by David Kenny
However, by January of 1982, the Fine Gael-Labour government had collapsed and the ensuing general election produced another inconclusive result.
Thanks to the votes of the Workers Party and Tony Gregory – with whom Haughey had personally negotiated the controversial ‘Gregory Deal’ – Haughey was back as Taoiseach and felt sufficiently emboldened not to offer the position of Tánaiste to Colley.
However, the failure to win an overall majority gave Haughey’s many opponents within Fianna Fáil fresh ammunition. While moves to put Des O’Malley forward as an alternative candidate for Taoiseach after the election came to nothing, in October Charlie McCreevy, frustrated at Haughey’s performance on the economy, put down a motion of no confidence. McCreevy’s unilateral action caught the rest of the anti-Haughey wing wholly unprepared. And, with Haughey insisting on an ‘open roll call’, only twenty-two parliamentary party members voted against their leader.
1982 is now best remembered as the year of ‘GUBU’. When the most-wanted man in the country, Malcolm Macarthur, was apprehended in the home of the Attorney General (who was unaware that Macarthur was a fugitive), Haughey described the strange series of events as ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’ to which Conor Cruise O’Brien applied the acronym ‘GUBU’.
But it would not be until Haughey’s government collapsed that a fuller picture would emerge of what was going on in that government. Ironically, it was Haughey’s belated attempt to address the country’s economic crisis that precipitated a general election. The Workers’ Party and Gregory withdrew their support over ‘The Way Forward’, a Fianna Fáil document which envisaged major cuts in public spending.
Fine Gael and Labour swept back into government in the following general election, with Fine Gael coming within five seats of Fianna Fáil. But Haughey’s problems were only beginning. His leadership would be tested yet again when revelations emerged that the phones of two leading political journalists had been tapped.
Seán Doherty, who was a controversial justice minister during the GUBU government, took the fall for the phone taps, but there was enormous pressure on Haughey and it appeared that finally his enemies in the party would be able to overthrow him. However, the tragic death of Clem Coughlan in a car accident led the crucial party meeting to be postponed. A fierce lobbying campaign by his supporters in the days following saw Haughey once again defy the odds and scrape through.
The leadership contests had taken their toll on everyone. The party organisation reacted almost hysterically to every challenge and there were stories of threats, intimidation and inducements. The pressure on everyone was enormous, with a number of Fianna Fáil TDs suffering physical collapse under the strain. One story from the time speaks volumes of the atmosphere within the party. A couple of days after Martin O’Donoghue was dropped from the cabinet, he received a special delivery at his home. When he and his wife opened the parcel, they found two dead ducks inside along with a short message from Haughey.
‘Shot on my estate this morning.’ O’Donoghue regarded this as both a bad joke and a menacing gesture.
Longtime ally Albert Reynolds recently recounted that he went to Haughey’s office after the heaves to tell him face to face that he couldn’t count on his support from then on. But it was also the end of the line for many of his critics in the party, who understandably yearned for a return to normal politics.
By February 1985, with the expulsion of Des O’Malley from the organisation for refusing the vote with the party against the government’s Family Planning Bill, Haughey was finally in complete control of Fianna Fáil.
Typically, Haughey took a wholly opportunistic approach to opposition politics, opposing the government’s divorce referendum and the historic Anglo-Irish Agreement, while also strongly criticising the Fine Gael/Labour coalition’s (admittedly limited) efforts to rescue the economy. With the economy in the grip of the worst recession since the 1950s, the coalition’s popularity plummeted and Haughey at last seemed destined to win that elusive overall majority at the fourth time of asking. The only cloud on the horizon was O’Malley’s decision to create a new political party, the Progressive Democrats, where he was joined by high-profile Fianna Fáil figures Mary Harney, Bobby Molloy and Pearse Wyse.
