‘I hear from people who had seen the script that it was a very loveless relationship, punctuated only by expensive dinners or trips on yachts,’ she explained. ‘It wasn’t like that. I wanted to show that it really was love.’
Although he was ‘a consummate politician, he was not consumed by politics,’ according to Terry Keane, a journalist who began a torrid affair with him. ‘I viewed Charlie as a bit of a wide boy with a terrible reputation as a womaniser,’ she wrote. ‘There was a whole series of Charlie stories, some true, some false and some frankly lurid.’ She began her affair with him on 17 January 1972 at Club Elizabeth, a nightclub in Leeson Street that was frequented by politicians. At the time, she was in her early thirties, the fashion editor of the Sunday Press and temporarily separated from her lawyer husband.
She was in company with Haughey, whom she teased and treated rather contemptuously. ‘I don’t have to put up with this,’ he finally snapped in exasperation. ‘I’m going home.’
‘Don’t go,’ Terry responded. ‘I’ll dance with you instead.’
‘There was some sort of empathy,’ she later explained. ‘I felt that I would also be like that if I wasn’t the centre of attention. I suddenly thought: “He’s attractive”. He oozed sex appeal and had the most beautiful mouth of anybody I ’d ever seen.’
After that night, he invited her to London, where they stayed in an apartment owned by his friend John Byrne, the property developer. That was the first of a number of foreign trips. During one of their early trips to London, he introduced her to ‘Cristal’ champagne. As the waiter was returning with a bottle of the expensive wine, a customer checked the vintage, much to the indignation of Haughey.
’Who’s that fucker and what is he doing with my champagne?’ he snapped.
‘I couldn’t stop laughing: the facade of sophistication demolished at a stroke,’ she noted. ‘But that’s Charlie’. That was the side of him that the people with old money sneered at and denigrated him as nouveau riche.
At the time Haughey was at low point in his political career, being shunned by politicians he had previously considered friends. He was venomous about the arms crisis, feeling that he had been victimised, and much of that venom was reserved for Lynch. There was no doubt he was implicated but the Taoiseach had obviously turned a blind eye and then made him the scapegoat, dismissing him from the cabinet while he was still in hospital after his riding accident. ‘He didn’t even have the decency to wait until I was back on my feet’, Haughey would often complain.
The short fellow still had a firm conviction that he would be Taoiseach one day, and he talked to Terry for hours about how he was going to make his way back, this time to the very top. She found him exciting and great fun to be with.
‘We were waltzing off to London and Paris all the time for trysts,’ she wrote. France was Haughey’s favourite. Napoleon, the little emperor who up-ended all of Europe, was ‘his hero and inspiration,’ according to her. Haughey loved French things, wines, restaurants, clothes, architecture and history. In the coming years, they would stay in various places in France and Germany without worry, but Haughey was leery of London, because of the danger of being outed by the tabloid press. He and Terry were not discreet about their affair, especially in Dublin, where it was an open secret among journalists. The two of them were married to other people. She got back together with her husband for some time, but throughout it all she and Haughey frequently met at different Dublin hotels, such as the Russell, Hibernian and Sachs, where they often dined or drank openly. There were numerous stories of tiffs between them; most were probably apocryphal. If she threw as many glasses of champagne in his face as rumoured, she would have drenched half of Dublin, not to mention all the dinners she supposedly dumped in his lap. She wrote about one night when she ordered him out of her car in Merrion Street after he had too much to drink. He telephoned her next day.
‘So you got home,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘I met some citizens who carried me on their shoulders and were thrilled for the opportunity.’ This was Charlie’s natural arrogance. Within a month of the start of the affair, he was already on the road to political recovery.
He was actually amused when Private Eyementioned the affair. He called Frank Dunlop to get a copy of the magazine. And he doubled up with laughter when he began reading it. ‘Jasus, Frank, she’ll go fuckin’ bananas when she reads this’. He pointed to a reference to ‘the aging Terry Keane’.
Although she wafted on about Haughey’s achievements, the audience at the Late Late Show did not seem inclined to believe that he ever did anything worthwhile. ‘They have forgotten all the good things he has done,’ she said. ‘When Ireland was a begging bowl, Charlie went out and eyeballed people in Europe and the world.’
