Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy (35 page)

At one point during Haughey's testimony, McCracken noted that the former Taoiseach admitted that he had received financial statements from Traynor. ‘The clear impression is that despite his earlier denials, Haughey had in fact received statements dealing with his accounts which he read and noted, and therefore he did not ask about his affairs, because he was already aware of them.' The judge went on to state that ‘the tribunal thinks it probable that he was at all times aware that money was being held for his benefit in Ansbacher Cayman Limited.'

‘While he may not have known the exact sums of money which he was spending,' McCracken argued, ‘he must have known that large sums of money were being spent on his behalf, despite his denial of having a lavish lifestyle.'

The judge stopped short of actually accusing Haughey of perjury as that would be a judgment for a court of law. The clear implications of the report were that Haughey had obstructed the work of the tribunal and perjured himself. ‘It is not for the tribunal to determine whether Mr Charles Haughey should be prosecuted,' McCracken wrote. ‘This is a matter for the director of public prosecutions,' but he added rather pointedly ‘that the circumstances warrant the papers in the matter being sent to the director of public prosecutions for his consideration as to whether there ought to be a prosecution, and the tribunal intends to do so.'

In the aftermath of the McCracken report, two more judicial tribunals were set up under high court judges to investigate allegations of political corruption. One tribunal under Michael Moriarty was to investigate the Ansbacher and related payments to politicians, while the second tribunal under Fergus Flood, was to investigate corruption in relation to the planning process, which included allegations of payments to politicians.

The other tribunals exposed further payments not only to Haughey but also to some of his cabinet appointees. This form of sleaze reached its nadir in June 1989 when, after being introduced to members of the cabinet, the builder Tom Gilmartin was asked by a Fianna Fáil functionary to deposit £5 million in an offshore account for the party.

‘You people make the effing Mafia look like monks!' Gilmartin exclaimed.

‘You could end up in the Liffey for that statement,'the functionary replied.

Haughey was billed for £2 millions by the revenue commissioners for his failure to pay income tax on the money provided for him by Ben Dunne, but he appealed the assessment. The case was heard in camera in October 1998 before Ronan Kelly, an appeals commissioner. His task was to sit independently of the revenue commissioners to evaluate the assessment and decide whether it should stand, be reduced, or dismissed.

The revenue commissioners insisted that the McCracken report identified Ben Dunne as the donor of £1.3m given to Haughey. Off-shore companies paid the money – Equifex Trust Corporation, registered in Zug, Switzerland, which forwarded £621,000 sterling, and Tutbury, a company in the Isle of Man, which provided £410,000 sterling. A further £182,650 sterling was provided by Dunnes Stores in Bangor, Northern Ireland. Haughey's legal team contended that, in law, the actual donors were the off-shore companies from which Dunnes Stores withdrew the money for the benefit of the former Taoiseach. The shareholders of the companies would be the actual donors, but, as these were not identified, the appeals commissioner Ronan Kelly had no real option but to conclude that the money came from outside the state and was not therefore liable to income tax under existing laws.

When the decision was announced on 15 December 1998, it was greeted with a storm of protests. The revenue commissioners indicated that they would be appealing the finding to the circuit court, where the proceedings would be open to the public.

The revenue commissioners lodged an appeal to the circuit court against the verdict of the appeals commissioner in essentially dismissing the £2 million tax assessment against Haughey. Moreover, he had been returned for trial in March 2000 on charges of obstructing the McCracken tribunal. If convicted, he could have been fined £10,000 and sentenced to two years in jail, but a series of events conspired to postpone and eventually prevent the trial.

For more than 30 years Gay Byrne's
Late Late Show
had been the most popular television programme on RTÉ, before his decision to retire in 1999. The second last programme on 14 May 1999 featured Terry Keane, who raised many eyebrows by talking openly about her 27-year affair with Haughey. By then, even the ‘dogs in the street' knew about that affair, according to Byrne.

