Charles Haughey: Waiting Watching and Waiting

  • 30 November 1981
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The Fianna Fail leader is immobilized on his front bench on policy and on the future of his party. Like an arthritic vulture he sits poised on the opposition benches waiting for government to fall down dead. By Olivia O'Leary.

If you walk into the Dail chamber during any sitting day you will note the permanent fixtures: the busts of the 1916 signatories, the ushers, the Ceann Comhairle, the essential government spokesman and at the near end of the opposition front bench the constant brooding figure of Fianna Fail leader Charles J. Haughey. He sits there day after long day, watching for the independents who may turn tail, for the act of God which may absent crucial government votes, waiting . . . watching . . . waiting.

To retire to lick his wounds, indeed to retire just to think it out again would be to admit defeat, and Mr. Haughey has never admitted to anything of the kind. As all the world now knows, Mr. Haughey “was prevented only from being the government of the country by a few quirks of the proportional representation system and the erratic behaviour of a few independent deputies”.

There's an endearing dottiness about that statement, at least there would be if his quixotic eminence, Sean Dublin Bay Loftus, had uttered it. But coming from the leader of the country's biggest party, it's the sort of manic self- delusion which keeps a whole party constantly in the ring, flailing tiredly at any discernible target, and missing more often than not, because the have no policies that cannot be changed instantly to suit the demands of reactive opposition, and no strategy beyond the three line whip.

Parliamentary party meetings these days don't last very long — a recent one lasted half an hour compared with the two and three hour meetings of Lynch and Lemass days. “There is no discussion and TDs are afraid to talk” said one disgruntled member. “The party isn't breathing” said another. “Haughey says on each issue: this is how it is. Lynch and Lemass would let everyone have his say, go away and then come back, maybe the following week, with their considered view. At one half an hour meeting recently, Haughey intervened no less than six times. He's not letting the party breathe”.

The parliamentary party, say backbenchers, doesn't discuss policy. The frontbench rarely discusses policy.

Tactical stances are adopted on issues of liberal reform which might prove difficult for the government, and these seem to be decided by Mr. Haughey with a group of his closest associates including Ray McSharry and Albert Reynolds. The removal of capital punishment — not at this time. Ending the ban on divorce — not at this time. And Fianna Fail, as Niall Andrews pointed out determinedly on a recent television programme, does not believe in free votes.

But it is on the economy and on Northern Ireland that deputies are most at sea, and on both these fronts Haughey faces determined opposition from some of the brightest and most experienced members of his party. He diminished rather than defended his own real achievement, the development of a new Anglo-Irish arrangement by the unseemly haste with which he poured scorn on Garret FitzGerald's attempts to build on the Haughey foundations.

And he brought into question Fianna Fail's established policy of unity by consent in his vital need to prove that his agreement with Mrs. Thatcher that constitutional change in Northern Ireland would “come about only” by consent, did not recognise the Northern Protestant veto as much as did Garret FitzGerald's acceptance that constitutional change would “require” consent.

But it is his handling of the country's finances, particularly in the long six month run up to the general election, and his need now to defend that record, that leaves his party uneasy and in some cases openly embarrassed.

His belt-tightening television address of February 1980 was given grudging commendation even from his critics within the party. But having recognised the realities, Haughey didn'tact accordingly. The man who was to deal decisively with the economy was not ready to risk the brave if unpopular stance on public sector pay which Jack Lynch's government was ready to take during the 1979 postal strike. Industrial peace in the public sector was bought at an ever increasing rate, foreign borrowing mounted recklessly. By the end of 1980 with a spring election in the offing, the cabinet were plunged into a desperate exercise to cut the estimates.

Once again, avoiding the realities, they underestimated by £485 million: for instance a 30% underestimation for Garda pay, a 28% underestimation for army pay, and a massive 44.6% short on the social welfare budget.

In the social welfare area, for instance, Dr. Michael Woods provided for a dole queue of 106,000 when the unemployment level at the time was 110,000 and it was clear that the recession would further increase that figure. Officials in the Department of Finance were horrified when Gene FitzGerald arrived back from the final estimates meeting of the cabinet in January 1981 to tell them to cut everything by 5%. They knew what this meant was a deliberate decision to provide finance for only nine months of the c year. It wasn't the attitude they had come to expect from either George Colley or even Michael O'Kennedy.

