Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (20 page)

From early on it was clear that there would be a vital test of strength between the two sides on whether the vote should be taken openly or in secret. Rule 83 of the Fianna Fáil
Coru
(constitution) specifically stated that ‘every ballot throughout the organisation should be held by secret ballot', but the dissident position was really not all that strong, because the parliamentary party was traditionally free to make its own decisions without outside dictation from the party itself. Moreover in the aftermath of the arms crisis Jack Lynch had demanded and secured an open vote of confidence. Now some of his supporters were demanding his successor should agree to a secret vote, and they were being undermined by the precedent they had set themselves.

The parliamentary party meeting began at 11 am on 6 October with 80 of the 81 Fianna Fáil TDs present, as well as 27 Senators, and 5 members of the European parliament. Though the atmosphere was tense, the proceedings were conducted in an orderly manner.

It was decided to discuss McCreevy's motion and the method of voting simultaneously. McCreevy explained he was objecting to Haughey's leadership because there had been a lowering of political standards, mishandling of the economy, as well as the party's failure to secure a majority in two successive general elections. People wanted to be governed not bought, he said, emphasising it was time ‘to get decency back into the party'.

Haughey was obviously nervous when he spoke. He paused frequently to choose the right words, or to rummage through notes. He defended himself and his government on the grounds that they had been facing unprecedented difficulties in the deepest recession since the 1930s. Having worked hard to prepare a new plan to tackle the economic situation, he said they should be given a chance to let it work. Under the circumstances he felt the motion was not only divisive but also badly timed.

This time the dissidents were determined that there would be no repetition of the debacle surrounding the abortive challenge in February. They had arranged for people to speak in favour of the motion in order to prevent a precipitate collapse of their challenge as had happened earlier. Thus the meeting dragged on throughout the day and into the night, with adjournments for lunch and tea.

Some senior deputies like Pádraig Faulkner and Michael O'Kennedy called for a secret ballot, but the dissidents had again overestimated their support for this crucial test of strength. On a role call vote, only 27 favoured a secret ballot on the actual motion with 53 preferring an open vote. The subsequent vote on the McCreevy motion was then defeated by 58 votes to 22.

Haughey had won and some of his supporters were anything but magnanimous in victory. ‘These people have been flushed out now, once, finally and for all,' was how one supporter put it. ‘The situation after tonight is that they had better be ready to kiss Haughey's ass or get out of the party.'

The mood was so ugly that gardaí tried to persuade McCreevy to leave Leinster House by a side entrance, but he refused. As he emerged by the front door, surrounded by six gardaí, he was met by a jeering group of Haughey supporters, many of whom had been drinking throughout the day as they waited for the outcome of the meeting.

When Jim Gibbons left the building shortly afterwards, he was not only jeered loudly but also jostled about by the unruly crowd. It was one of the ugliest scenes witnessed in Irish politics for many years. One of the hecklers tried to attack him and actually landed a glancing blow. These incidents, which were captured on television, were probably more damaging to the government than anything that happened during the day.

The next IMS poll, published on 23 October 1982, showed Haughey's popularity slumping even further, and his party dropped to its lowest rating since the poll began in 1974. Only 23% of those sampled were satisfied with the way the government was running the country, and his personal popularity dropped to 32%.

As it was his government was already in trouble as a result of the death on 18 October of Bill Loughnane, and the hospitalisation next day of Jim Gibbons, following a heart attack. Without their votes the government was in deep trouble.

The publication of Fianna Fáil's new economic programme,
The Way Forward,
virtually killed any chance of survival. Tony Gregory and the three Workers' party's deputies joined with the opposition to bring down the government.

Fianna Fáil was out of office barely a week when the public received the first indication of the coming political storm. Peter Murtagh, the security correspondent of the
Irish Times,
reported that the telephones of Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy had been tapped ‘officially' with the full knowledge and approval of the last Minister for Justice, Seán Doherty.

