than the United States. At the time it was seen as evidence of how out of touch Garret was, but within a decade, with the economy back in the black and Ireland rapidly revealing itself as the IT hub of Europe, Garret’s professorial pronouncement didn’t seem quite so nutty.

  In the long run, of course, it didn’t matter. With the benefit of hindsight, the difficulties of the 1980s were a minor blip compared to what happened in 2009. But the real problem about the Garret experience was that it would be a long time again before the Irish electorate would be able to trust the type of educated, sophisticated man who read books, listened to Mozart and would, later, write for the Irish Times. We became wary of talkers and thinkers, which is why, perhaps, we ended up with monosyllabic mediocrities and affable actors who never, ever get their shoes mixed up.

  14 Bishop Eamonn Casey

  Ne
arly two decades on, Bishop Eamonn Casey’s ‘sins’, or at least the ones he was punished for, suggest themselves as the flaws of a good man. He had knocked up an American woman, Annie Murphy, who had given birth in 1974 to a boy called Peter. All things considered, he was a high-class kind of sinner.

  In May 1992, when Peter Murphy was seventeen, it all started to spill out. The Irish Times had been sitting on the story for weeks and eventually went with a partial version of it, mainly an element relating to Casey’s payment of some £70,000, said to have come from a diocesan account, to Annie Murphy’s ‘partner’ as a ‘settlement for Peter’. A couple of days previously, Casey had mysteriously resigned as Bishop of Galway, after the Irish Times made contact with him concerning the information it had gathered. Gradually it emerged: Annie Murphy had been the daughter of an American friend of Casey’s, who had come to Ireland on the run from a broken marriage, and had become ‘involved’ with Casey, who had been Bishop of Kerry at the time.

  The Irish people were stunned, and not purely because it was impossible to come to terms with the idea of a bishop having sex. Casey had been no ordinary kind of bishop. In an era of clerical austerity, he had been a breath of fresh air. Roly-poly of both body and spirit, with his mellifluous Kerry accent he caused people to smile when he started to speak. He was known to like big cars and to drive them fast, and to ‘enjoy a glass of wine with his meals’. He would go on The Late Late Show and sing ‘If You’re Irish, Come into the Parlour’ and tell jokes and talk and talk until the cows came home. Gaybo would be rolling around the floor.

  If he had not been wearing the purple rig-out, you would never have known Casey was a bishop at all. And yet, he was one of the most attractive figures in a Church that seemed to have forgotten about the necessity to convince people that religion was not entirely an occasion of misery. Casey had been one of the stars of the visit to Ireland of Pope John Paul II in 1979. He also seemed to do much more than other bishops of the kinds of things Christians were supposed to be doing: helping starving Africans and suchlike. As Director of the Catholic Housing Aid Society, he had been responsible for establishing sixty-five branches in the UK, enabling thousands of homeless people to find places to live. As Bishop of Kerry he had taken a special interest in developing services for young people. As chairman of the Catholic Third Word Aid organization Trócaire, he was a constant campaigner on issues affecting the poorest people on earth, frequently excoriating politicians for their failures. He had also been a vocal critic of the Reagan administration’s record in Central America.

  For many years, the Irish people had studied Bishop Casey and wondered what he was so happy about, and now they knew. And, although the idea of a bishop having sex was unthinkable, in another sense it fitted perfectly with the undertow of Casey’s character. In one way, it caused people a great deal of existential relief to realize that there had been a perfectly reasonable explanation for Casey’s apparent perpetual good humour. And it also offered people the prospect of relief from their own sins. The idea that a senior bishop had succumbed to the temptation of an American divorcée was something that, deep down, people wanted to celebrate rather than condemn. But this was not a culturally approved response, either in the old world of the Catholic Church or the ‘new’ one led by the Irish Times, so they had to keep it to themselves. Many people grinned inwardly when they thought of Casey and wondered how many other adventures he might have had, but outwardly had to join in the general clamour of cant and humbug in a society only too delighted at this opportunity to prosecute such a monumental example of a senior cleric being caught out doing one thing while preaching another. So, whether because of the woman, the baby, the money or all the above, Casey had to go.

  As the years unfolded and the floodgates opened up on revelations of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up, Casey gradually came to look as if he’d been hard done by. What, after all, was Irish society trying to say? That it did not approve of bishops having sex? On the contrary, there began to be a growing demand for married priests, women priests, men and women priest who were married to each other, transvestite priests, transsexual priests and so forth.

  What was it? That Irish society could not tolerate bishops having sex while seeming to oppose such activity for others? That it was really, as the Irish Times tried to pretend, about the money? Or, as some of the more pious critics insisted: that the worst thing was Casey’s refusal to leave his position and marry Annie Murphy, or his failure subsequently to develop a relationship with his son. Perhaps, indeed, this latter was Casey’s only real offence, added to Murphy’s claims that he had initially tried to persuade her to give their child up for adoption.