Certain cabinet ministers, no friends of Haughey's, fought their corners and insisted on providing fully for their departments — notably Des O'Malley in Industry and Commerce, and George Colley in Energy. These senior members of Haughey's administration have pointedly failed to take part in any financial debate since the election in which they might be expected to defend the last eighteen months of the Fianna Fail government's financial record. As the election was postponed to summer from spring, and the polls became less favour able, the apportioning of government-controlled funds became even more questionable.

Deciding that his plaque in Castlebar might not be a sufficient monument to him in the West, at least not one which would have the same electoral effect as an international airport, Haughey conferred with the indefati gable Monsignor James Horan about an airport for Knock. Right from the start the Department of Finance raised objections but initial approval was given in September 1980. At the time officials in the Department were soothed it seems by Gene FitzGerald understanding from the Taoiseach, and a memo on the department files reports this, that what Haughey had in min for Knock was a grass strip.

But the grass strip with which Gene reassured his officials and the £8 million plan approved by Haughey's cabinet last April represent a gap as wide as that between fiscal probity and electoral opportunity. There was also the small matter of there being no formal pcevii for the £8 million. Indeed the coalition government, who seem to be as terrified ofjettisoning Knock as Haughey was deter mined to provide it, had to provide the first £2 million in the July budget for the earthworks already under way.

And after the April approval for Knock, there was the mad dash up to the May election in which Ministers were announcing the approval of sports centres around the country as though fitness had replaced unity as the party's first national aim. With the North of the Liffey area well looked after, and the rest scattered around the country, £3.4 million of sports centres were approved, many of them in the weeks running up to the election. Proper project plans were not submitted for a number of them, and sometimes approval was given in a to say the least of it most unorthodox way, by means of a telephone call approving a constituency announcement. And where was the money to come from? From the tripartite job-creation fund to which the unions, employers and government contribute — next year's fund, mind, you, not even this year's. One wonders whether in future employers or unions will be eager to contribute to a fund so gaily disposed of by the government of the day.

The painting of the economic picture at election time involved an amount of artistic licence. The mortgage subsidies, increased food subsidies, and frozen CIE and ESB prices, in the spring, costing about £100 million, produced an inflation rate of 2'/2% for the relevant quarter.

Multiplying by four Mr. Haughey arrived at an infla tion rate of 10%, a dazzling exercise in arithmetical virtuosity and hard neck. And what period did this 10% rate purport to represent? It was “the inflation rate”, he said solemnly. The annual May to May figure was in fact 17%, but Mr. Haughey's figures were proved wrong even for the February to May 1981 time capsule in which he preferred to isolate his “inflation rate”. He had to admit after the election that the rate for the period was over 3% and suggested that his civil servants had given him the wrong information. “It transpires” he said “that there was a miscalculation.”

It transpires that there was also a miscalculation on the budget deficit. Haughey admitted before the election that the deficit was running higher than the £500 million targeted at the beginning of the year, but that it was nothing near the £800 million forecast by the opposition. In fact the deficit at the end of the year, says the Department of Finance, will now be £950 million.

T he only consistent economic line to emerge from Fianna Fail before and since the election is that borrowing is good, borrowing is necessary, and indeed that the measure of a government's humanity and commitment to keeping people in jobs, is the size of its public sector debt. The line is chanted obediently by Haughey himself,Gene Fitz Gerald, Albert Reynolds, Michael Woods, though to a lesser extent by Ray McSharry who has been confining himself to agriculture.

It also has such fine exponents as Terry Leydon, Padraig Flynn, Sean Keegan, but not Molloy, Brennan, or O'Donoghue who makes little secret of the fact that Haughey's hairshirt address of February 1980 is the line he would have preferred to pursue.
But it was Desmond O'Malley, in a hitherto almost unpublished speech in UCD last month, who voiced the most trenchant criticism of the borrow and be damned policy and public sector job creation policy. Keynes' (and we might add in the recent past Charlie Haughey's) pro position that extra government investment necessarily raises output and employment, he said, has a major weak ness especially in Ireland — it ignores the importance of international trade.

