Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy

by T. Ryle Dwyer

  ALBERT’S GRAB

  After the O’Malley heave collapsed in February 1982, Charlie was given a breathing space of some seven months before the McCreevy challenge, but this time he was not even given two weeks. By the following Wednesday he was back in the middle of a political storm.

  The previous week he had indignantly refuted an intimation by Dick Spring that Bernie Cahill had not been asked to step aside from Greencore because he had too much on Charlie. Dick contended that it was Charlie who suggested to Cahill that NCB and his friend Pat O’Connor should be appointed as advisers to Greencore on its privatisation.

  ‘I reject that with contempt,’ Charlie replied. ‘That is totally untrue and it does the deputy no credit to make those sort of unfounded allegations. I suggest to him on that score that he too await the outcome of the present investigation when he will find –’

  ‘The Taoiseach had no meeting?’ Dick interjected.

  ‘I had no meetings. I suggest to him on that score that he too await the outcome of the present investigations when he will find that he will owe me an apology.’ At the end of a further exchange, Charlie reaffirmed that ‘no such meeting took place’.

  It quickly became apparent, however, that he had met Cahill and there was evidence to prove that on 26 May 1990 Cahill had flown by helicopter from his home in West Cork to Kinsealy. What was more the Irish Sugar Company had paid for the trip. Cahill admitted this at an extraordinary general meeting of Greencore shareholders on Wednesday, 30 October. At this meeting, he said, he showed Charlie the list of companies from which a stockbroker would be chosen to advise on Greencore’s privatisation, but denied ‘any undue pressure’ had been put on him to support the appointment of NCB. It was already on the list. Although pressed a number of times, he persistently side-stepped questions about whether Charlie had actually recommended NCB.

  Many people thought that Cahill’s confirmation was proof that the Taoiseach had lied to the Dáil, but Charlie denied this. ‘I did not say, as is now being suggested, that I had no meetings with Mr Bernard Cahill,’ he explained. ‘What I said was that no meeting of the kind suggested by Deputy Spring took place.’

  In the context of his initial remarks, however, what Charlie had initially denied was the suggestion that he had recommended the appointment of NCB to Cahill. If he had, so what? Charlie was Taoiseach and there was nothing wrong with recommending the best people for any position. Politicians of all parties regularly make representations on behalf of people or companies. So long as no undue pressure was applied, there was absolutely nothing wrong with making recommendations, and Cahill had confirmed there was no undue pressure in this instance. But Haughey’s behaviour reeked of gross impropriety against the backdrop of essentially accepting a so-called interest free loan worth £75,546 from Dermot Desmond of NCB to refurbish his yacht. Charlie was seriously compromised by his acceptance of this loan.

  As with the Carysfort controversy, Charlie had walked into trouble by denying involvement with Cahill. Whether he had actually lied may be open to question, but there was no doubt that he had deliberately tried to mislead the Dáil.

  In the past this kind of dispute in the Dáil would have been quickly forgotten, but now there were television cameras in the chamber. The earlier part of his initial remarks, where he denied meeting Cahill, had been shown that night on television and were now repeated. Taken by themselves, these seemed conclusive that Charlie was saying that he had not met Cahill, but he did indeed subsequently qualify his initial denial by stipulating that there had been ‘no such meeting’.

  Deputies know that the use of a word like ‘such’ is pregnant with significance. But he should have remembered that he was going into homes all over the country through the medium of television. His subtle nuance had not been included in the edited highlights. Whether or not deputies had actually been fooled, there is no doubt that the viewing public was deceived, especially by the edited highlights. As a result there was further speculation about a heave within Fianna Fáil. It was ironic that such a fuss should have been kicked up over this affair. Charlie had been misleading the whole country between 1983 and 1987 with his criticism of health cuts, the Hillsborough Agreement and the Single European Act, and most of the party had gladly gone along with him.

