Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (27 page)

In December 1989 Charlie discouraged these rumours by effectively touting the candidacy of Brian Lenihan at an annual Fianna Fáil dinner. ‘He will still be one of us whatever high office he is called to during the next decade,' the Taoiseach said to tremendous applause.

Lenihan had been quietly campaigning for the office for months, and had done absolutely nothing to discourage speculation about his own ambitions for the office. ‘I would be honoured, as any Irishman would be honoured, to run for the presidency,' he declared.

Despite his open benediction, however, Charlie had real misgivings, because Lenihan's election would undermine his majority in the Dáil. The government would have to win the ensuing by-election in Lenihan's Dublin West constituency and, of course, Charlie had some unhappy memories of the by-election there eight years earlier. In the circumstances some of the government became uneasy, and Charlie did nothing to allay their disquiet. In fact, he quietly encouraged an alternative to Lenihan, going so far as to send out feelers to Fine Gael about the possibility of running an agreed candidate like the distinguished civil servant, T. K. Whittaker.

Lenihan betrayed his own suspicions in April when he told the press that Charlie was ‘a tremendously loyal person to his friends, generous in spirit and a very kind and considerate person in all his personal relationships and dealings.' He was trying to put pressure on the Taoiseach, as there were indications that John Wilson, the Minister for the Marine, was also interested in running for the presidency. If he won, Fianna Fáil would have little difficulty winning a by-election in his Cavan-Monaghan constituency.

‘The more suspicious of my supporters felt that Mr Haughey was behind the Wilson gambit,' Lenihan wrote. But Leinhan's campaign had already gained an unstoppable momentum, and he brushed aside the Wilson challenge to win the Fianna Fáil nomination by 54 votes to 19.

From the outset Lenihan was an odds-on favourite to win the presidential election. Over the years he had enjoyed a high profile, especially in recent months after his successful liver transplant. He was well liked by politicians on all sides of the Dáil and also by the press. He was the kind of man who facilitated journalists and, unlike Charlie, he never took offence at their criticism.

Prior to the start of the campaign proper, therefore, Lenihan enjoyed a considerable lead in the polls. He had more than double the support of his nearest rival, Mary Robinson. During the campaign she began to eat into his lead as expected, but her left wing views on matter like divorce and contraception, were seen as a distinct liability among conservative voters. The various public opinion surveys were indicating that if Brian did not win on the first count, he would win easily on transfers from the Fine Gael candidate, Austin Currie, who did not get into the campaign until too late. He and his party was floundering in their efforts to boost his candidacy by trying to depict Lenihan as unsuitable for the office on the grounds that he was too close to Charlie and could not therefore be trusted to act independently. ‘It is difficult to see how the habits of loyalty to Mr Haughey for half a lifetime will be abandoned by Mr Lenihan if elected president,' Currie said at the launching of his campaign.

On RTÉ's
Questions and Answers
on 22 October 1990 Garret FitzGerald noted that Lenihan had facilitated Charlie in trying to interfere with the discretionary power of the president by trying to get Hillery to refuse a dissolution of the Dáil after the coalition government was defeated on John Bruton's budget eight years earlier. Lenihan dismissed this, because no president had ever used the option.

‘Why the phone calls to try to force him to exercise it?' Garret asked, alluding to what happened in 1982.

‘That's fictional, Garret,' Lenihan replied.

‘It is not fictional, excuse me, I was in Aras an Uachtaráin when those phone calls came through and I know how many there were.'

A member of the audience asked Brian directly if he had made any phone calls to the Aras that night.

‘No, I didn't at all,' he insisted. ‘That never happened. I want to assure you that never happened.'

Lenihan had forgotten that he had told a student in May that he had called President Hillery that night and had actually spoken to him. ‘I got through to him,' he said. In hindsight, he explained that the whole thing was a mistake because the president was not the type of man who would break new ground. ‘But, of course,' Brian added, ‘Charlie was gung-ho.'

