Feckers

by John Waters

  The peace process was not something that happened on television, but, long before that, in the hearts and minds of the people. There had to be a process of thawing, initiated by the leaderships, but incapable of being dictated or contrived. Around the talks table, a formal method was called for: an engagement of moderates, followed by engagement of extremists. This too was a layer of the drama, vital to the unfolding of the deeper one.

  But this was still just the formal political process, depending for its viability on a deeper process in the imagination of society, and, beneath this collective imagination, in the individual heart of every member of that society, contriving to change him- or herself in ways that cannot be measured or discounted. Ultimately, it was not the politicians who changed Ireland, but the people, one by one, in our private hearts, allowing our deepest antagonisms and prejudices to melt away in the hope of a brighter dawn.

  And yet the story can only be told, comprehended, as a drama in which the King of the Culture, flawed and flamboyant, was Ian Paisley. And here was the deeper truth about Paisley: that, despite his protestations, he was at least as Irish as anyone else and more so than most of those who claimed the condition. For who, beholding the extravagant dimensions of his remarkable personality, could conclude other than that he emerged from the mists of some Celtic identity crisis? In truth, he was as ‘British’ as the Pope of Rome.

  And this is perhaps the tragedy of Ireland in summary: that neither part of itself could recognize itself even in this, its most vibrant and passionate manifestation. For if, four decades earlier, we could have got to know each other as well as we got to know each other in the end, the whole sorry bother could have been substituted with a brief but hearty slanging match.

  31 Martin Cahill

  Around the end of the 1980s, an odd figure emerged into the grey light of an Ireland still struggling with recession. His name was Martin Cahill, but he called himself ‘The General’, and he was, by all accounts, a major criminal and a thoroughly nasty piece of work. But then, almost overnight, he became something of a star.

  First he appeared on the primetime television current affairs programme, Today Tonight, wearing an anorak with the hood pulled up and with his hand covering his face. Sometimes he wore Mickey Mouse T-shirts and once he dropped his pants to show he was wearing Mickey Mouse shorts. Emerging from a period in Garda custody, he would wear a homemade balaclava and, as he made his way through the throng of reporters, hum to himself a simple tune.

  Cahill was rumoured to have an unusual domestic arrangement: he was living simultaneously with two sisters, in two different houses. He came across as great crack altogether. He had an easy line in humour and some great yarns about how he would take the mickey (Mickey Mouse, geddit?) out of the cops who were keeping him under constant surveillance. Nobody was quite clear what this surveillance was intended to achieve, since Cahill was unlikely to try to commit any crime while he was being watched.

  Nodding satirically towards his garda escort, The General would inform journalists that he was thinking of advertising for an armed garda escort for the movement of large amounts of cash. It would have been easy to forget that this joker had once nailed a criminal ‘colleague’ to the floor.

  Cahill had spent most of his adult life in jail, mainly for relatively trivial offences. He had been suspected of many crimes, including the 1986 robbery of eleven priceless paintings in the Beit collection from Russborough House, County Wicklow. The haul included a Vermeer, a Goya and a Rubens.

  Cahill had immense respect for An Garda Síochána. He believed it was a mistake to underestimate them, and the lengths to which they might go in order to get their man. Still, he regarded his dealings with them as a game, in which the main thing was not to show a reaction. In prison he learned to read, and read Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

  Martin Cahill told of an impoverished childhood. He had grown up as one of 12 children, the son of a lighthouse keeper. Convicted of his first criminal offence even before he entered his teens, he had spent time in Daingean reformatory, one of the most notorious of those Church-run institutions for orphans and wayward children which would in 2009 be exposed in the Ryan Report into abuse in Catholic-run institutions. When he was released from Daingean, he remained at liberty for two years before being jailed for four years for handling stolen property.

  The General was to change not merely the popular concept of criminality in Ireland but also the way crime was reported. He would become the first subject of a new style of crime reporting, in which a kind of irony entered into what had previously been an unambiguously serious business. Thenceforth, the most gruesome thugs and sadists were given nicknames and written about as though they were soap stars, which in a sense they now were. Cahill was the first of a new breed of allegedly lovable criminals, the old rogue with a heart of gold who saw himself as a modern-day Robin Hood. He spoke about his deprived childhood and seemed to take it for granted that this justified his grown-up activities.

  The Robin Hood subtext began to enter into the reporting of nearly all criminality. No story of the evil deeds of the latest drug warlord was complete without an account of his impoverished childhood and grievances against ‘the system’. Before The General, crimes were reported as offences against society, simple breaches of the law, demanding detection and punishment. But, after him, every criminal became potential inspiration for a film, or a novel, in which the ‘backstory’ was invariably rooted in a troubled past and a desire to ‘get even’ with society.