In the general election, Fianna Fáil attacked the government for spending cuts, running posters declaring that ‘Health cuts hurt the old, the sick and the handicapped.’ Fine Gael had a bad election, losing nineteen seats, but the PDs’ surprise success in getting fourteen TDs elected meant that, once again, Fianna Fáil fell just short of an overall majority, with Haughey needing the casting vote of the Ceann Comhairle to be elected Taoiseach in the Dáil.
Yet, despite being three seats short of a majority, it proved to be Haughey’s best period in office. Seven years after talking the talk on rescuing the country’s finances, Haughey finally began to walk the walk.
With Ray MacSharry as finance minister and Alan Dukes’ Fine Gael lending support in the Dáil for tough economic policies, budget cuts were introduced in all government departments. The positive impact on the economy and public confidence was almost immediate. There is little doubt that the basis for the future Celtic Tiger was laid during the last three years of the 1980s. Haughey’s other major success from that time was his backing of the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), which despite the many sceptics, has proved a massive success.
Haughey ran his cabinets in a brutally efficient manner, in stark contrast to the all-day agonising of FitzGerald’s term of office. He bluntly told ministers he was not interested in hearing their problems, only their solutions.
Whatever about his relationship with his ministers, Haughey’s tough line on the economy was going down well with the electorate, with opinion polls continually showing Fianna Fáil over fifty per cent in the opinion polls. In late April 1989 Haughey returned from a trip in Japan to the news that the government was about to be defeated in a Dáil vote. Lured by the prospect of an overall majority, he decided to call an election for 15 June. It was a political gamble and it backfired spectacularly. In a campaign dominated by cutbacks in health, Fianna Fáil ended up losing four seats.
When the new Dáil sat, it was the first time in history a nominee for Taoiseach failed to achieve a majority when a vote was taken.
In order to stay in power, Haughey now had to sacrifice one of Fianna Fáil’s core values – that it would never go into coalition. To the horror of party diehards, he did just that, agreeing a deal with the PDs, led by Des O’Malley. Haughey’s absolute control of the party, which he had enjoyed since surviving the final heave against him six years earlier, started to slip from this point. If the 1989 general election was bad for Haughey, the presidential election of the following year was arguably worse. The Tánaiste, Brian Lenihan, was the Fianna Fáil candidate and he looked a shoo-in early on. However, during the campaign, controversy erupted over calls made to Áras an Uachtaráin in 1982 by Fianna Fáil, on the night that the FG/Labour coalition collapsed, urging president Paddy Hillery not to dissolve the Dáil. Lenihan gave conflicting accounts, denying on television that he had been involved in the phone calls, but saying the opposite in an interview with postgraduate student, Jim Duffy.
With the PDs demanding action, Haughey was forced to sack his old ally from the cabinet, a decision that disgusted many in Fianna Fáil. Mary Robinson, who had been running an impressive campaign anyway, went on to win the election. Even at the time, it seemed clear that Haughey’s time was drawing to a close. Ireland was changing dramatically. Haughey’s appeal was on the wane and Robinson successfully tapped into a major mood for change.
A series of business scandals, which led to claims of a ‘Golden Circle’, increased the pressure on Haughey, and there was near open revolt in the party by the autumn of 1991. Haughey won a no-confidence motion put down by Seán Power, and sacked Reynolds and Flynn from his government. It later emerged that a week after this no-confidence vote, supermarket magnate Ben
Dunne famously handed Haughey bank drafts worth £210,000, prompting the immortal ‘thanks, big fella’, line from the Taoiseach.
Haughey’s political victory was short-lived. In early 1992, Seán Doherty went on RTÉ TV’s Nighthawks programme and told the nation that Haughey had known and authorised the phone tapping of the early 1980s.
Haughey denied this, but with the PDs insisting they could not stay in government with him, he signalled his intention to retire. He stood down as Taoiseach on 11 February, when he was succeeded by Albert Reynolds, and retired completely from politics at the general election the following December.