  When you rinse it all down, it seems Casey had to go because he had behaved hypocritically. In truth, of course, there is not necessarily always something morally decisive about believing and stating one thing and, in certain circumstances, doing another. On the contrary, the Catholic Church insists that we are all sinners but that sins may be wiped away in the sacrament of confession. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the heavily secularized mass culture of modern Ireland, which calls for more and greater sexual freedoms, is far less forgiving than the tyrant bishops, when it happens to be a bishop who is caught with his trousers down.

  Mercy and compassion towards Casey appears to have been the unspoken wish of the Irish people. Casey himself later claimed that he had received 1,500 letters and that only two were critical of him. Why could Eamonn Casey not simply have confessed his sins, conducted his penance in private and got on with his work? Would this not have been the best way of demonstrating how Christianity was supposed to work? In due course, he could have gone on The Late Late and confessed his sins to secular Ireland. God knows, in the years that followed, we could have done with a bishop who could come on television and sing ‘The Foggy Dew’ and tell a yarn or two about what the actress said to the bishop to cause him to fall out of bed.

  15 Albert Reynolds

  Albert Reynolds, who, when asked during the 1992 general election campaign about claims that he and the leader of Fianna Fáil’s coalition partners, Desmond O’Malley, never spoke outside the cabinet room, responded that this rumour was ‘crap, pure crap’. There followed a tsunami of sanctimony and high dudgeon, as opponents and journalists, supposedly offended by Albert’s language, spun into verbal tizzies at the offence and drama of it all.

  The then government Press Secretary, Seán ‘Diggy’ Duignan, later recalled in his book One Spin on the Merry-Go-Round that this episode genuinely damaged Reynolds. It probably did, but only because a couple of people in the media just wouldn’t let it go. It was an issue of taste, we were told, of how the Taoiseach was expected to comport himself, of the coarsening of public life, the dragging down of high office and the end of life as we knew it.

  If you tell people often enough that something is important, they start to believe you. But really this was the seizing by opportunistic actors of a chance to put flesh on an existing prejudice. Albert had never been popular outside his own party supporters, and was deeply loathed by many media people.

  Reynolds, unlike Bertie Ahern, had a proven record as a businessman, having made his fortune in the dancehall boom of the 1960s, later moving on to the dog food business. He had started out as a lowly clerical officer with CIE, the state transport company and, when working as a clerk in Dromod railway station in the late 1960s, was noted for the way he would get all his work done in the morning and spend the rest of the day looking after his growing dancehall business. With his brother Jim, he built and operated more than a dozen dancehalls, using the profits from one hall to build another, borrowing judiciously and expanding exponentially, always dealing in cash. One time, when Albert was involved in a car smash on the way home from a dance, the road was littered with the night’s takings, which he had casually stowed in the boot. This back-story in the dancehall business was the source of much ignorant commentary by journalists who, by sheer force of repetition, created the impression that the show
band boom had been some kind of reactionary ideological movement rather than an opportunity for people to make money by enabling other people to have fun. But, having laid their groundwork of prejudice by associating the Taoiseach with the ‘Country ’n’ Western Alliance’, the new ‘evidence’ was easy to work into the thesis that Reynolds was an uncouth redneck unsuited to high office.

  Although the story of Albert’s ultimate demise is complex, there is no doubt that the ‘crap’ episode contributed to the drip-drip of prejudice which, in the end, rendered him a pushover for the Salomés who came looking for his head.

  When Albert was elected Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach, he set himself to cleaning up the party after CJH, or at least seemed keen about being seen to do this. The appointment of his cabinet amounted to an outright purge of Haughey loyalists, which resulted in deep resentments being carried into the long grass. When you are at the mercy of the delicate arithmetic of a coalition arrangement, it is not a good idea to open cracks in your own parliamentary party.

  Albert was eventually undone as the result of a trumped-up crisis about an alleged attempt to suppress an extradition warrant for the paedophile priest, Father Brendan Smyth. From the instant when the political crisis began to unravel in mid-November 1994, the media seemed resolved to prosecute the issue to the death. The allegation was made that, owing to outside interference, a warrant from Northern Ireland for the extradition of Smyth had been inordinately delayed at the Attorney General’s office. The Democratic Left TD Pat Rabbitte stood up in Dáil Éireann and announced that he was aware of a document that would rock the State to its foundations. There was a letter in existence, he insisted, from a senior cleric, requesting the Attorney General not to proceed with the Smyth warrant. The Labour Party, Fianna Fáil’s junior partner in coalition, demanded a head – Reynolds’s or his AG’s – or they would pull out of government. The controversy was further muddied by allegations that Reynolds had misled the Dáil in relation to another case involving a paedophile priest, which became infamous as ‘the Duggan case’.