Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (28 page)

The drama was being played out behind the scenes as the Dáil debate on the no confidence motion began. Charlie took the offensive. ‘I would rather, any day, have Brian Lenihan who would, for whatever reason, give an impulsive inaccurate version of something that happened eight years ago, than a group of Fine Gael conspirators who, with a cold ruthless determination, planned to trap and destroy a decent man,' he said. ‘There is not the slightest doubt that Brian Lenihan did not speak to President Hillery on the telephone on that night of January 27, 1982. In fact, President Hillery did not speak on the telephone to anyone in Fianna Fáil that night. The Tánaiste was carefully set up by Fine Gael, with the willing collaboration of a Fine Gael activist, in a way that breached the ethics of research.'

Charlie was personally stung by the recent accusations that he had actually threatened the army officer at the Aras over the telephone that night. This was something that only came out during the latest controversy. The opposition was charging that this was a criminal offence and should be investigated. ‘My father was an army officer,' Charlie declared, his voice vibrating with emotion. ‘I myself have been an officer in the defence forces. I was brought up to believe in the integrity of our defence forces and have the highest respect for them. I would never, and never have, insulted an army officer in any way, and I never will. I reject that allegation with contempt and I ask why is it being brought up now after eight years. Why is it being raised now and being cast at me in this way?

‘The people opposite, who are making this allegation, have been in government themselves,' Charlie continued. ‘They had all the records at their disposal. They knew all about the gossip and chat going on since 1982. Why did they not investigate it? They did not because they knew it was a tissue of lies and a fabrication and that is what I brand it here in this House.'

Dick Spring made a virulent speech, which many people found offensive. ‘This debate is not about Brian Lenihan when it is all boiled down,' he said. ‘This debate, essentially, is about the evil spirit that controls one political party in the Republic. And it is about the way in which that spirit has begun to corrupt the entire political system in our country. This is a debate about greed for office, about disregard for truth, and about contempt for political standards. It is a debate about the way in which a once great party has been brought to its knees by the grasping acquisitiveness of its leader. It is ultimately a debate about the cancer that is eating away at our body politic – and the virus which has caused that cancer, An Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey.'

Shortly after six o'clock Lenihan telephoned Charlie. It was a short call lasting little over a minute. At the outset Charlie asked if he intended to resign.

‘No,' Lenihan replied.

‘It would have helped your campaign you know.'

‘We'll agree to differ on that.'

‘Brian Lenihan has been a friend, a loyal and trusted colleague with whom I have served in the Dáil for well over a quarter of a century,' Charlie told the Dáil minutes later. ‘Most people in this House will understand that what I have to do I do with great sadness and great sorrow.' Lenihan had failed to comply with the request for his resignation. ‘Accordingly,' Charlie added, ‘I propose to exercise my constitutional prerogative and advise the president to terminate his appointment as a member of the government.'

‘Charlie won't be able to live with this,' Chris Glennon of the
Irish Independent
was told by a seasoned backbencher, who predicted that the Boss would ‘probably stand down in a few months'.

Charlie was castigated for abandoning his old friend, but in this instance he really had little choice. He made mistakes in the affair, but his biggest mistakes were not that he did not give Brian enough support, but that he overstepped the bounds of propriety in the way in which he supported him – by his attacks on Garret FitzGerald and Duffy, as well as his statement to the press at Dublin airport.

Lenihan had put his own personal considerations before the government, and the party. It was he who got into the mess. He really had only himself to blame, but he tried to blame a whole range of people from Charlie, to FitzGerald, to Duffy and the
Irish Times
. His subsequent explanation about being on strong drugs and not remembering the Duffy interview was both plausible and believable, but his real problem was in denying that calls had been made to the Aras in the first place. There would have been no controversy had he told the truth on
Questions and Answers
.

There was nothing wrong about informing the president that Fianna Fáil was ready to form a government. If Fine Gael were contending that Paddy Hillery was incapable of making an independent decision after talking to anyone, that would have been even more insulting than trying to contact him.