She felt he was being treated unfairly and resented it when somebody in the audience suggested that Haughey had done as much damage to politics as the paedophile priest, Fr Brendan Smyth, had done to the Catholic Church in Ireland. ‘Brendan Smyth buggered little boys,’ Keane said. ‘Charlie has never done that. Charlie took money from people who were very willing to give it to him so that he would go out and not have to worry about his own finances, that he could go and run the country, which he did brilliantly and brought us the Celtic Tiger and the prosperity we have today,’ she argued. She was crediting him with too much, but then others were not giving him any credit at all.
Over the years, so many rumours about Haughey turned out to be untrue that there were still some who doubted Terry Keane’s story. For instance, there was the totally unfounded story that Haughey had an affair with Emer O’Kelly of RTÉ. She first heard the story in 1980, but it was not until the wake of the Keane exposé that she found an opportunity to deny the story. There was also another false story that did the rounds for decades about how Eamonn Andrews had supposedly given Haughey a right hammering one night in the 1960s. One version of the story was that he had made a pass at Eamonn’s wife, Gráinne. This supposedly happened at different places – at Haughey’s home, at the Gresham Hotel, or at Jury’s Hotel, depending on who was telling the story.
Andrews and his wife did attend a party at Haughey’s home before he moved to Kinsealy. ‘Charlie received us personally and graciously, as was his wont,’ Andrews recalled. ‘And he did make an innocent pass at Gráinne, who was looking particularly fetching. Both she and I would have been somewhat peeved had he not. But it was hardly the sort of pass to warrant a punch on the nose.’
The story persisted until Andrews finally became exasperated when it was repeated in the News of the World. He sued for libel and secured ‘a few thousand pounds and an apology in open court’. On returning to Dublin, Andrews invited Haughey to his house for a champagne celebration.
‘I’ll come,’ Haughey said, ‘provided it’s Dom Perignon!’
It was, and Haughey came. Andrews had purchased some sixty copies of the offending newspaper and he made a carpet of those all the way in from the doorway. The rumour persisted, but at least it had financed a good party.
Unfounded rumours about Haughey’s famous fall from the horse in 1970 also persisted. Over a quarter of a century later twisted versions of that story were still being told. It was actually reported that Haughey was beaten close to death by the father and brother of a young woman after they supposedly caught him in bed with her, upstairs in the Grasshopper Inn in Clonee, Co. Meath. But there was no truth to the story.
Haughey’s behaviour tended to encourage some of the rumours. In 1991 when he officiated at the start of the Dingle Regatta, he was still Taoiseach. He arrived in Dingle on the Celtic Mist, clearly in a happy mood. It had just been raining and there was a crew of young women in one race. The Taoiseach called out to them, ‘Are ye’r knickers wet?’
He then gave an interview to a young woman reporter. ‘I suppose,’ he said at the end of the interview, ‘a ride would be out of the question!’
There was a young male photographer with her at the time,
so this was obviously not a proposition. It was Haughey’s way of saying to the young people that he was still ‘with it’. Some people would say, no doubt, that his behaviour was confirmation of the old Irish adage, ‘the older the goat, the giddier!’
‘He is not an oil painting – never was,’ Joanne McElgunn wrote in the Sunday Independent. ‘Women were metal and he was a powerful magnet.’ He tended to flirt shamelessly, and they loved it.
‘Once C. J. patted my bottom,’ McElgunn continued. ‘The company and the consumption of two gins and tonic, might just have saved him from the sharp edge of my tongue. In retrospect, I was strangely flattered. I know many women with whom he had only shaken hands.’
Terry Keane was certainly proud of her love affair with Haughey – the 27 years of which she went on to detail in a series of articles in the Sunday Times. Those included a photograph of them kissing while she was stretched out on the floor. That photograph dispelled any lingering doubts about the truth of the affair. But she was taken aback by the intensity of the public reaction to her articles.