  Now, however, Charlie McCreevy challenged Haughey to ask for a vote of confidence in his leadership at the next parliamentary party meeting, but the challenge was brushed aside as the Taoiseach took the offensive by suggesting that Spring was deliberately deflecting attention from the Greencore scandal by his attacks on the government.

  P. J. Mara then pulled a little stunt on Charlie’s behalf. He set the press up by suggesting that Spring had been associated with the property developer Pat Doherty, who claimed to be the principal owner of Hoddle Investments, the company which ultimately sold the controversial building to Telecom Éireann. ‘If we are going into guilt by association,’ P. J. told reporters, ‘one of the things that will emerge in the Dáil will be the association between Mr Pat Doherty and Mr Dick Spring.’ He was very careful with what he had to say. In order that there would be no confusion, he actually read the single sentence from a piece of paper.

  The press swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker. The whole thing made front page headlines suggesting that Charlie believed he had the dirt on Dick, who was worried enough to go scurrying through his diaries.

  The ruse worked. The press turned the spotlight on Spring, though there was nothing to the whole thing. Doherty announced that Dick had once been introduced to him at a function in the Irish embassy in London, but he doubted that the Kerryman even remembered the introduction.

  Charlie was making no apologies. He asked how many questions the opposition would have tabled, if somebody had told the press that the Taoiseach had once met Pat Doherty. Nobody needed to answer that!

  The media were outraged. They had been made to look stupid. Charlie was accused of misleading the people and Mara was denounced for ‘acting as a professional character assassin’.

  Next day, Seán Power – one of the ‘gang of four’ backbench dissidents who had criticised Charlie back in September – proposed a formal motion calling for Charlie’s removal as leader at the next meeting of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party. Reynolds announced his support of the motion next day The sense of drama was heightened as Reynolds was about to be interviewed on RTÉ television’s evening news. Gerard Collins seemed near to tears during an interview in the Dáil studio. He accused Albert of ‘frightful political immaturity’ and made an emotional appeal to him not to go through with the challenge. ‘You will wreck our party right down the centre and burst up the government,’ Collins said.

  This had been the first real political crisis since the introduction of television cameras in the Dáil. The highlights in recent days had been depicting a most unruly setting with politicians trying to score cheap points off each other. On top of all this came the tear-jerking appeal by Collins. The whole thing was beginning to look like a bad political play in which ham actors were turning a tragedy into a farce.

  ‘For some time now there has been considerable political instability, which has led to an erosion of confidence in our democratic institutions,’ Reynolds declared. ‘This uncertainty must not be allowed to continue.’ He added that the country needed ‘strong and decisive leadership’, with the result that he would be supporting the motion.

  As Article 28 of the country’s constitution enshrines the concept of collective cabinet responsibility, Albert should have resigned from the government. When he did not, Charlie was obliged to ask for his resignation, but Reynolds refused. The Taoiseach therefore asked the president to remove him.

  Albert was apparently hoping his dismissal would provoke the kind of sympathy that Lenihan received a year earlier. Pádraig Flynn followed the same path in forcing Charlie to have the president dismiss him after coming out in support of Power’s motion, but eleven other ministers came out strongly for Charlie, as did Br
ian Lenihan.

  On Friday, the eve of the parliamentary party meeting, Charlie gave an extended lunchtime interview on RTÉ radio. He denounced the whole thing as a ‘power grab’.

  ‘When Albert talks about political stability and wishing to avoid political instability that seems to be very much like a bookie complaining about gambling,’ he said. ‘This is just a new type of campaign directed, I believe, quite simply, not so much at getting rid of me, as a campaign to install Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach.’

  It was ironic that Charlie’s opponents should be turning to Albert. After all he was one of ‘the gang of five’ who claimed credit for pushing Jack Lynch and organising Charlie’s rise to power in 1979. Indeed it would seem that he was more than just one of the gang, seeing that he was only one of the five who was immediately appointed to the cabinet.