  A new breed of crime reporter emerged who became to the criminal underworld what gossip writers had been to the showbiz scene. They wrote about the private lives of criminals, their sex lives, their rumoured deeds, heroic and otherwise. The reporters featured in dramatic television ads and created the impression that all this had something to do with investigative journalism. The criminal underworld, flattered by the attention, began to compete for stardom.

  And this development seemed to be related to an even more ominous syndrome. Invariably in the wake of criminal outrages, the voices of certain journalists and amateur sociologists were to be heard even above the grief of those left bereaved by the actions of some monstrous Robin Hood. Eschewing the obvious explanation that the perpetrators of such obscenities were simply irredeemably evil, these voices speak of ‘alienation’ and ‘context’, explaining that such things happen because the perpetrators come from a class in society disenfranchised by virtue of economic and social marginalization.

  As the years wore on, the crime figures went through the roof. Gang warfare broke out in several Irish cities, most notably Limerick. The media were hard-pressed to keep coming up with original nicknames for the criminals who came and often, despatched by the next in line for stardom, went.

  Although the social theoreticians prated about social deprivation, the evidence was to the contrary. In the twenty years after Martin Cahill made his first television appearance, most sections of Irish society became steadily wealthier. It is true that an imbecilic social policy, which pursued unchecked urbanization as a path to ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’, had created appalling social ghettoes in many cities and towns, and that, as a consequence of short-sighted social welfare policies, these had become festering cesspits of idleness, ignorance, brutishness and self-destruction. But the deeper, cultural change was that, in tandem with the growth of these jungles, there had evolved a stream of public thought that sought to play down the imperative of personal responsibility in deciding that all wrongdoing emanating from these ghettoes could be explained by reference to ‘social factors’. Following an initial bout of public horror in the wake of each new outrage, the voices of enlightenment reasserted themselves to speak of ‘marginalization’ and ‘alienation’, thus destroying any chance of a concerted initiative against thuggery.

  There is something to be said for the ‘social context’ analysis of crime – provided it is advanced purely as a cautionary note concerning the
implications of social policy. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of the Irish criminal classes tend to emanate from the social welfare jungles we have deposited on the edges of our cities and towns. But to observe this as evidence of social policy mistakes is quite a different thing to advancing it in exculpation of criminal and murderous behaviour.

  There is evidence that, since the brief stardom of Martin Cahill, self-justification on the basis of ‘social deprivation’ is becoming increasingly fashionable among criminals when they are apprehended. Even more worrying is the tendency for such notions to be trotted out by judges sitting in cases where these issues are highly irrelevant. One eminent judge, sentencing in a manslaughter case, made much of his negative impressions on a visit to the area where the convicted individual had grown up, making it clear that he was handing down a reduced sentence on this account. Martin Cahill, had he still been around, would have approved. He had been shot dead one August 1994 afternoon in the street, allegedly by the IRA in one of its final pre-ceasefire clean-up operations.

  32 Sean Doherty

  When Sean Doherty came to prominence in Irish politics in the early 1980s, Ireland had been in the throes of a culture war for more than a decade. Though centred on the personality of Charles Haughey, this war drew its energy from the struggle to change Ireland from what it had been to what it ‘should’ be. It was bound up with the ‘national question’, but more fundamentally with the tension between practitioners of the old-style, pejoratively termed ‘clientelist’ model of politics, that is Haughey and Doherty, and a modernizing tendency which demanded that we abandon the parish-pump and embrace the new, technocratic model which required politicians to be legislators first and public representatives as an afterthought. At issue was the very nature of Ireland and the drafting of a commonly agreed version of the kind of society we should become.

  The key moral questions related not so much to right and wrong, as to ‘Which side are you on?’ All this tension and drama was perhaps inevitable in a society which had lately moved from domination and dependency to its first baby steps of political and economic independence. The struggle that occurred in Sean Doherty’s time was really between, on the one hand, those who through fate and circumstances had garnered the resources to escape the implications of the past and, on the other, those who had been left behind to make their own way. The former demanded a new, shiny, exemplary modernity, while the latter perceived themselves as still enwrapped in a history they could not so easily brush aside.

  The main reason it has become difficult to argue with those who continued to pour scorn on Doherty and Haughey for both outlook and deed was not because the moral perspective of such detractors was irrefutable. It was also because they had won the war and so succeeded in imposing their version of events and morality on the public realm and consciousness.