‘I certainly was surprised by the fallout after the first extract from them,’ she said. ‘Perhaps naively I didn’t expect such a shock wave of reaction.’
For a while, she tried to defend him, especially in relation to money. All Ben Dunne got for the million pounds plus that he gave to Charlie Haughey was an invitation to a few parties at Abbeville and some family weddings, she told Marian Finucane in an RTÉ interview. ‘If anybody is foolish enough to give a million pounds to be included in someone’s social circle, that’s up to them.’
Anybody who thinks that they could buy favours from Haughey does not know the man. ‘They don’t understand Charlie’s character,’ she said. ‘Charlie would think the million pounds was his by right’. As was mentioned earlier, she added that ‘it would be like the three wise men putting gold, frankincense and myrrh in front of the Saviour and that he would have no obligation because of a gift.’ Ben Dunne continued to assert that he never got nor sought any favours. The Moriarty tribunal uncovered further cheques totalling £180,000 that Dunne gave to Haughey in November 1992. This was after Haughey had lost his political clout. In fact, he had actually quit politics, so those cheques would tend to support Dunne’s contention that he was not looking for political favours. Ben even offered later still to provide the further million that Haughey would need to cover his tax liabilities if he came clean about the money Dunne had given him.
Between 1987 and 1997, when the story of the Dunne money first broke, Haughey spent a lot more money than he earned. Just where he got all the money is still not clear. The Ansbacher accounts controlled by Des Traynor, which the McCracken tribunal suspected might contain up to £40 million, were actually much more extensive. In all, there were about a hundred different Irish residents involved in those accounts and the total money ran into the hundreds of millions of pounds. Despite reckless remarks by some politicians suggesting that all those people involved were criminal tax evaders, a number of those accounts were perfectly legal and being used for legitimate business reasons.
In the midst of the further Ansbacher disclosures in September 1999, Terry Keane was back in the news when she auctioned off some paintings of Haughey and other memorabilia of their affair. News of the items to be auctioned first broke as the lead story on the front page of The Examiner on what was – unknown to the editorial staff – the eve of the Haughey’s forty-eighth wedding anniversary. The unseemly timing of the hurtful gesture seemed like a confirmation of the lines of William Congreve:
Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d
Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.
THE HUMILIATION
The Moriarty tribunal uncovered other cheques that Ben Dunne diverted to Haughey, bringing the total of his contributions to £1.9m, but there was still no suggestion that Dunne had obtained any improper favour from Haughey, or the government.
A whole plethora of issues about his financial affairs were raised by the Moriarty tribunal, particularly in relation to Charlie’s handling of money contributed to Fianna Fáil and his use of the party leader’s fund, especially in relation to the money contributed towards Brian Lenihan lifesaving operation. Questions were also raised about propriety of using the leader’s fund to pay for either Charlie’s household bills, or his Charvet shirts, or using £26,000 to help Deputy John Ellis stave off bankruptcy, because if he was declared bankrupt, he would have to vacate his Dáil seat and the government would lose its majority. The National Irish Bank was even persuaded to write off a debt of £263,540 owed by Ellis about the same time.
There can be no real doubt that Haughey misappropriated the £100,000 given to Fianna Fáil by Irish Permanent Building Society in 1986, or that there was a vast surplus in the money contributed for Lenihan’s liver transplant, or that a substantial amount of the £160,000 handed over by Mark Kavanagh and Michael Smurfit for Fianna Fáil in 1989 was allegedly misappropriated.
Rather than answered the various questions, however, Haughey appeared to prevaricate and even tried to frustrate the investigation. He challenged the right of Moriarty tribunal to investigate his bank accounts and those of wife, daughter, and two sisters on constitutional grounds. In April 1998 the high court held that the failure to give members of his family advance notice of the discovery orders executed on their accounts was unfair, but not sufficient to void the proceedings of the tribunal. On the other hand, the court ruled that Haughey’s own complaints against the tribunal itself were ‘bordering on the absurd’. The judge, Hugh Geoghegan concluded that ‘some invasion of Mr Haughey’s constitutional rights, such as his right of privacy et cetera, is justified having regard to the legitimate public concern,’ because of valid questions were raised by his acceptance of gifts.
