Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (14 page)

At worst, he was guilty of canvassing for the leadership of the party among members of the parliamentary party who elected the leader, whereas Colley went outside the party and sought to enlist the help of the press. He went public next day disavowing what Haughey had said.

‘In my speech at the party meeting,' Colley explained, ‘I referred to Mr Haughey's ability, capacity and flair and I wished him well in the enormous tasks he was taking on. I did not, however, use the words “loyalty” or “support” which he attributed to me.' Colley fully understood how, ‘in the excitement and euphoria' of victory, Charlie had misunderstood him, but now the Tánaiste was setting the record straight. As far as he was concerned the traditional loyalty normally given to the leader of the party had been withheld from Lynch, and it was now legitimate to withhold ‘loyalty to, and support for the elected leader'.

He made these views clear to Charlie before the cabinet was formed, he said. Since then he told him that he intended to set the record straight publicly. As far as he was concerned the rule henceforth would be that ‘the Taoiseach is entitled to our conscientious and diligent support in all his efforts in the national interest'.

When Geraldine Kennedy of the
Irish Times
asked if he expected the Taoiseach to seek his resignation, Colley responded rather indifferently. ‘I couldn't say what I would expect,' he replied. ‘Obviously, if I were asked to resign, it would be a matter for the Taoiseach. It is not for me to say.'

These were most extraordinary speeches for any deputy leader to make barely a week into the life of a new government. Naturally they provoked an immediate political crisis. Next day Charlie called Colley into his office.

‘Before he agreed to join the government the Tánaiste expressed to me the views which he has now stated publicly,' Charlie explained in a statement to the press. ‘Following our discussion, he has assured me of his full support and loyalty in his office as Tánaiste and as a member of the government.' And that was the end of that.

But the perception was born that Charlie had led the campaign against Jack Lynch. This would be widely accepted by elements of the media, even though no evidence was ever produced to show that he played any part.

‘It is untrue to say that Charlie Haughey orchestrated an undermining campaign against Jack Lynch,' Charlie McCreevy admitted in January 1992, shortly after Haughey had announced his impending retirement. ‘It is correct that it was pro-Haughey people who participated, but the man himself neither orchestrated nor encouraged it – of course, neither did he do anything to halt it.'

Tom McEllistrim, one of the gang of four who orchestrated the campaign to replace Lynch, was adamant that Charlie was not behind the whole thing. They informed him about what they were doing, but they were acting in their own political interest. McEllistrim's assessment would seem to have been confirmed by subsequent events. Two of the gang – Albert Reynolds and Seán Doherty – led the moves to oust Charlie in 1992, and by then Jackie Fahey had already broken with Haughey.

‘George and his followers sincerely believed Haughey's treachery in the demise of Jack Lynch, but in this they were wrong,' McCreevy continued. ‘An unfortunate consequence of that period was that the pro-Lynch/Colley axis of the party believed the orchestration theory when their favourite did not succeed. This was the basis of many party troubles in the early 1980s.'

On the night of the election count in 1977 Haughey had promised his first interview as Taoiseach to Geraldine Kennedy. She told government press secretary Frank Dunlop of the promise and asked him to arrange the interview, but Charlie obviously regretted his rash promise. He decided to explain the situation to Geraldine personally.

Dunlop called her to arrange this meeting and forewarned her of what was going to happen so that she would not be too disappointed. Haughey explained that he could not fulfil his promise, because giving her an exclusive interview would offend other journalists. She thanked him for the courtesy of telling her to her face and added that she was not really surprised. It was what she had come to expect from what colleagues had been telling her.

‘What are they saying?' Haughey asked.

‘That you're a liar,' she replied.

Haughey was taken aback. He was not about to confirm what his critics in the press thought of him, so he immediately reversed himself and again agreed to give her his first formal interview as Taoiseach. For all his combativeness over the years, it would become apparent in the following months and years that he was a classic bully. When confronted he frequently backed down, as he demonstrated with both Colley and Geraldine Kennedy.