It looked as if Haughey could look forward to a quiet, dignified retirement, enjoying the usual mellowing of public opinion towards departed public figures. However, the dark secret of his personal finances finally came into the public domain. The revelations about his extravagant private life – the £16,000 a year spent on Charvet shirts, the expensive dinners at top restaurants funded by party money and the many millions he had received from various benefactors and businessmen would change the public perception of him forever. The adoration of the masses at ard fheiseanna was replaced by protesters lobbing coins at him during his appearance at the Moriarty Tribunal.
His reputation was further damaged by his initial attempts at the McCracken tribunal to bluster through, suggesting that Des Traynor had handled his finances – that he had been too busy running the affairs of the nation to worry about such things.
While charges of obstructing the work of that tribunal were suspended indefinitely on the grounds that he could not get a fair trial, in the court of public opinion Haughey was tried and found guilty.
Some of Haughey’s advocates have suggested that history may well judge him more kindly. Certainly it would be unfair to overlook his many achievements, not least his belated role in laying the foundations for the current prosperity.
Undoubtedly he was a politician of enormous intelligence, imagination and vision. Imagine what he might have done, for example, with the billions of euro in surpluses created by the exchequer in recent years. But it’s also impossible not to dwell on the lost opportunity. Garret FitzGerald said Haughey had the potential to become one of the best taoisigh the country ever had. However, his preoccupation with wealth and power clouded his judgement.
What is undeniable is that in the five general elections he contested as Fianna Fáil leader, Haughey won between 44 per cent and 48 per cent of the popular vote – a figure his successors have never come close to.
His flaws and strengths said more about Ireland in the second half of the 20th century than we might wish to acknowledge. There is an old Irish saying on a person’s passing: ‘Ní bheidh a leithéad arís ann’.
Never does it seem more true than in the case of Charles James Haughey.
1988: the year the Celtic Tiger earned its stripes
8 June 2008
It was the worst of times. Anyone under the age of thirty-five would struggle to appreciate just how bad things were in Ireland in 1988. Economically the country was a basket case. The national debt was so enormous and crippling that most of the money raised in taxes simply went on interest payments. Unemployment was at 18.5 per cent. Each year, 30,000 of the nation’s young people were opting to or being forced to move abroad. One government minister said at the time that ‘we can’t all live on a small island’.
It was like the miserable 1950s, but worse, because of what was happening in the North. So many horrendous things happened during the three decades of the Troubles that it’s impossible to pick out a low point. But March 1988 certainly seemed like a nadir at the time. The series of connected incidents – the shooting of three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar, the attacks on their funerals by Michael Stone and the subsequent killings of two British army corporals – that occurred during one two-week period, led many people to believe that the North was on the brink of meltdown.
For the vast majority of people back then, it seemed the violence would go on for ever.
Few of us wanted to admit it at the time, but we were living in a failed state. It was probably just as well for national morale that we didn’t know then about the corruption that was going on at senior levels of government. All in all, the country needed a lift and, oh boy, was it about to get one.
Amidst all the gloom, 12 June 1988 shines through like a beacon. It was our JFK moment, but in reverse. It was the day we started to believe, even if we couldn’t fully take in what the giant scoreboard in the Neckar Stadion in Stuttgart was telling us: ‘England 0: Rep. Ireland 1’.
Lady luck for possibly the first time ever had favoured an Irish football team. As writer Dermot Bolger puts it, ‘In the old days when you followed Ireland, you may not have found Jesus in Dalymount Park, but you certainly heard a lot about him.’ But, finally after the heartbreak of disallowed goals and dodgy refereeing decisions in places such as Paris, Sofia and (most notoriously) Brussels, fortune had finally favoured us.
The team had qualified for its first ever major tournament finals courtesy of a late goal by Gary Mackay, who was playing for an already eliminated Scottish team against a Bulgarian side that had only needed to draw at home to qualify. And the gods continued to shine on Jack Charlton’s team during that epic encounter with England. After Ray Houghton headed Ireland into the lead in the sixth minute, the old enemy had enough gilt-edged chances to win the game comfortably. But, somehow, they failed to convert any.
