With Charlie refusing to talk, NFA leaders decided to exert public pressure with marches and a massive protest rally. On 7 October 1966 Deasy and other members of the NFA set out from Bantry to walk the 210 miles to Dublin, where it was planned to hold a protest rally outside Leinster House. In the following days other marchers set out from different centres and gathered support on the way. By the time the various marchers reached Merrion Square on 19 October, there were several thousand protesters. After a rally Deasy and eight other leaders went over to Department of Agriculture to talk to Charlie, but he refused to meet them.
The refusal seemed churlish after they had walked such a long way. Charlie had blundered tactically, because the NFA leaders set about dramatising his refusal in a novel way. Deasy announced that they would wait outside the Department of Agriculture for ‘a bloody month’ if necessary until Charlie met them. The nine of them literally camped outside the front door of the Department for the next three weeks.
Charlie was becoming desperate. He travelled to the continent and tried frantically to find a market for Irish cattle. He was actually depicted on the cover of Dublin Opinion magazine as a cowboy driving cattle to the ends of the earth. But the only concession he came back with was a German promise to purchase 2,000 cattle. He promptly announced this to the Dáil, much to the embarrassment of the Germans, who had not had time to clear the matter with their European partners.
In the midst of the controversy with the farmers, Lemass formally announced his decision to retire and the quest for a successor began in earnest. Charlie and George Colley were initially seen as the main contenders.
‘There is great appreciation of the sheer ability of Mr Haughey in the Dáil, in the party, and in the government,’ according to the political correspondent of the Irish Times. ‘The only snag, it is generally agreed, is that his public image is not favourable.’
And that image was not being enhanced by either the RTÉ controversy or his problems with the farmers camped on the steps of his office. When he went to Athlone for a Fianna Fáil meeting on 21 October, his car was attacked by a mob of protesting farmers. Four days later the same thing happened outside a hotel in Dublin.
‘Rat, rat, come out of your sewer, sewer rat’, many of the 200 farmers chanted as they tried to prevent his car entering the hotel grounds. Later they attempted to block the road as he was leaving. Some stood in front of the car and pounded on it.
‘Go on, go on,’ an elegantly dressed woman shouted from the sidelines. ‘I hate him.’
Such scenes really put paid to Charlie’s chances for the leadership. Lemass, who initially stayed in the background, led some correspondents to believe he was supporting Colley, but this may have been just a ploy to help Charlie by discouraging others from entering the fray.
With backing from senior party figures like Frank Aiken and Seán MacEntee, Colley was seen as the candidate of party traditionalists, who were more concerned with the revival of the Gaelic language than with economic matters. On the other hand, Charlie’s support came largely from those interested in a more pragmatic, business-minded approach.
Charlie was the epitome of the men in the mohair suits who were changing the face of Fianna Fáil. He and fellow ministers, like Donagh O’Malley and Brian Lenihan, were urban realists with little time for the pastoral idealism inspiring de Valera’s dream of comely maidens dancing at the cross roads. Instead, Charlie and friends were to be found in the company of self-made men, speculators, builders and architects, the very people it seemed to some who were destroying the pastoral dream with their concrete jungles.
By working hard and also playing hard, Charlie had already become the subject of an elaborate mythology of rumours. His bon-vivant lifestyle with its aristocratic trappings commanded attention, but not always the approval of those he seemed to be imitating. Many of them despised him as nouveau riche. Others, possibly jealous at his successful rise, questioned how in a relatively short time he made money to live in such opulence, especially when most of his career was in public life at a time when politicians were not particularly well paid. He was secretive about his business dealings, and the unanswered questions led to speculation, which was easily exploited by enemies spreading defamatory rumours.
Although the Irish Times described Charlie as ‘far and away the strongest candidate,’ the political correspondent of The Cork Examiner believed that Colley was virtually certain to win a contest, because Haughey was so unpopular at the time.