It may be acceptable if applied in the world as a whole, he said, but in the real world all countries do not act in unison.

“We can act in isolation, as it were, and increase expenditure if at the same time we increase taxation to balance the increased expenditure. But as taxes and public expenditure rise, a growing percentage of the labour force becomes dependent for its employment on the taxes paid by those workers who are not in tax- dependent public sector jobs. However, if workers resist the payment of higher taxes to keep others in employment the result will be accelerating inflation and a profits squeeze, increasing still further the need for more tax- dependent jobs”.

This, indicated Mr. O'Malley, was what had happened in Ireland: that we were, through deficit budgeting, avoid ing the level of taxation which would be commensurate with the number of public sector jobs we have provided. This, he said, could all too easily lead to a spiral where extra tax-dependent job creation resulted in the creation of fewer self-financing jobs in the private sector, with the result that more and more tax-dependent jobs are needed, raising the required tax rates still further and cutting job creation in industry and commerce which are the areas that are self-financing.

And that is why Des O'Malley and his friends (notably Deputy Seamus Brennan in his maiden speech last week) have not joined in Fianna Fail's demand for a continuation of government investment from non-existent funds, and the expansion of public sector jobs.

Martin O'Donoghue, who was the architect one must point out of the priming of the pump policy in 1977 and indeed the man who then advocated expansion of public sector jobs, has confined his Dail contributions to some revealing parliamentary questions. Only this month, he asked a series of questions on the extent to which economic planning and development structure still existed in the Department of Finance, and the answer revealed the extent to which Haughey had dismantled any such structures, and brought a coalition compliment to Dr. O'Donoghue's original planning structures and a promise to reintroduce some of them. Martin looks after his record. Indeed on radio twice recently, on the national pay talks Martin has criticised the present government for its lack of economic planning structures.

When asked about the dismantling of the Department of Economic Planning and Development by his own leader, Martin simply smiled and refused to comment. But Martin has been spreading the word in the party of the need for a detailed economic policy, for more substantive opposition He even, heresy of heresies, suggested at a recent parliamentary meeting that there might be some merit in Peter Barry's notion that charges could be made for some local authority services, thereby giving the councils some revenue. Many in the party agreed with him. Pleasant, helpful, amiable, O'Donoghue is making it very difficult for Haughey not to bring him back on the front bench. Martin has outgrown the think-tank days now; if that was the role in mind for him.

He'd not take the praise or the blame for anyone else's election fortunes. He'd rather be out there batting himself.

T he differences between Haughey and his critics on Northern Ireland policy have become more defined since he lost the election. Despite his emphasis on the 32 county solution rather than Jack Lynch's readiness to accept an agreed internal solution, Haughey included in most of his speeches the friendly hand to unionists, the acceptance of their fears, and the promise that all would be well for them in a united Ireland. But since June his public comments have grown more strident in their identification with the plight of the Northern minority and more critical of the unionists. Reacting (Mr. Haughey has done little else since June) to Garret FitzGerald's comments about a constitutional crusade, he said on radio: There had been “too much wishy-washy talk of appeasing unionists and all that” “Why doesn't Dr. FitzGerald refer to the fact that the unionists in Northern Ireland won't permit children in Northern Ireland to have swings on a Sunday? Why do we have to do all the reparation and the self- abasement and excusing for our existence?”

Speaking in the Dail on the death of Robert Bradford he pointedly omitted to refer to the IRA and added in the names of Catholics who had been killed.

Replying to the Taoiseach's statement on the Anglo Irish summit in London, Haughey accused FitzGerald roundly of being unaware of the anxieties and aspirations “of those in the North who adhere to the nationalist tradition”. The unionist view was constantly accommodated but the views of the nationalist minority were hardly ever adverted to. “What is virtually ignored is the biggest source of tension on this island, the treatment of the nationalist minority of the North.” Increasing attention would have to be given to them, he said, or they would be come alienated and would more and more regard them selves as being let down by those in the Republic from whom they might have expected much more understanding and support.