‘Ethical behaviour in public office surely incorporates more than simply refusing to take bribes,’ the judge contended. An office-holder was obliged to behave in a way that did not give rise to a public apprehension or inference of impropriety. In Geoghegan’s judgment, there was already evidence that Charlie’s conduct had given rise to such apprehension by accepting the money from Ben Dunne. The judge concurred with the conclusion of his colleague Brian McCracken that ‘Haughey’s whole life style’ would appear to have been ‘dependent upon such gifts.’
Geoghegan ruled that Haughey had to pay half the cost of the high court hearing. The former Taoiseach appealed this to the supreme court but lost in 1999. As a result, he was saddled not only with half the high court costs, but also the whole cost of the supreme court hearing. It was estimated that those costs could run as high as £500,000. This was only part of his growing financial problems. The revenue commissioners had lodged an appeal in the circuit court against the verdict of the appeals commissioner in dismissing the £2 million tax assessment against Haughey, but this was eventually settled out of court in April 2000 when Charlie agreed to pay £1,009,435 in tax arrears and interest on the money given by Dunne. Of course, this was only an interim settlement as the Moriarty tribunal had uncovered other monies given or appropriated by Haughey. He had little trouble paying the money, because of the explosion in property prices around Dublin. He was offered £5m for just 10 acres of Kinsealy. In August 2003 he sold the remainder of the property to Manor Park home builders, controlled by Joe Moran for around a reported 45 million euro. He had, in fact, become a fabulously wealthy man, but now in his twilight years, he was being hounded by his past.
The director of public prosecutions directed that Charlie should be charged with obstructing the McCracken tribunal. If convicted, he could have been fined £10,000 and sentenced to two years in jail. When he was due to make his first appearance in court on 14 October 1999, members of the Socialist Worker’s party staged a virtual circus outside the courthouse, parading around with different placards reading:
Jail the Corrupt Politicians
Make Haughey Pay his Tax
Jail the Ansbacher Crooks
Altho
ugh there were rarely more than a couple of dozen protesters, they made an enormous amount of noise with their rhythmic chants backed up with a loud hailer:
Charvet Charlie what’s the score?
One law for the rich, one law for the poor!
Charlie Haughey what’s the crack?
We want the shirt off your back.
Your island, your yacht, your shirt, you’re caught!
Haughey had given the media the slip at the McCracken tribunal by going into Dublin Castle a couple of hours before the proceedings were due to begin. This time the media were not about to be deceived – they had television cameras covering all the entrances to the Four Courts from 7 a.m., even though the proceedings were not due to begin until 9.30. At about 9.10 Conor Haughey, Charlie’s eldest son arrived, and told the photographers that his father was inside already.
‘How did he get in?’ one asked.
‘He just got up before you.’
As the photographers followed him into the yard of the Four Courts a blue Mercedes drove up quickly behind them, a garda opened the door of court, and Haughey dashed in before the photographers could get any shots. They were disgusted as they were now going to be the butt of complaints from colleagues covering the other entrances.
‘This could not happen in England,’ a disappointed TV3 cameraman complained. ‘They would never open the court early to suit somebody charged with a criminal offence.’
It was widely rumoured that Charlie would plead guilty as the evidence against him was overwhelming, but that was never his way. His trial was set from March 2000, but a series of events conspired to postpone it. When Jack Lynch died in October 1999, Haughey attended the funeral in Cork. It was the last great Irish political funeral of the twentieth century. In symbolic terms it differs enormously from the first great political funeral of the century, that of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa on 1 August 1915. That turned into a clarion call to arms when Patrick Pearse delivered the funeral oration. ‘The fools, the fools, the fools,’ he said, ‘they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’ Pearse used that occasion as an opportunity to establish himself as a spokesman for militant Irish Nationalism, and he then used that platform to lead the Easter Rebellion less than a year later. Lynch, on the other hand, was celebrated as the man who blocked another call to arms in Northern Ireland in 1970. ‘For that alone Jack Lynch deserves his place in history’, Des O’Malley declared in his funeral oration.
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