Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (12 page)

‘This judgment deprived the committee,' in the estimation of its own members, ‘of any effective powers in the event of a witness refusing to attend, to produce documents or to answer questions.' Opposition members of the committee wanted to ask the Oireachtas for the necessary powers, but this was blocked by Fianna Fáil members, with the result that the hearings spluttered to a rather ineffective conclusion with the presentation of the committee's final report on 13 July 1972.

The report was incomplete; the committee was only able to conclude ‘definitely' that a little over £29,000 was ‘expended on or in connection with the relief of distress' in Northern Ireland. It found that a further £31,150 may have been spent in the same way, but over £39,000 had, in effect, been misappropriated.

There was no definitive conclusion on who was directly responsible for the misappropriations, but the committee was specifically critical of Charlie on two counts. Firstly, it concluded that ‘the misappropriation of part of the money which is now known to have been spent on arms might have been avoided' if either Charlie, Blaney or Gibbons had ‘passed on to the Taoiseach their suspicion or knowledge of the proposed arms importation.' The committee came to that conclusion without even asking any of the witnesses what they had told Lynch.

Garret FitzGerald, one of the opposition members of the committee, later explained to Justin O'Brien that the threat posed by the likes of Neil Blaney was considered so serious, that even the opposition did not want to destabilise Lynch's leadership. He explained ‘the committee's hearings were designed specifically by government and opposition alike not to ascertain the truth but “to buttress the state against the greatest threat to its security since partition”.'

But there was no such reluctance to be critical of Haughey. The committee concluded that it was ‘not satisfied' that Charlie's actions in connection with the £500 given to Capt. Kelly for the Bailieboro meeting ‘was justified under the terms of the fund'.

Following the dismissal of Charlie and Blaney in May, the Taoiseach had said that there could not be ‘even the slightest suspicion' about the activities of a minister, but he then seemed to apply a different standard to Jim Gibbons. If the latter's testimony about not having approved the importation of arms had been accepted by the jury, it is difficult to see how all the defendants could have been acquitted. This at least raised the spectre of doubt about his role in the controversial events. Moreover, during the trial Gibbons essentially admitted that he had deliberately deceived the Dáil back in May when he denied any knowledge of an attempt by Capt. Kelly to import arms. ‘I wish emphatically to deny any such knowledge,' he told the Dáil at the time. Yet in court he admitted that Capt. Kelly had already informed him, and he lamely tried to excuse deceiving the Dáil by implying that a different degree of veracity was required in Leinster House.

Surely deceiving the Dáil in such a blatant manner was valid grounds for his removal; so why did Lynch promote him to Agriculture rather than drop him from the cabinet? Was it because Gibbons knew too much? It may have been significant that after Lynch's retirement from politics, Gibbons admitted that he had told him what was going on before the arms crisis.

Rather than vote confidence in the Minister for Agriculture or side with the opposition, Kevin Boland resigned from the Dáil. In the circumstances all eyes were on Charlie, but he dutifully voted with the government, thereby affording his critics another opportunity of slating him.

‘Whatever charisma attached to the name of C. J. Haughey,'
Hibernia
noted, ‘was very seriously, perhaps irrevocably tarnished by his decision to vote with the government on the Gibbons censure. For a man who so terribly badly wanted to be leader, his epitaph may well read that he tried too hard.'

Boland went on to found a new party,
Aontacht Éireann.
‘I went to Haughey and tried to persuade him that even if he did succeed in taking over Fianna Fáil, he would be dealing with people who were incompetent, inadequate and unreliable,' Boland recalled. ‘But he didn't see it that way.'

Charlie decided to re-establish himself within Fianna Fáil instead. At the party's Ard Fheis in February 1972 he was elected as one of the party's five vice-presidents. His supporters were ecstatic as he arrived on the platform to be greeted by many of the party hierarchy, but there were some determined exceptions. Erskine Childers sat silently reading his newspaper. Dismayed at the prospect of Haughey's return to prominence, he repeatedly urged Lynch not to restore Charlie to the front bench of the parliamentary party.