Some rural deputies like Tom McEllistrim of Kerry and Eugene Gilbride of Sligo called on Jack Lynch, Minister of Finance, to run, but he expressed no interest.
Haughey was rebutted when he approached Neil Blaney for support. ‘No, Charlie,’ Blaney told him, ‘you haven’t got the background.’ Blaney decided to run himself, and Kevin Boland announced on 3 November 1966 that he would be nominating him. This changed everything. Donagh O’Malley, Haughey’s campaign manager, promptly threw his support to Blaney. At that point, the Taoiseach decided to put pressure on Lynch to stand.
Lemass told Lynch ‘that several backbenchers wanted me to run and that the party generally favoured me as his successor,’ Lynch recalled. ‘He pointed out that I owed the party a duty to serve, even as leader. He gave me to understand that the other contenders, to whom he had already spoken, were prepared to withdraw in my favour. I told him I would consider my position and would discuss it with my wife.’
When Lynch agreed to stand, Lemass called in the other candidates and informed them that he would be backing Lynch. He basically wished them to withdraw. Colley told him that he would first have to consult his wife, Mary.
‘What kind of people have I got when one man has to get his wife’s permission to run and the other has to get his wife’s permission to withdraw?’ Lemass asked in exasperation.
Haughey’s chances had already been undermined by the defection of Donagh O’Malley, so when the Taoiseach talked to him, he immediately agreed to withdraw and even offered to nominate Lynch.
‘I’m glad someone can give me a straight answer around here,’ Lemass remarked.
The Taoiseach then called in Blaney and asked about his plans.
‘What are George and Charlie doing?’ Blaney asked.
‘Charlie is no problem,’ Lemass replied.
‘What about George?’
‘George is going out to Mary to allow him to withdraw.’ With that Blaney agreed to stand down.
‘We were foolishly blinded by the necessity for unity in the party,’ Blaney said afterwards. ‘Lynch literally didn’t have a Fianna Fáil background at all.’ Both Blaney and Boland were the sons of founder members of Fianna Fáil and both of their fathers had served in the Dáil. In their sneering arrogance, they essentially questioned Lynch’s party pedigree from the outset. ‘Look,’ Boland said to Blaney, ‘let him on so long as he does what we tell him.’
Haughey and Blaney publicly announced that they would be supporting Lynch. But George Colley – who was one of those with an impeccable party pedigree as the son of a former Fianna Fáil deputy – announced that he would not be withdrawing. There would be a contest, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Lynch won easily and was promptly elected Taoiseach.
His selection was widely welcomed, even in opposition circles, where there was obvious relief that Charlie had not succeeded. James Dillon, the Fine Gael leader, rejoiced openly. Now Charlie would never become Taoiseach, he gloated.
‘Remember,’ Dillon told the Dáil, ‘when he failed to land his fish last Wednesday night, he will never land it. He is finished. He stinks, politically, of course.’
Having backed Lynch in the end, Charlie was rewarded with a prestigious promotion to what was generally seen as the second most powerful post in the government. He was appointed Minister for Finance.
‘LOW STANDARDS IN HIGH PLACES’
Charlie was an innovative Minister for Finance. Each of his budget addresses incorporated popular giveaways, which reduced the opposi
tion to impotent frustration. Richie Ryan of Fine Gael described the various concessions as a ‘payment of conscience money’.
‘You are a reflection on the dignity of this house,’ Charlie snapped. ‘You are only a gutty.’
‘Our people will get the government they voted for,’ James Dillon declared. ‘If it is Animal Farm they want, they should vote for Fianna Fáil, but if it is democracy and decency they want, I suggest they will have to look elsewhere. I think the acceptance of corruption as the norm in public life is shocking.’
‘Is it not another form of corruption to take people’s character away, to spread false rumours about them?’ Charlie asked. Fine Gael was vilifying and slandering him with malicious rumours, he said. ‘That is all you are good for, the lot of you.’