  The most notorious of Doherty’s actions was his ordering, as Minister for Justice, of garda taps on the phones of two political journalists at the height of the leadership struggles that convulsed Fianna Fáil in government in the early 1980s. Doherty, like other ministers at the time, was concerned about leaks from the cabinet table, suspecting Haughey’s main longtime rival, George Colley. In tapping the phones of two journalists, however, he stepped outside the party political arena and embroiled senior garda officers in what was undoubtedly an illegal, as well as wholly bizarre, burst of activity. Sean Doherty’s claim – that he ordered the tapping of the telephones of Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy on the basis that cabinet confidentiality was being breached, and he wanted to discover who was breaching it – is easily dismissed as self-serving in the culture created for, and by, the winners. And it is literally impossible to argue with this verdict because Doherty ended up on the losing side.

  A lot of the indignation about Doherty, and the demonization arising from it, was simply a conflation of events into a particular set of meanings, which were, above all, convenient. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the tapping of the phones of two senior political journalists was legally correct or otherwise justifiable, but for some people, including Sean Doherty, it was possible to justify from where they sat.

  To even try to explain Doherty’s actions or personality in the language and logic of the re-created culture is inevitably to attract accusations of defending the indefensible. But the justifications he offered for his actions were arguably valid when you see things from where he, and his followers and supporters, saw them.

  Thus, the series of ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’ events that became known as GUBU and defined the early 1980s era of Haughey’s leadership, came down to questions of perspective, which in turn depended on which side you were on. When Haughey and Doherty were on the same side, they were equally derided by the modernizing tendency, which repudiated as embarrassments residual elements of what they regarded as an outmoded Ireland. Haughey came to embody all of their prejudices, not because he was of the culture that was so despised (he was but had left it far behind) but because, in seeking to rebuild his own political reputation after the Arms Trial, he had appealed successfully to this constituency and had secured his rehabilitated persona on a rhetorical genuflection in its direction.

  In the 1980s, however, a strange thing happened. Haughey had been banished after GUBU and spent four years in opposition. Only the dire state of the economy and the abject failure of the Fine Gael/Labour coalition to deal with the emergency gave him a second chance. The reluctant consensus among media commentators and economists was that Haughey might make a better fist of running the economy, and GUBU was, as far as it concerned Haughey at least, airbrushed out of the picture.

  It would be more accurate, however, to say that the ghosts of GUBU had been temporarily exorcized from the persona of Charles Haughey and transferred to the enigmatic persona of Sean Doherty. It has been interesting to observe that whatever negativities Haughey and Doherty together represented were in some sense perceived to be more acute in Doherty than they had ever been in Haughey. But there is also the fascinating possibility that the anger of those who opposed Haughey was never really personal against him – what they mainly hated was that he had ‘chosen’ the ‘ordinary’ people of Ireland over them. Later, when division opened up between Doherty and Haughey, some of Haughey’s most celebrated media detractors bizarrely rushed to defend him, at least to the extent of kicking more determinedly his former friend.

  And Haughey even briefly tried to exploit this tendency by playing to the fact that the prejudices of his own enemies were even more strongly pitted against Doherty than against himself. There was a remarkable moment in the press conference Haughey held in January 1992 to respond to the allegations of Sean Doherty that he, Doherty, had told Haughey about the tapping of the two journalists’ phones and had given him transcripts of the taps. Asked by one journalist if he thought Doherty’s initiative was related to the leadership bid of Albert Reynolds ‘and the so-called Western alliance’, Haughey threw back his head, laughed and corrected him: ‘You mean the country and western alliance!’ For a moment, the hostility of the press conference dissipated and Haughey had most of the journalists again laughing and eating out of his hand. This pandering to the smug prejudices of supposed sophisticates whose self-confidence went no further than a snobbish sense of superiority based on living in a street rather than a field was the moment when Charles Haughey betrayed the very people he had courted to become Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach.

  There are some senses in which Sean Doherty was to blame for much of what happened to him. He was a scapegoat, but never quite a victim. He had a perverse streak in his character which caused him to play up to the role allotted to him by his enemies. He was so full of mischief and such a convincing actor that there were times when he seemed to be relishing the notion of himself as this crazed lynch-lawman, standing in judgement on his adversaries by virtue of his office. Part of the trouble was that the media presentation of Doherty as some kind of tribal backwoodsman led his enormous int
elligence to be totally underestimated, and this meant that nobody quite gave him credit for the irony he exuded much of the time

  How seriously you regarded any of it depended on where you stood, which side of the tracks you came from. The telephone tapping incident was either an outrageous abuse of office for party political purposes or an entirely justifiable attempt to protect the Taoiseach of the day from the subversive energies of his internal enemies. Perhaps, in the end, Doherty’s real mistake was in tapping the phones of Arnold and Kennedy, when he should have been tapping George Colley’s.