Childers had already departed the political scene to succeed de Valera as president of the country when a general election was called in 1973. The Tánaiste, Frank Aiken, one of the principal founders of Fianna Fáil in 1926, urged Jack Lynch to block Charlie's nomination as a party candidate, but Lynch rejected the idea. Aiken was so annoyed that he decided to retired from politics himself. Initially he threatened to give the press his reasons for quitting, but under pressure from President de Valera and others, he relented and allowed Lynch to announce that he was retiring ‘on doctor's orders'. It was a sad end to a long political career of a particularly courageous man, and it was all the sadder that he should leave politics quietly while the truth about his principled stand was distorted.

A couple of years later Charlie was returned to the front bench of the party, much to the indignation of the widow of President Childers, who had died some weeks earlier. When she was invited to a Mass arranged by the party, she declined with an open letter.

‘The late president would not benefit from the prayers of such a party,' she wrote. ‘Happily for him he is now closer to God and will be able to ask His intercession that his much loved country will never again be governed by these people.' It was an extraordinary outburst, but Fianna Fáil was returned to power at the next general election in 1977 with a record twenty-seat majority.

Haughey was offered a cabinet position as Minister for Health and Social Welfare. Health was essentially a poison chalice. Only Noel Browne had ever made a name for himself in the post, but he got into bishop trouble and never got another government job. One of Charlie's greatest tasks was to do something about the political unrest surrounding the public demand for the legalised sale of contraceptives, which had plagued Liam Cosgrave's outgoing government. Charlie was going to have to tackle this thorny question as an essential outsider within the cabinet.

Lynch surrounded himself with an inner cabinet consisting of George Colley, Des O'Malley and Martin O'Donoghue, who all despised Haughey. But if they thought they were going to bury him in the Department of Health, they were badly mistaken, because he had real administrative ability.

During his two and a half years as Minister for Health, Charlie generated a considerable amount of publicity to enhance his own political image. He used his administrative and legislative experience to telling effect in securing funding for a wide range of programmes that he had the skill and drive to get off the ground. He also implemented some legislative measures that received enormous, if not always favourable, publicity.

‘His greatest coup,' according to the
Irish Medical Times
, ‘was bought for the modest expenditure of £1 million – the cost of dramatically expanding the role of the new Health Education Bureau', which had been set up by his predecessor in 1975. Through this bureau, Haughey launched imaginative publicity campaigns aimed at promoting better standards of fitness and hygiene. He was credited with bombarding the public with exhortations to walk rather than drive, to jog, to dance, to play games, to quit smoking and to cut down on alcohol.

He introduced legislation to deal with the promotion and advertising of tobacco products. He banned cigarette companies from sponsoring a wide range of events and made it illegal for competitors in certain events to carry the name of a tobacco company, or its products. He had the imagination and drive to introduce legislation to ban tobacco advertising more than twenty years before the Americans or the British.

The groundwork had already been done for a new hospital programme by the previous government, and Charlie implemented it by cutting through reams of red tape. He took the design of Cork Regional Hospital and had it used for the Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, thereby speeding up the construction of the new building. He secured funds for a £5 million development at Mullingar General Hospital, authorised an extension doubling the size of Sligo General Hospital, and got funds for a new general hospital in Tralee.

In July 1978, Charlie announced a new scheme providing free hospitalisation for all those earning under £5,500 per year. His predecessor had been anxious to introduce free hospitalisation and the Department of Health had drawn up a scheme, but consultant doctors refused to implement it. Haughey compromised with the consultants and got cabinet approval for the scheme, which was a real political achievement, because free hospitalisation had not been part of the 1977 election manifesto.