She had been making snide references to the affair in her column in the
Sunday Independent
over the years, and it had been parodied week after week on
Scrap Saturday
, a popular comedy radio programme. She said she was telling her story because Kevin O'Connor was bringing out a book,
Sweetie
, which she said would distort the affair. She said she was motivated by a desire to ensure that the relationship was accurately depicted as ‘a genuine love affair.'

‘I hear from people who had seen the script that it was a very loveless relationship, punctuated only by expensive dinners or trips on yachts,' she explained. ‘It wasn't like that. I wanted to show that it really was love.'

Although he was ‘a consummate politician, he was not consumed by politics,' according to Terry Keane, a journalist who began a torrid affair with him. ‘I viewed Charlie as a bit of a wide boy with a terrible reputation as a womaniser,' she wrote. ‘There was a whole series of Charlie stories, some true, some false and some frankly lurid.' She began her affair with him on 17 January 1972 at Club Elizabeth, a nightclub in Leeson Street that was frequented by politicians. At the time, she was in her early thirties, the fashion editor of the
Sunday Press
and temporarily separated from her lawyer husband.

She was in company with Haughey, whom she teased and treated rather contemptuously. ‘I don't have to put up with this,' he finally snapped in exasperation. ‘I'm going home.'

‘Don't go,' Terry responded. ‘I'll dance with you instead.'

‘There was some sort of empathy,' she later explained. ‘I felt that I would also be like that if I wasn't the centre of attention. I suddenly thought: “He's attractive”. He oozed sex appeal and had the most beautiful mouth of anybody I 'd ever seen.'

After that night, he invited her to London, where they stayed in an apartment owned by his friend John Byrne, the property developer. That was the first of a number of foreign trips. During one of their early trips to London, he introduced her to ‘Cristal' champagne. As the waiter was returning with a bottle of the expensive wine, a customer checked the vintage, much to the indignation of Haughey.

'Who's that fucker and what is he doing with my champagne?' he snapped.

‘I couldn't stop laughing: the facade of sophistication demolished at a stroke,' she noted. ‘But that's Charlie'. That was the side of him that the people with old money sneered at and denigrated him as
nouveau riche.

At the time Haughey was at low point in his political career, being shunned by politicians he had previously considered friends. He was venomous about the arms crisis, feeling that he had been victimised, and much of that venom was reserved for Lynch. There was no doubt he was implicated but the Taoiseach had obviously turned a blind eye and then made him the scapegoat, dismissing him from the cabinet while he was still in hospital after his riding accident. ‘He didn't even have the decency to wait until I was back on my feet', Haughey would often complain.

The short fellow still had a firm conviction that he would be Taoiseach one day, and he talked to Terry for hours about how he was going to make his way back, this time to the very top. She found him exciting and great fun to be with.

‘We were waltzing off to London and Paris all the time for trysts,' she wrote. France was Haughey's favourite. Napoleon, the little emperor who up-ended all of Europe, was ‘his hero and inspiration,' according to her. Haughey loved French things, wines, restaurants, clothes, architecture and history. In the coming years, they would stay in various places in France and Germany without worry, but Haughey was leery of London, because of the danger of being outed by the tabloid press. He and Terry were not discreet about their affair, especially in Dublin, where it was an open secret among journalists. The two of them were married to other people. She got back together with her husband for some time, but throughout it all she and Haughey frequently met at different Dublin hotels, such as the Russell, Hibernian and Sachs, where they often dined or drank openly. There were numerous stories of tiffs between them; most were probably apocryphal. If she threw as many glasses of champagne in his face as rumoured, she would have drenched half of Dublin, not to mention all the dinners she supposedly dumped in his lap. She wrote about one night when she ordered him out of her car in Merrion Street after he had too much to drink. He telephoned her next day.

‘So you got home,' she said.

‘Of course,' he replied. ‘I met some citizens who carried me on their shoulders and were thrilled for the opportunity.' This was Charlie's natural arrogance. Within a month of the start of the affair, he was already on the road to political recovery.