On the night of 20 September 1968 he was seriously injured in a car accident in Co. Wicklow while driving home following an election rally. The circumstances of the crash were never explained publicly, but it was widely believed in political, garda and media circles that Haughey was driving at his own insistence. As Charlie was seriously injured, the opposition did not press the matter on this occasion. Thereafter, however, ministerial drivers were ordered not to allow anyone to drive their cars, even their respective ministers.
Haughey recovered in time to be appointed national director of elections for the general election of June 1969. This time he was the subject of some particularly strong opposition criticism in relation both to his own finances and his fundraising tactics for the party.
Fianna Fáil had been adopting American methods. Charlie had helped to draw up the blueprint for Taca, a support group made up mostly of businessmen who were invited to join at £100 a year. The money was deposited in a bank until election time, and the interest was used to fund lavish dinners at which members of Taca could mix with cabinet ministers.
Taca was ‘a fairly innocent concept,’ according to Charlie. ‘In so far as it had any particular motivation it was to make the party independent of big business and try to spread the level of financial support right across a much wider spectrum of the community.’ Some members had previously been subscribing ‘substantially more’ to the party at election times than the £500 that would accumulate in Taca subscriptions, if the Dáil ran its full five-year term, he contended.
Although Charlie was the politician most associated with Taca in the public mind, the idea had come from somebody else and he had no control over the funds, but he embraced the scheme with enthusiasm and organised the first dinner – a particularly lavish affair attended by the whole cabinet. ‘We were all organised by Haughey and sent to different tables around the room,’ Kevin Boland recalled. ‘The extraordinary thing about my table was that everybody at it was in somehow or other connected with the construction industry.’
Opposition deputies promptly questioned the propriety of such fraternisation between the property developers and members of the government. In particular, there were questions about the selection of property being rented by government departments and agencies as they mushroomed in the midst of the unprecedented economic growth.
Boland insisted that he ‘never did a thing’ within his department for any member of Taca, but he admitted that other ministers might have been ‘susceptible’. A cloud of suspicion was cast over the operations of Taca and it ‘unfortunately provided a basis for political attack which,’ Charlie said, ‘did us a lot of damage at the time’.
Insinuations of corruption were widespread and these had been fuelled in May 1967 when George Colley urged those attending a Fianna Fáil youth conference in Galway not to be ‘dispirited if some people in high places appear to have low standards’. It was widely assumed that Colley was alluding to Charlie in particular, in view of the intensity of their rivalry over the party leadership some months earlier, but Colley rather disingenuously denied this intent.
Haughey was involved with Donagh O’Malley in Reema (Ireland) Ltd., a property company of which O’Malley was the chief executive and Charlie was secretary. Reema bought property around Limerick on the road to Shannon airport. At the time, there were suggestions that he and O’Malley used inside knowledge.
When it came to money matters Charlie was very much a mystery man. Following their marriage the Haugheys initially lived in a semi-detached house in a Raheny housing estate, but in 1957, they moved to Grangemore, a large Victorian mansion on a 45 acre site in Raheny. The builder Matt Gallagher advised Haughey to splash out £13,000 to buy the house and lands in Raheny, with the promise that when the time was right and planning permission had been secured to build houses on the property, he would buy it from him.
In his early years in the Dáil, Charlie projected a high public profile and enjoyed a good press, but he was quiet about his own private life and especially his business dealings. He appeared to amass a considerable fortune at a time when politicians were not a particularly well paid. ‘Now to be a wealthy politician was the sin of the day – and Charlie Haughey was indecently wealthy,’ according to columnist John Healy. ‘If a pub changed hands, Haughey was the secret buyer.’ At one point, he supposedly owned about five on the north and south sides of Dublin.