  Reynolds appeared to be moving with a precipitate haste by being unwilling to await the results of the various investigations. His supporters argued that it was necessary to get Charlie out before there were any more embarrassing disclosures. Everyone expected political sparks from the Beef tribunal, but Reynolds was liable to be dragged into that himself in a way that would raise questions about his much vaunted fiscal prowess. This may well have had something to do with his impatience. It was a case of now or never.

  Financial mistakes had undoubtedly been made by the Haughey government, but the biggest mistake of all was probably the re-introduction of export insurance on beef exports to Iraq after these had been suspended by the FitzGerald government. This monumental blunder could cost the state well over £100 million and Albert was the individual minister responsible for its re-introduction. When the money involved in all the other scandals was added together, it amounted to only a fraction of the state’s potential exposure under the Export Credit scheme.

  The media seemed to be touting Reynolds on his own terms without even questioning his overall record, which was distinguished more for its style than its substance. He had avoided taking a stand on a whole range of issues – on contraception, education, divorce, women’s affairs, or even Northern Ireland. He had nothing to say in the debates on some of the most momentous issues of the past decade – the Pro-Life Amendment, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Divorce Referendum, and the Single European Act. Most of his political contributions had been confined to economic and financial matters.

  By the eve of the parliamentary party meeting on 9 November Charlie was confident enough to have his own people put forward an amendment calling for a vote of confidence in his leadership, which was something he had pointedly refused to do when challenged by McCreevy earlier in the week. The media, which had been predicting his demise suddenly began to hedge. Having got it wrong so often in the past, the political pundits did not actually write off him this time. They said he might survive in an open vote, but he would be defeated in an secret ballot.

  The first part of the parliamentary party meeting was taken up with a procedural debate on whether the vote on the motion should be secret or open. Haughey’s opponents contended that it should be secret, as he had been elected by secret ballot. He had also had his position confirmed by secret vote during the last heave in February 1983.

  Charlie argued that he was in opposition the last time. When he had been in government at the time of the McCreevy motion, it had been by open vote, which Reynolds and Flynn had supported.

  The public was bombarded with cliches about democracy and the secret ballot. But surely it was not in the interest of democracy to facilitate gutless politicians who lacked the integrity to stand up for their own beliefs. A secret vote on the leadership issue would have been patently undemocratic in this instance. While it is vital that people should have a secret vote in choosing their representatives, it is equally important that the representatives should then vote openly so the people can assess how they are being represented. This is why all votes in the Dáil are taken openly.

  After more than three hours of debate, the party voted openly by 44 to 33 for a roll call vote on the actual motion. Thereafter the eventual outcome was a virtual foregone conclusion.

  When the meeting reconvened after a short break Reynolds was among the first to speak. He complained that ‘disinformation’ had been circulated about him. There was an unfounded story, for instance, that Larry Goodman had loaned him £150,000 to keep one of his business interests afloat. In addition, he said that ‘a very prominent businessman’ from Dublin had been investigating his business dealings going back to the late 1950s. His home in Longford had been under surveillance by people in a white Hiace van, and somebody had been acting suspiciously near his Dublin apartment.

  Jim Tunney, the chairman of the parliamentary party, proposed a committee be set up to investigate the charges. This was agreed. Reynolds, John Wilson and Tunney being selected.

  The atmosphere was electric as Albert went on to accuse Charlie of instigating the campaign of disinformation through the government information service, because of the rumours that Reynolds was preparing to challenge for the leadership. He denied that he was making a grab for power. Indeed, having lost the procedural vote, he clearly recognised that he was now involved in a lost cause. He said that he was throwing away power because of his principles. There was a deathly silence as he wound up. ‘It is enough for evil to prosper that good men do nothing,’ he concluded.

  The discussion on the actual motion dragged on for a further ten hours, well into the early Sunday morning. Much of the initial tension dissipated as critics were allowed the opportunity to let off steam.