In November 1978 hundreds of uniformed nurses descended on Leinster House, looking for salary increases. Charlie has some 300 of them invited into the Dáil. Fine Gael proposed ‘to set up a commission of inquiry on nurses' pay and conditions', and Haughey stole the initiative by establishing such a commission of inquiry. By the time the nurses left Leinster House, they were being called ‘Charlie's Angels'.

In 1979, he took on the Catholic hierarchy in forcing through the first law providing for the sale of artificial contraceptives. A provision of the legislation required that condoms could only be sold on a doctor's prescription for bona fide family planning purposes. When Kevin Moore of the
Irish Independent
suggested that the Irish Medical Association would balk at doctors writing such prescriptions, Charlie was dismissive. ‘Listen Kevin,' he said, ‘those fuckers will do anything for money.'

This was his idea of ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem'. It paved the way for others to pass amending legislation. One cynical commentator contended at the time that Haughey's plans were not for health but to fulfil his own ambition of becoming Taoiseach. ‘What he's done,' he said, ‘is to keep ten balls in the air at the same time and protect his own'. He had taken a political poison chalice and not only survived but made a success of it.

On the night of general elections returns in June 1977 Haughey was at the count centre at the Royal Dublin Society when the news came through that Jack Lynch had led Fianna Fáil to a 20-seat majority, the greatest margin of victory since independence. Geraldine Kennedy of the
Irish Times
was standing next to Charlie and she remarked that his chances of every becoming Taoiseach were now dead.

‘No,' Haughey replied. ‘Those are all my men,' he explained, referring the many new deputies elected for the first time. ‘Now I know I will be Taoiseach.' He seemed so confident that she asked if he would give her his first interview as Taoiseach. He agreed.

‘Is that a promise?' she asked.

‘Yes,' he replied emphatically. It was a promise.

When Jack Lynch announced his decision to step down as Taoiseach in December 1979 following his return from a short tour of the United States, there was no suggestion that Charlie was in any way involved in the decision, but the charge would later be made that he was behind what amounted to Lynch's ousting. It would virtually become an accepted fact that Charlie orchestrated a sneaky, sordid campaign to destroy Lynch, and this would do as much damage to him politically as many of the earlier controversies.

In the circumstances it is necessary here to evaluate what actually happened in the run up to Lynch's resignation. The first real signs of trouble occurred in April when it came to voting on the bill introduced by Charlie to legalise the sale of contraceptive in certain restricted circumstances. Four Fianna Fáil deputies defied their party's three line whip by refusing to vote on the measure. Three of them later apologised but the fourth, Charlie's Arms Trial adversary, Jim Gibbons, was unapologetic.

As Minister for Agriculture, Gibbons could easily have arranged to be away on business, and his absence would not have been noticed because his vote was not needed. Instead, he stayed around the Dáil until just before the vote was due to take place and then he left. Afterwards he announced defiantly that he would not be supporting any stage of the bill.

The whole thing was seen as a clear challenge to Lynch's authority, but the Taoiseach took no action. Relations between Lynch and Gibbons had been ‘distinctly chilly, even glacial', according to press secretary Frank Dunlop. This led many to conclude that Gibbons had something damaging, possibly in relation to the arms crisis, that Lynch dared not drop him from the cabinet. Even now he dared not move against Gibbons. It was the first time since the foundation of the state that any minister had publicly defied his own government in such a blatant manner. The first nail had been driven into Lynch's political coffin, and the man responsible was not Charlie, but his implacable critic, Jim Gibbons.

A public opinion poll conducted during the controversy found that Charlie had the most favourable rating of all the members of the government, including the Taoiseach. Some 75% expressed the opinion that Charlie had done well or very well in his ministry. Only 20% were not favourably impressed with the job he was doing. On the other hand, George Colley had a dismal approval rating of just 38%, with 53% feeling that he had been doing a poor job as Minister for Finance. Indeed, he had the poorest rating of all, with the exception of Pádraig Faulkner, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, who was plagued at the time by a protracted postal strike.