Lenihan's dismissal provoked a strong reaction from the grassroots of the party and a great wave of support for him. He began to regain lost ground by leaps and bounds and might even have turned about the election had it not been for some unfortunate remarks by Pádraig Flynn during a radio programme on which he seemed to question Mary Robinson's suitability as a wife and a mother. That put paid to whatever chance Lenihan had. He did head the poll with 44.1% of the vote, against Mary Robinson's 38.9% but she got 76.7% of Austin Currie's transfers to win by over 86,500 votes. For the first time in the history of the state, Fianna Fáil had failed to get its man into the presidency.

Tension ran high within the party afterwards, but the expected challenge to Charlie's leadership never materialised. It was not until a year later in the midst of a series of business scandals that an attempt was made to topple him and then Brian Lenihan was among the first to come out openly in support of the man who had fired him.

In May 1991 when the
World in Action
programme highlighted alleged abuses of the beef intervention system by Larry Goodman's companies, the Progressive Democrats demanded a judicial inquiry. A similar demand the previous year had been denied by the Fianna Fáil government, but now the party was in coalition and Charlie had no choice. He conceded.

At the time he was riding high in the polls, enjoying a 56% favourable rating. Although his popularity was running well ahead of his party, he was nevertheless blamed by many people when Fianna Fáil fared comparatively badly in both the local and European elections the following month. And things went further wrong in the early autumn with the eruption of a whole series of financial controversies, beginning with the Greencore scandal.

In 1987 the Irish Sugar Company – or Greencore as it would become known following privatisation in 1991 – gave an interest-free loan of £1 million to four of its executives in order to purchase a shareholding in Sugar Distributors. Eleven months later Irish Sugar bought their shareholding for over £8 million – a profit of over £7 million in just eleven months for a mere personal outlay of £10,000 each.

When the whole transaction came to light at the beginning of September 1991, Chris Comerford, the company's chief executive, was persuaded to retire from Greencore, but not before negotiating a golden handshake worth about £1.5 for himself. News of this exacerbated the public outrage, and gradually a whole series of different business scandals came to the fore.

Questions were quickly raised about transactions regarding the acquisition of a new headquarters site for Telecom Éireann as well as the purchase of the old teachers' training college at Carysfort as a graduate business school for University College, Dublin. There were also controversies over a sewer pipe laid through Charlie's estate in Kinsealy, the spending of over £166,000 by the Electricity Supply Board on wind experiments on his island off the south-west coast, and the leaking of information to a company partly owned by one of Charlie's sons.

The Telecom controversy arose following reports that Michael Smurfit, the chairman of the board of Telecom Éireann, had a financial stake in United Property Holdings (UPH), which once owned the building purchased for a new headquarters for Telecom Éireann. He had a 10% share in UPH, a property development company mainly owned by Dermot Desmond, the founder and chief executive of National City Brokers (NCB), which had handled the privatisation of Greencore and had recently been retained to advise on the privatisation of Telecom Éireann. UPH had purchased the controversial site for £4.4 million and then sold shortly afterwards for £6.4 million. Dermot Desmond helped Hoddle Investments to acquire the building, which was then sold to Telecom for £9.4 million. It had more than doubled in price at a time when property values were actually dropping.

Examining the various business controversies is beyond the scope of this study, except in as much as Charlie was dragged into the story. He was known to have been friendly with people like Goodman, Desmond, Smurfit and Bernie Cahill, who was not only the chairman of the board of Greencore but also of Aer Lingus and Feltrim, a mining company largely owned by Charlie's son, Conor. These people were part of what was being called the Golden Circle – a group of top businessmen for whom the government seemed particularly facilitory.

As top businessmen with proven track records in having vitalised their companies, they were probably the country's best Irish hope of providing extra employment. Hence it was natural that the Taoiseach should have extensive contacts with them. Nevertheless he appeared to try to distance himself from them in his latest radio interview.