In an article in the
Irish Times
on 27 September the student, Jim Duffy, wrote that Charlie, Lenihan and Sylvester Barrett had made phone calls to the president on the night of the budget fiasco. Dick Walsh, the political editor of the newspaper, was anxious to run a follow up story, but Duffy was reluctant. He allowed Walsh to hear the taped interview and agreed to the
Irish Times
running a low-key story on 24 October to the effect that it had corroborative evidence.

The whole thing was by now gathering a momentum of its own. Gay Byrne challenged the
Irish Times
to publish the evidence, if it had any. And Lenihan reaffirmed his denial on RTÉ radio's
News at One,
as well as
Today at Five
, on which his campaign manager, Bertie Ahern, mentioned Jim Duffy and suggested that his tape had been stolen.

With the political temperature rising Duffy decided to release the pertinent segment of the controversial tape after Bertie Ahern had named him on RTÉ. The
Irish Times
then called an extraordinary press conference. Rather than running the story as an exclusive on its own pages, it gave the story to the world, setting off a political firestorm.

Lenihan was caught completely by surprise. He rushed over to appear on RTÉ's evening news programme to explain his side of the story without even hearing the tape. He only heard it for the first time on the programme. Rather than candidly admit that he had no recollection of the interview, he tried to bluff his way out by looking straight into the camera.

‘My mature recollection at this stage is that I did not ring President Hillery. I want to put my reputation on the line in that respect,' he said.

The interviewer, Seán Duignan, realised that Lenihan could not have it both ways. Either he wasn't telling the truth now, or else he did not tell the truth to the student.

‘I must have been mistaken in what I said to Duffy on that occasion,' Lenihan replied. ‘It was a casual discussion with a research student and I was obviously mistaken in what I said.'

But it could not have been just a casual slip; it wasn't just one mistake. Duignan quoted from the transcript of the conversation.

‘But you made a phone call?' Duffy asked.

‘Oh, I did,' Lenihan replied.

‘Sylvester Barrett made one?'

‘That is right.'

‘And Mr Haughey?'

‘That is right.'

‘Well,' Lenihan interrupted Duignan, ‘in fact, that is wrong, and I want to emphasise it here. From my mature recollection and discussion with other people, at no stage did I ring President Hillery on that occasion or any other time.'

‘They are all going to come after you demanding that you pull out of the race,' Duignan suggested. ‘Do you not think that in all the circumstances you should?'

‘I will not pull out of the race. I am not going to do so on the basis of a remark made to a university student, to whom I was doing a very great service in providing background for the material he was making on the presidency.'

It was a pathetic performance, made all the worse by Lenihan's ridiculous efforts to project sincerity by looking straight into the camera and using the phrase ‘mature recollection' four different times. Either he was lying now, or else he had spun a cock and bull story to the student. If the latter was true, it was certainly ludicrous to describe the interview as ‘a very great service'.

What he said to Duffy ‘was a casual oversight', he explained minutes later during an interview on radio news. ‘I am telling you the honest truth. And I like to be honest. I have been honest all my life in politics.'

‘What state of mind could you have been in to be so very wrong over such a very wide area?' Olivia O'Leary asked him some hours later on
Today To night
. ‘One knows that you've been sick recently. But were you on some drugs or something?'

‘Not at all,' Brian replied breaking into a broad smile. ‘That's an out rageous suggestion.'

Much later in his book,
For the Record
, Lenihan provided a plausible explanation for his behaviour when he admitted that at the time of the Duffy interview he was on strong drugs to ward off rejection of his new liver. A common side effect of those drugs is a partial loss of memory, but he only admitted this long after the campaign had ended.

During the actual campaign, his behaviour seemed inexplicable. He had obviously been lying to somebody and by protesting his honesty, he seemed to be lying to everybody and insulting the intelligence of the electorate.

There was uproar in the Dáil next day when the opposition tried to raise the issue of the Lenihan tape and the telephone calls to the Aras. ‘Brian Lenihan should be hauled in here and hung, drawn and quartered,' Jim Mitchell of Fine Gael declared.

Charlie was incensed. ‘The leader of the opposition is hurling false accusations around the House,' he said, ‘before he makes any more accusations about telling lies or untruths, he should look behind him at Deputy Garret FitzGerald, who had been completely exposed as telling lies.' He had to withdraw the accusation of telling ‘lies' or ‘un truths,' but of course the damage was done by then.