The promised interview turned sour when Geraldine asked questions about the arms crisis. He actually threatened to terminate the proceedings, if she persisted with her line of questioning. She wrote about this in her report, but her editor excised that material. The seeds of future discord had been sown.

She had seen Haughey close up and was not impressed, while his distrust of journalists was probably strengthened by what, in his eyes, would have amounted to the hostility of a journalist he had facilitated. In the following weeks he repeatedly put off requests for interviews without actually refusing them. As a result the requests built up to the point where there were over 250 applications from journalists to interview him.

Frank Dunlop was summoned to Haughey's office one Monday morning. ‘Were the fuck were you yesterday?' Haughey asked.

‘Yesterday – Sunday – I was at home in the bosom of my family,' Dunlop replied.

‘We're making some progress – the fucker knows yesterday was Sunday', Haughey remarked to his aide Pádraig Ó hAnnracháin.

‘With that my reserve broke,' Dunlop noted. ‘I stood up and approached his desk. ‘Don't you ever speak to me like that again,' I said, and made for the door.

Haughey shouted after me to come back, but I kept going. Ó hAnn racháin later admonised Dunlop for speaking like that to the Taoiseach.

‘Pádraig, you are missing the point,' Dunlop replied. ‘He can't speak to me like that!'

Haughey did not speak to him for the rest of the week, but the following Monday had called Dunlop to ask his opinion on some subject. It was his way of apologising.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the arms crisis in May 1980, Vincent Browne of
Magill
began a series of articles that re-opened the whole controversy. Based largely on the reminiscences of Peter Berry, the late secretary of the Department of Justice who had died in 1975, they provided an extraordinary insight into the controversial events. A number of people tried to block publication by threatening to sue the publisher, distributors and sellers of the magazine. Although publication was temporarily delayed, the controversy helped to generate public curiosity and the issues carrying the Berry story were in great demand. As a result Haughey's role in the whole crisis became the focus of public attention and the Dáil held another debate on the arms crisis, some ten years after the traumatic events.

Although the
Magill
articles raised serious questions about Charlie's conduct, the disclosures were probably even more damaging to some of his critics within Fianna Fáil, because Berry had already told the court virtually all he knew about Haughey's involvement in the affair during the two arms trials. Thus, his most startling posthumous disclosures related to others.

Browne concluded that Haughey ‘could easily and justifiably defend what he did at the time' but was so anxious to put the whole affair behind him that he glided over the facts. ‘While Mr Haughey certainly behaved improperly,' Browne concluded, ‘he was and has been innocent of the more colourful charges that have been laid against him concerning the crisis. It can be argued with some force that he was more a victim of the arms crisis than anything else.'

The
Magill
articles were dragged out over four different issues of the monthly magazine. Browne wrote that Kevin Boland had tried to persuade Haughey to secure cabinet approval for the planned importation of the arms in March 1970. If this conversation took place, there was no way that it could be squared with Haughey's arms trial testimony both about believing the importation was totally proper and not knowing that guns were involved.

When the Dáil conducted a debate on the arms crisis revelations the following autumn, George Colley approached Fine Gael with an extraordinary proposal. Through an emissary, he suggested that if Fine Gael amended its motion in order to highlight the conflict of testimony between Gibbons and Haughey at the arms trial a number of Fianna Fáil deputies would abstain rather than support Haughey.

‘On 19 November I met George Colley at a party and he confirmed the proposal, saying that about twenty members would abstain,' FitzGerald noted in his autobiography. This would be enough to bring down the government. In the circumstances, the Fine Gael leader was naturally interested, but Colley got cold feet.

‘When I put the matter to the test by inviting George Colley to draft the amendment himself – which seemed to me the best way of ensuring that the abstentions would in fact occur,' Garret wrote, ‘he backed away from the proposal.' The idea that Colley ever suggested such a proposal was an extraordinary reflection on his sense of loyalty and collective responsibility. Yet, ironically, he was the main person questioning Charlie's integrity in such matters.