Charlie promptly denied any involvement. ‘I wouldn't countenance such action,' he declared on RTÉ next day. He called for a judicial inquiry to investigate the matter fully. ‘The capacity to listen in to phone conversations is one which must be kept under the very closest, rigid scrutiny,' he said.

Back in 1964 he had assured the Dáil that there were safeguards to ensure that telephone-tapping could not be abused for political purposes. The request for a tap had to come from the garda commissioner or a deputy commissioner, who had to be satisfied that the person to be tapped was involved with a subversive organisation or engaged in organised criminal activities. Moreover, an officer of the Justice Department had then to advise the minister on the application.

‘The Minister for Justice cannot initiate the procedure,' Charlie assured the Dáil as Minister for Justice himself. ‘He can act only when a written request comes to him from a responsible authority and when he is satisfied and when his Departmental advisers are satisfied that the information concerned can be obtained in no other way.' It would therefore be necessary to have ‘the connivance of a whole group of people,' he contended, ‘before there could be the slightest possible abuse of power.'

‘I don't think any politician himself should ever initiate because that would be an abuse,' Charlie explained eighteen years later when he was asked in an RTÉ interview on 19 December 1982 about the reported taps on the telephones of Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy. ‘There's a very limited number of reasons which justify the issue of warrants and it's to combat crime or subversion,' he explained. ‘Now I don't think either of the two journalists whose names have been mentioned would come within that category.'

Over nine years later Seán Doherty complained that Charlie made this statement before he had a chance to comment himself. Charlie had been aware of the tappings, according to Doherty, who decided not to contradict him at the time. ‘I felt pressured to support Mr Haughey's stated position,' Doherty explained in a sensational announcement on the evening of 21 January 1992. ‘Not only did I take the blame,' he continued, ‘but when Mr Haughey claimed not to have been aware of the tapping while it was in progress, I did not correct this claim, and indeed supported it.'

Although Charlie expressed concern about the allegations in the RTÉ interview of 19 December 1982, he took his time in questioning Seán Doherty about them. It was not until two days later that he even broached him on the subject. Then, assured by Doherty that there was nothing to worry about, he did not bother to pursue the matter further.

As Minister for Justice, Doherty had asked deputy commissioner Joe Ainsworth of the garda síochána to have a tap placed on Arnold's telephone. Commissioner Patrick McLoughlin duly authorised this request on Ainsworth's recommendation.

When the Justice Department official, who was charged with vetting the application, asked for the reason for the tap, Ainsworth explained that Arnold was ‘anti-national in outlook' and ‘might be obtaining information from sources of a similar disposition'. There was no question of Arnold being involved with criminal or paramilitary organisations, so the official recommended against the tap, but Doherty signed the necessary warrant anyway. In the following weeks the tap produced nothing of value, so it was discontinued in the immediate aftermath of the over-ride controversy.

By then Geraldine Kennedy had replaced Arnold as the greatest thorn in the side of the Taoiseach. She had the confidence of someone privy to what was happening within the cabinet. On 11 July 1982, for instance, she quoted some cabinet exchanges and disclosed that the government had decided to reverse its economic policies and adopt an approach of fiscal rectitude. In another article she disclosed that Charlie had been having some secret talks in an effort to come to a political arrangement with the Labour party, but any hope of this was killed when she broke the news of the discussions.

Charlie complained to Hugh McLoughlin, the publisher of the
Sun day Tribune,
about Kennedy's articles. McLoughlin in turn told Conor Brady, the newspaper's editor, to keep a tighter control of Kennedy and to go easy on Charlie. He explained that the Taoiseach was ‘desperately worried about the Kennedy woman' and wondered who in Fianna Fáil was talking to her. A few days later Doherty asked for and then formally authorised a tap on Kennedy's telephone for reasons of ‘national security'.

Charlie said afterwards that he knew nothing about the tap. In fact, even the garda commissioner who formally requested it was not aware that it applied to Geraldine Kennedy's telephone, because it was actually in the name of a previous tenant of the apartment in which she was living.