He was actually amused when
Private Eye
mentioned the affair. He called Frank Dunlop to get a copy of the magazine. And he doubled up with laughter when he began reading it. ‘Jasus, Frank, she'll go fuckin' bananas when she reads this'. He pointed to a reference to ‘the aging Terry Keane'.

Although she wafted on about Haughey's achievements, the audience at the
Late Late Show
did not seem inclined to believe that he ever did anything worthwhile. ‘They have forgotten all the good things he has done,' she said. ‘When Ireland was a begging bowl, Charlie went out and eyeballed people in Europe and the world.'

She felt he was being treated unfairly and resented it when somebody in the audience suggested that Haughey had done as much damage to politics as the paedophile priest, Fr Brendan Smyth, had done to the Catholic Church in Ireland. ‘Brendan Smyth buggered little boys,' Keane said. ‘Charlie has never done that. Charlie took money from people who were very willing to give it to him so that he would go out and not have to worry about his own finances, that he could go and run the country, which he did brilliantly and brought us the Celtic Tiger and the prosperity we have today,' she argued. She was crediting him with too much, but then others were not giving him any credit at all.

Over the years, so many rumours about Haughey turned out to be untrue that there were still some who doubted Terry Keane's story. For instance, there was the totally unfounded story that Haughey had an affair with Emer O'Kelly of RTÉ. She first heard the story in 1980, but it was not until the wake of the Keane exposé that she found an opportunity to deny the story. There was also another false story that did the rounds for decades about how Eamonn Andrews had supposedly given Haughey a right hammering one night in the 1960s. One version of the story was that he had made a pass at Eamonn's wife, Gráinne. This supposedly happened at different places – at Haughey's home, at the Gresham Hotel, or at Jury's Hotel, depending on who was telling the story.

Andrews and his wife did attend a party at Haughey's home before he moved to Kinsealy. ‘Charlie received us personally and graciously, as was his wont,' Andrews recalled. ‘And he did make an innocent pass at Gráinne, who was looking particularly fetching. Both she and I would have been somewhat peeved had he not. But it was hardly the sort of pass to warrant a punch on the nose.'

The story persisted until Andrews finally became exasperated when it was repeated in the
News of the World
. He sued for libel and secured ‘a few thousand pounds and an apology in open court'. On returning to Dublin, Andrews invited Haughey to his house for a champagne celebration.

‘I'll come,' Haughey said, ‘provided it's Dom Perignon!'

It was, and Haughey came. Andrews had purchased some sixty copies of the offending newspaper and he made a carpet of those all the way in from the doorway. The rumour persisted, but at least it had financed a good party.

Unfounded rumours about Haughey's famous fall from the horse in 1970 also persisted. Over a quarter of a century later twisted versions of that story were still being told. It was actually reported that Haughey was beaten close to death by the father and brother of a young woman after they supposedly caught him in bed with her, upstairs in the Grasshopper Inn in Clonee, Co. Meath. But there was no truth to the story.

Haughey's behaviour tended to encourage some of the rumours. In 1991 when he officiated at the start of the Dingle Regatta, he was still Taoiseach. He arrived in Dingle on the
Celtic Mist
, clearly in a happy mood. It had just been raining and there was a crew of young women in one race. The Taoiseach called out to them, ‘Are ye'r knickers wet?'

He then gave an interview to a young woman reporter. ‘I suppose,' he said at the end of the interview, ‘a ride would be out of the question!'

There was a young male photographer with her at the time, so this was obviously not a proposition. It was Haughey's way of saying to the young people that he was still ‘with it'. Some people would say, no doubt, that his behaviour was confirmation of the old Irish adage, ‘the older the goat, the giddier!'

‘He is not an oil painting – never was,' Joanne McElgunn wrote in the
Sunday Independent
. ‘Women were metal and he was a powerful magnet.' He tended to flirt shamelessly, and they loved it.

‘Once C. J. patted my bottom,' McElgunn continued. ‘The company and the consumption of two gins and tonic, might just have saved him from the sharp edge of my tongue. In retrospect, I was strangely flattered. I know many women with whom he had only shaken hands.'