On 10 January 1980, less than a month after his election as Taoiseach, Charlie addressed the nation. ‘We have been living at a rate which is simply not justified by the amounts of goods and services we have been producing,' he said. ‘To make up the difference we have been borrowing enormous amounts of money, borrowing at a rate which just cannot continue.' It was ironic that Charlie Haughey of all people should have lectured the Irish people about living beyond their means, when he had been spending at a rate that bore little relationship to his income. For the past decade, the Allied Irish Banks (AIB) had been trying to rein in his personal spending.

In September 1971 he owed the bank £244,000. At the time, he was only backbencher. On the kind of money politicians earned, he would never be able to pay off that debt. He agreed to pay off £101,000 by selling £23,000 worth of shares in Tara Mines and Whim Creek, along with £20,000 worth of cattle and his interest in Simmonstown Stud, which was expected to raise £48,000. He would raise the other £10,000 by selling ‘other odds and ends.' He told the bank that he was trying to sell the farm he owned in Ashbourne, Co. Meath, for £100,000.

He had the assets to cover his bank debts, so he really viewed his financial difficulties as a mere cash flow problem. The bank fixed his credit limit at £250,000 subject to him halving that debt in three months and clearing it altogether in six months. In June 1972 he got a further loan of £100,000 from another bank by putting up the farm in Co. Meath as security, but this only brought his debt down to £153,000, and by December 1973 he owed AIB £283,000.

‘Mr Haughey is quite irresponsible in money matters,' J. J. McAuliffe, the AIB regional manager wrote the following month. ‘He cannot be controlled on a running account. His affairs can only deteriorate further.' In 1973, he had paid £20,000 for the island of Innisvicillaun off the Kerry coast, where he planned to build a summer home.

By that September, his bank manager, Michael Phelan, was calling on the bank to take action on the account. ‘Despite the un attractiveness of the proposition, Mr Phelan recommends sanctions, bearing in mind the likelihood of Mr Haughey being a man of influence in the future,' one internal bank memorandum read. A year later, the bank was noting that Haughey ‘mentioned that the bank did not make use of his influential position and he indicated that he would be more than willing to assist the bank in directing new business, etc.'

On 1 October 1976, Charlie met Phelan and James Denvir, the area manager of AIB. They said that he would have to surrender his cheque book. ‘Haughey became quite vicious and told Mr Denvir that “he would not give up his cheque book as he had to live,” and “that we were dealing with an adult and no banker would talk to him in this manner”,' according to a bank report. The bank officials had talked tough until the client showed his teeth, and then they turned chicken. They were afraid to bounce his cheques as they would do to most other customers in his circumstances. He not only became aggressive and shirty when they asked for his cheque book, he had the audacity to ask for more money. They offered him £10,000 a year for the next two years on the understanding that he would sell 150 acres of Abbeville. When the meeting ended, ‘he departed having been left in no doubt as to the seriousness of the situation and the bank's firm intentions once and for all to free the debt and obtain payment in full in the short ter', the report continued.

Of course, this was a piece of fatuous delusion. They had capitulated in the face of his ire. They not only backed off in their demand for his cheque book but also had extended him even more credit for the next two years, and they had cheek to suggest that they were insisting on a short-term solution. They really put him in his place, didn't they!

By the following April he was being warned, according to bank records, that ‘if he failed to honour his undertaking we would be forced to dishonour his cheques.' But again, the bank did not have the guts to act. Liam St John Devlin, the chief executive of AIB, concluded that it would be impractical to bounce Haughey's cheques because ‘he was a popular and powerful leader and a potential Taoiseach'.

The most senior people in AIB already had doubts as to whether the bank would ever get its money back. As of 1976, the interest that Haughey owed was being recorded in a suspense account, which meant that the officials suspected it would never be paid.