Among her calls intercepted was a conversation in which she forewarned Peter Prendergast, the general secretary of Fine Gael, of the McCreevy motion. Seán Doherty was so interested in this intercept that he requested a transcript on the eve of the parliamentary party meeting at which McCreevy's motion was considered.

Immediately after this meeting there was a curious incident when the Taoiseach's son, Ciarán, walked up to Geraldine Kennedy. ‘I want to tell you one thing,' young Haughey said. ‘You'll be hearing from us.'

She asked if this was a threat.

‘You can take it as such,' he replied.

She thought at the time he must have been annoyed at some remarks she had made on television the previous night. Of course, she never suspected there was a tap on her telephone.

The political storm surrounding this tap did not break until 20 January 1983 when Michael Noonan, the new Minister for Justice, confirmed that the telephones of Arnold and Kennedy had indeed been tapped and that the procedures outlined by various Ministers for Justice had not been followed in either case. He also disclosed that Ray MacSharry had borrowed sophisticated garda equipment and had secretly recorded a conversation he had with Martin O'Donoghue on 21 October 1982.

Charlie initially accepted responsibility for what had happened but at the same time he tried to distance himself from the abuses. ‘Any head of government must take responsibility for anything that happens during his administration,' he said. ‘But I want to make it crystal clear that the government as such and I, as Taoiseach, knew absolutely nothing about any activities of this sort and would not countenance any such abuse.' He was particularly dismissive of the suggestion that the taps were connected with his own leadership problems within Fianna Fáil.

‘I wouldn't need any such secret information from any such sources,' he said. ‘I know as a politician and leader of the party exactly what is going on in the party and who was saying what. The idea of resorting to telephone-tapping or any other devices to get that sort of information is ludicrous.'

But, if it was ludicrous, why had he been so interested in learning Geraldine Kennedy's sources only days before the tap was placed on her telephone? In a front page article in the
Sunday Press,
where she had taken over as political correspondent following the collapse of the
Sunday Tribune,
she disclosed that Haughey had asked her publisher about her sources back in July. This story, which raised some serious questions, hurt Charlie politically.

Within Fianna Fáil he appointed a four man committee to investigate the whole affair. It was headed by Jim Tunney, the new chairman of the parliamentary party. From the very outset Tunney was sceptical that Charlie might have been responsible for any misconduct. ‘All the evidence shows that Mr Haughey knew absolutely nothing about it,' he declared on the day the committee was set up.

When the parliamentary party next met, Charlie was clearly on the defensive. Although he had already publicly stated there was no justification for the taps, he now sought to justify Doherty's actions on the grounds that ‘national security' had been endangered by ‘cabinet leaks'.

‘What leaks?' Pearse Wyse asked.

‘The Fianna Fáil farm plan had appeared for instance in the
Far mer's Journal,'
Charlie replied to a chorus of incredulous laughter.

‘Isn't it strange then that you would tap the telephones of journalists working in the
Tribune
and the
Independent
?' rejoined Wyse.

This use of the ‘national security' cloak was the exact same one used by Richard Nixon to defend the misdeeds of his people during the Watergate scandal in the United States almost a decade earlier. And this latest Irish scandal was rapidly beginning to look like a repetition of Watergate.

‘The parallels to the Nixon White House are uncomfortably close and to the point,' thundered Vincent Jennings in a signed editorial in the
Sunday Press
. ‘Wall-to-wall distrust and paranoia; anyone who disagrees with the leadership is an enemy, or worse – anti-national. Get them, the expletive deleted.' There were a number of distinct parallels, but there was also an enormous difference. Watergate had been the subject of a thorough, exhaustive investigation in which congressional leaders were careful to avoid any taint of engaging in a political vendetta. The Democratic leadership went to great pains to ensure their Republican counterparts were satisfied the investigation was being conducted in an impartial manner. In the end Nixon was brought down, not because of any involvement in the initial crimes, but because he impeded the investigation by engaging in a cover up.