Desmond was just a ‘business friend' as opposed to a ‘personal friend', Charlie contended. He proceeded to call on him, Smurfit, and Seamus Páircéir, the chief executive of UPH and chairman of the Custom House Docks Authority, ‘to stand aside' while the various controversies were being investigated. In each instance he was careful to stress that he was not implying that any one of them had done anything wrong. ‘I say all that without any implication, the slightest scintilla or suggestion that there is anything wrong,' he emphasised.

Nine years earlier he had been roundly denounced for not asking the attorney-general to step aside when the MacArthur affair broke. Now that he was asking these people to stand aside, he was castigated because he did not forewarn them of his intention. No matter what he did, his opponents were going to criticise him for doing the wrong thing.

Next day he was drawn further into the growing list of controversies when Nora Owen of Fine Gael raised questions about a sewer pipe that had recently been laid through his Kinsealy estate by Dublin County Council, reportedly to service some nearby cottages. The work, which cost £78,000, had been deemed unnecessary by the council in 1985; so there were therefore some legitimate questions that needed to be answered. But Owen proceeded to hype up the affair in the Dáil by charging that this was not the first time that Charlie had been involved in this kind of controversy.

‘After all, hasn't he experienced this before on his landholding on the outskirts of Dublin in the Donaghmede area in the late 1960s?' she said. ‘In that instance, rumours and stories abound of undue pressure put on corporation engineers to extend pipes on to his land. Whether or not these rumours or allegations are true, the facts speak for themselves. The Taoiseach's former land was rezoned, thereby greatly inflating the value of the land, and many hundreds of houses are now built on that land. One can be forgiven for sensing a touch of
déjà vu!'

The controversy over Charlie's land, which had been an election issue in 1969, had initially been prompted by charges that he had supposedly benefited from recent tax legislation introduced by himself, but that charge was convincingly discredited at the time. There were also intimations that there was something immoral about the way the value of the property had appreciated from £50,000 to a little over £200,000 in just ten years, but while that kind of jump in value seemed extreme in relation to previous decades, it was actually quite modest when compared to either of the next two decades.

The controversy surrounding the land had nothing to do with extending pipes in 1969. It seemed that rumours were growing with time. Yet nobody in the media challenged Owen's extravagant claims, which were reproduced
verbatim
in the
Sunday Tribune,
even though she did not cite one shred of evidence to support them.

A further controversy followed after the disclosure that NCB had fouled up after being commissioned in 1986 to do some work for Irish Helicopters, a subsidiary of Aer Lingus. A report containing confidential information supplied to NCB by the Aer Lingus subsidiary was mailed to a rival firm, Celtic Helicopters. Due to a postal error, however, the material was delivered to Irish Helicopters. That had been resolved quietly between the various companies some time ago, but suddenly it became the subject of public controversy, no doubt because Celtic Helicopters was partly owned by Charlie's son, Ciarán.

‘The Taoiseach must say if he had any hand in inducing Mr Desmond of NCB to attempt to pass on this information to his son's company,' John Bruton demanded under the protection of Dáil privilege. As a result the media were able to highlight the affair in a way that suggested that the whole thing may have been the result of Desmond's friendship with the Haugheys. It was ironic that NCB had actually been hired while the FitzGerald government was in power. There was no evidence that Desmond was personally involved, but this did not deter Bruton or the media. Some of them asked whimsically if Charlie – having redefined his friendship with Desmond – was about to redefine his relationship with his son, Ciarán.

When controversy erupted over the purchase of Carysfort, Charlie insisted that the place had been bought at the instigation of the UCD authorities. ‘UCD proposed to us that they acquire Carysfort,' he emphasised during his radio interview on 22 September. ‘UCD carried out an examination of Carysfort through their own mechanism and decided that the asking price for it was great value.'