The tension throughout the game was unbearable. Historian and broadcaster Diarmaid Ferriter was just sixteen at the time and recalls watching the match in a friend’s house with a big group of pals. ‘We were just waiting for the ref to blow the whistle [to end the game]. We didn’t care about the style of the Irish team, we just wanted him to blow the whistle.’
‘I was just finished fifth year. It was the start of the summer holidays. It was really hot weather. Ireland had just beaten England. It can’t really get much better,’ he says.
What sticks in the memory of author and commentator David McWilliams is the tricolours on the cars in Dublin immediately after the game. Back then the tricolour was a rare sight, other than on state buildings. ‘I never saw them [on cars] before. We were thinking, “Where did you get them?”’
After watching the game with an ‘unfeasible amount of cans’ in a friend’s house in Monkstown, McWilliams and his friends – who had just finished their final exams in college – went on a ‘massive pub crawl from Monkstown to Dun Laoghaire’. He remembers sitting outside Goggins pub in Monkstown a few hours after the game. ‘We were all pinching ourselves and singing the name of Kenny Sansom [the England full-back whose mis-kick had led to the Houghton goal] over and over again.’
Dermot Bolger, a diehard fan of the Irish team, had a ticket for all the group games in Euro ’88, but couldn’t travel for the English match because his publishing company had a book launch that day.
He watched the match in a house in Phibsborough’s Connaught Street, across the road from the spiritual home of Irish football, Dalymount Park. It was there, thirty-one years earlier, that England had broken Irish hearts with a last minute equaliser by John Atyeo in a World Cup qualifier.
Bolger remembers, after the game ended, meeting an elderly man who he knew well as a great talker and raconteur. But on that day, the man uttered only four words to him: ‘I can die happy.’
It was said after Atyeo’s late goal in Dalyer in 1957 that you could hear the silence as far away as O’Connell Street. But on 12 June 1988, the silence in the city centre was broken by a cacophony of car horns that greeted Ireland’s victory. The then Lord Mayor of Dublin, Carmencita Hederman, was walking back to the Mansion House from an official engagement and she knew Ireland had won when she heard the beeping.
The euphoria of the homecoming stunned the entire squad as hundreds of thousands turned out to greet their heroes on their procession through the city centre.
Hederman broke off her holidays in Connemara to be there to hos
t the civil reception and regards it as one of the highlights of her spell as Lord Mayor. ‘It gave everyone a great lift and a great boost.’ She recalls in particular the ‘wonderful rapport Jack Charlton had with his team. They were one big happy family.’ Delirious, even. Ray Houghton delighted the crowd in Parnell Square by chanting, to the tune of the ‘Camptown Races’, ‘Who put the ball in the England net? I did, I did.’ It was heady stuff.
So much so that in retrospect it is tempting to trace many of the wonderful things that have happened since in this country back to that epic encounter in Stuttgart. Was the Celtic Tiger, as some have contended, conceived in those magical couple of weeks of Euro ’88? Was it the beginning, as others have claimed, of a new post-Nationalist era?
Ferriter is sceptical about such theories. But he acknowledges that anything that gave people something to unite around was a good thing. ‘The 1980s was a very divisive decade. There were so many elections and referenda. So yes, it certainly made an impact in that it gave people something they could unite around,’ he says, adding that the country at that point was on the cusp of change.
It is a point taken up by Eamon Dunphy. He doesn’t think the victory over England was a catalyst for change, rather another sign that Ireland, and Irish people, could cut it on the international stage. ‘It coincided with a time when we were becoming much more confident vis-à-vis England. And this was reflected through our EU membership principally but also by the success of U2 and My Left Foot at the Oscars,’ Dunphy says.
‘It was a bleak time on the surface economically. People were emigrating. But there were green shoots of cultural significance. U2, My Left Foot, that match against England were part of a pattern of emerging confidence and competence. Irish soccer was no longer a shambles ... It [the match against England] was a brick in the wall, not a catalyst – one of the signs that we could do things.’
For Bill O’Herlihy, a new generation of Irish people ‘walked taller’ and realised they were ‘as good as anybody.’