In 1968, Haughey bought a 127-acre stud farm in Rathoath, Co. Meath for £30,000 without taking out a mortgage. He was a full-time politician, and was no longer earning from the accountancy firm that he had established with Harry Boland. His only visible income was his ministerial salary of £3,500, but the subsequent profit that he made from the sale of his Raheny property some months later would have more than accounted for the purchase price of the farm. Of course, he protested that his business dealings were all legitimate, but his subsequent behaviour cast serious doubts on both his veracity and his financial probity.
In the midst of the general election campaign of 1969 Charlie found himself implicated in further controversy, following a sensational report in the Evening Herald about the sale of his Raheny home, which the newspaper stated was sold to his developer friend, Matt Gallagher, for over £204,000. Charlie used this money to purchase Abbeville and the surrounding 240 acres for £144,997, so even with the purchase of the farm in Co. Meath, he would still have had about £25,000 left over.
‘I object to my private affairs being used in this way,’ Charlie declared. None of the figures could be given with certainty, because he did not give details to any reporter. ‘It is a private matter between myself and the purchaser.’
Planning permission would inevitably be granted for the land, regardless of who owned it, once Dublin began to spread out. Gallagher’s advice was not particularly inspired, but Haughey had the advantage of knowing that he had an eventual buyer when he purchased the land. By hanging on to the property for a decade its value appreciated greatly. Some opponents tried to suggest that there was something immoral about the profit he made on the whole venture. Maybe what they should really have been questioning was the cost of new land at Kinsealy, because that would seemed to have been an equally propitious purchase, seeing that he sold just 17.5 acres of that land to Cement Roadstone for a quarry in December 1973 for £140,000, which was under £5,000 less than he had paid for the house and the 240 acres four years earlier.
Matt Gallagher, who had made a small fortune in wartime Britain, returned to Ireland and began building houses in the public and private sector in the 1950s. There was a great deal of housing deprivation in urban Ireland, especially in Dublin, where several families often lived in the one tenement. Gallagher was one of the builders most involved in Taca, and some of those people were prepared to help Haughey in their own interest.
‘Haughey was financed in order to create the environment which the Anglo-Irish had enjoyed and that we as a people could never aspire to,’ according to Patrick Gallagher, who believed that his father saw the construction of a modern Ireland as a great patriotic enterprise.
The controversy over the sale of Charlie’s property became a national issue, however, when Gerard Sweetman of Fine Gael charged that Charlie mig
ht have acted improperly by not explaining to the Dáil that he stood to benefit personally from legislation that he had introduced himself. It was suggested that he might have been liable for income tax on the sale of his land, if part of the 1965 Finance Act had not been repealed recently.
Suddenly Charlie’s private business dealings became an election issue. ‘Because he has impugned my reputation,’ Charlie explained, ‘I have felt obliged to refer the matter to the revenue commissioners, under whose care and management are placed all taxes and duties imposed by the Finance Act, 1965.’
The revenue commissioners promptly reported ‘that no liability to income tax or surtax would have arisen’ under any provision of the 1965 act. Although this should have killed the issue, one of his opponents in his Dublin North Central constituency – the Labour party candidate, Conor Cruise O’Brien – raked up the issue repeatedly during the campaign in an effort to expose what he described as ‘the Fianna Fáil speculator-orientated oligarchy’. Despite everything, Charlie increased his vote to top the poll, while Cruise O’Brien was a distant second. Although Fianna Fáil’s vote dropped by 2% nationally, the party actually gained two seats through the vagaries of proportional representation. Lynch was re-elected as Taoiseach and Charlie was re-appointed as Minister for Finance.
In his three full years in that portfolio, the budget deficit quadrupled. He intended to tell the Dáil in his next budget address that the deficit would be ‘substantially higher’ in 1970.
‘There was a hushed silence as Mr Haughey rose from his usual seat and walked across to the Taoiseach’s place on the front bench to open his briefcase,’ the Evening Herald reported. ‘The minister, who began his budget speech earlier than usual because of the small number of queries during question time, started off with a review of the economy in general.’
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