  Several people were critical of Haughey’s arrogance. Senator Don Lydon complained that he had been summoned to the leader’s office and bawled out for making a public speech on Northern Ireland without permission. Lydon said he was then contemptuously dismissed from the Taoiseach’s office, but in his stunned state he could not find the door in the midst of all the new wood panelling.

  After a while Haughey looked up at the bemused senator still in his office.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t find the door, Taoiseach,’ Lydon replied.

  ‘Then why don’t you jump out the fucking window?’ Haughey rejoined.

  If Lydon had expected the meeting to be outraged at the Taoiseach’s conduct, he must have been sorely disappointed, because the meeting erupted with laughter.

  Pádraig Flynn waited until after midnight to speak. He reminded the gathering that it was now a quarter of a century to the day since Charlie’s father-in-law, Seán Lemass, stepped down as Taoiseach. He had been party leader for seven years. Charlie had been for almost twelve years, but he still had no intention of accepting the invitation to quit.

  Before the actual vote Charlie called on his supporters to ensure that there would be no triumphalism. He clearly did not want a repetition of the disgraceful scenes outside the Dáil in the aftermath of the McCreevy motion in October 1982.

  As expected the vote on the amendment expressing confidence in Charlie’s leadership was easily carried by 55 votes to 22. There was no triumphalism on the part of Charlie’s supporters, but there was a disingenuous display by his ousted opponents congratulating themselves for supposedly standing on principle. ‘I made the ultimate sacrifice to be able to be free to go into the parliamentary party and say what I wanted to say and to vote no confidence in Mr Haughey,’ Reynolds declared on returning to his constituency. ‘Everybody can take their own message out of that.’

  If principle had been the motivating factor, however, surely he would have gone ahead with his challenge a fortnight earlier. His timing and tactics suggested that his move had more to do with ambition and poor political judgment. There was not even that modicum of self-sacrifice which should have required him to resign from the cabinet rather than force the Taoiseach to dismiss him in order to preserve the principle of ‘collective responsibility’ required by the constitution.

  MCDAID AFFAIR

  Charlie used the occasion of the dis
missal of the two cabinet ministers to make his most extensive cabinet reshuffle of the four different governments which he had set up. Among the eight changes he announced the introduction of two new ministers – Noel Davern as Minister for Education and James McDaid as Minister for Defence. The latter’s nomination provoked a storm and landed Charlie in an unprecedented controversy. Some 20 months earlier McDaid had been photographed coming out of the Four Courts with James Pius Clarke, a convicted member of the Provisional IRA. The supreme court had just ruled against a request for Clarke’s extradition to Northern Ireland.

  McDaid had taken a personal interest in the case because he knew that Clarke had not been involved in an attempted murder for which he had been convicted in Northern Ireland. They had both been members of the same Gaelic football club and on the night of the crime, Clarke and McDaid had both been at a stag party in Letterkenny. Under the circumstances he felt he had a moral duty to defend Clarke, but he obviously got caught up in the euphoria of the moment after the supreme court found in Clarke’s favour. One of the photographs taken outside the Four Courts showed McDaid smiling broadly with his hand on Clarke’s shoulder.

  Neither John Bruton nor Dick Spring made any reference to the press photographs in their addresses. It was Proinsias de Rossa, the leader of the Workers’ Party, who first raised the issue of McDaid’s presence outside the court. This was like throwing a bone to Fine Gael wolves. Jim O’Keeffe and Michael Noonan launched into bitter attacks. The latter produced newspaper clippings of the Clarke case with a photograph of McDaid in the background. Looking directly at Des O’Malley he intimated that O’Malley should have followed George Colley’s example by insisting on a veto over the appointments of Ministers for Justice and Defence before agreeing to serve in Charlie’s government.

  O’Malley, who had raised no objection to McDaid’s appointment in advance, had not been aware of the incident outside the Four Courts. He withdrew from the chamber to read up on the Clarke case.