In football parlance, Charlie had gone over the top. He was accusing FitzGerald of lying because he had said on the controversial
Questions & Answers
programme that if the various Fianna Fáil people had not called the Aras on the night in question, somebody had done a good job of imitating them. This was taken by some people to suggest that he had actually overheard the calls, but Garret had already made it clear that he was making no such claim. He was simply told at the Aras that the various people had telephoned.

That night the Progressive Democrats decided to demand Lenihan's resignation from the government. On Monday, Charlie had Ahern explain the situation to Lenihan, but the latter said that he would not resign as it would destroy his campaign.

Charlie called an impromptu session of the Fianna Fáil members of his cabinet at his home to discuss the situation. Neither Brian, nor his sister, Mary O'Rourke, were invited. The Progressive Democrats were insisting on Lenihan's resignation, Charlie explained. Many of those present thought it was the only way out of the impasse and there was little doubt that the Taoiseach favoured this course.

On Tuesday morning, Brian broke off campaigning in the south to fly to Dublin to meet Charlie at his home. They had a twenty-minute meeting at which Charlie explained that the government would collapse if Brian did not resign. ‘The Taoiseach advocated that the best option open to me was my resignation,' Lenihan recalled. ‘He said my resignation would help rather than damage my campaign for the president. He said most people would respect me for standing down in the national interest in order to avoid a general election. Pressing the point further Mr Haughey said that if I resigned, Dessie O'Malley would issue a statement congratulating me on my decision.'

‘I listened to all this patiently,' he continued. ‘I then countered that my resignation would be tantamount to an admission that I had done something wrong as Tánaiste and Minister for Defence which rendered me unfit to serve as a member of the cabinet.'

Lenihan protested his honesty. ‘I put it to the Taoiseach that he and Mr O'Malley knew that I was telling the truth because both of them were on the Fianna Fáil front bench on the night the phone calls were made.' But that was only part of the problem.

O'Malley had succinctly summarised the situation on an RTÉ radio interview on Sunday. ‘Mr Lenihan has given two diametrically opposed accounts of what happened and they can't both be true,' he said. For some reason Lenihan seemed curiously unable to see that protesting his honesty in the circumstances seemed to be compounding the lie. Charlie explained that the Progressive Democrats were insistent ‘and the only acceptable solution' was his resignation.

The meeting had to be cut short as Charlie was due to meet Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands who was arriving at Dublin airport on a state visit. Ahern told Lenihan that the Progressive Democrats were going to pull out of the government, if he had not resigned by five o'clock that afternoon.

At Dublin airport Charlie was asked by waiting reporters about resignation rumours.

‘Brian Lenihan did not offer his resignation nor did I seek it,' he replied. ‘Anything like that would be a matter for my old friend, Brian Lenihan personally. I would not exert pressure on him in that regard, nor would my colleagues.'

He clearly thought that Lenihan was going to resign voluntarily. They met again after lunch. ‘This time Mr Haughey was pushing resignation harder than before,' Lenihan noted. ‘He handed me a three page prepared resignation statement.'

Brian promised to give Charlie his answer before five o'clock. When he did it was a refusal. ‘If I resigned, my credibility and reputation would be destroyed,' Lenihan felt.

That evening Ahern and Pádraig Flynn were sent to persuade him, but he refused to meet them. At that point, Haughey had apparently resigned himself to the idea that the government would fall, because he did not believe that he could weather the storm within the party if he sacked Lenihan, but then came word of a poll to be published in the
Irish Independent
next day.

The survey found that Lenihan was trailing very badly, with just 31% support against 51% for Mary Robinson. Faced with such figures, it was obvious that fighting a general election so that Lenihan could retain his job would be extremely risky, and there is nothing more likely to concentrate the minds of politicians than the possibility of losing their seats. When the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party met next morning Charlie found that it would be safe to dump Lenihan. The meeting expressed confidence in the Taoiseach to do as he thought fit. Word was passed to the Progressive Democrats that Lenihan would be given the choice of resigning or being dismissed.