When Seamus Brennan made it known to Southside that be would be telling the party's Cork Youth conference that it was time to sketch out our idea of a united Ireland, and to consider constitutional change which would make it possible for unionists to feel at home in our society, Haughey stepped in.

He made Brennan scrap the speech. “Sketching out” proposed united Irelands, he indicated to the conference later, was a paper exercise without the unionists. On the Anglo-Irish summit, he wasn't going to give anything away to the government. He raised expectations in a tele vision interview beforehand, was then understandably “deeply disappointed”. There were many in the party who didn't find it particularly edifying to see Haughey so hungry to score political points which might jeopardise a delicate exercise in Irish and Anglo-Irish relations which he himself had initiated.

And then there was the extraordinary matter of the “requires” versus the “come about onlys”.

Not visible to the naked eye, the hairsbreadth distinc tion is between Haughey's Anglo-Irish communique of 1980 which said constitutional change in the North would “come about only” with Northern majority consent, and Garret FitzGerald's Anglo-Irish communique which said that such change would “require” consent. His version meant that consent would be only a part of the solution, while Garret, he said, made it a prerequisite. Was he diluting the party policy on unity by consent, or, in the 1921 language into which this whole exchange seems to have fallen, did he simply not consider FitzGerald a sufficient plenipotentiary?

The distinction so evident to Mr. Haughey and so central to his condemnation of the London summit, has not been taken up eagerly by other members of the party most of whom don't understand it. Indeed Mr. Brian Lenihan, that consummate taker of the public pulse, ignored it completely when he appeared on television that same evening. Mr. Lenihan chose instead to hit the only target he could actually see —the failure to set up, even in principle, the parliamentary tier of the Anglo-Irish council. Indeed, before the smoke had cleared from the bitter exchange of fire between their two party leaders in the Dail, Brian Lenihan and Jim Dooge had agreed to co operate in a reasonable, low-key television chat. Brian left h double-barrelled shotgun at home, and not entirely, one gathers, from absent-mindedness.

Brian is a survivor. Brian stays loyal. Long live the 1 whoever he may be. But Haughey's dismissive yes will hardly be forgotten by a man who, whatever about his readiness to play the political game to the full, is na fallingly courteous. It has not gone unnoticed by the delegations to Haughey as Taoiseach, including 1k SDLP, that Brian was treated with scant regard. And the sharp dressing down Haughey gave him in front of his civil servants in London after Margaret Thatcher i&ained to Haughey of Brian's insistence that the Anglo-Irish studies would deal with “constitutional” matters, will not have warmed his heart.

“Haughey forgets we're a party of the eighties and not the sixties. The old rural nationalist line, the ‘trust us we know more about government' approach is not going to appeal to the young urban voter, Young people want a coherent economic philosophy. They want a more coherent line on Northern Ireland than the ‘we hate England' line” said a Parliamentary Party member. “We have a 50% vote in the West of Ireland and the South but only 42% in Dublin where the real battle is, where the new voters are, where there is going to be the real increase in seats”.

Even parliamentary tactics are thoughtless. If Haughey wants to vote the government down, he's not going to do it without the independents, and making life as difficult as possible for the independents is hardly wise. The attacks on Kemmy and Browne are inevitable. A personal hatred of Charlie Haughey accounts for quite a deal of their government support. But Sherlock, Loftus and Blaney will hardly thank Fianna Fail for constant refusal to agree. to speaking time for the independents, for opposing granting them private members time, and right of reply to Taoiseach's statements. Neither has the demand for constant attendance been applied equally within Fianna Fail itself. Charlie supporters, complain backbenchers, miss votes with impunity; others get no quarter. Liam Aylward and Sean French missed an important vote the other day because they were in Brussels. They were mildly admonished. Had it been O'Donoghue or Andrews or Molloy, said the backbenchers, it would have been a different matter.

It is difficult to say how strong Haughey would be within the parliamentary party in the event of an attempted putsch. There are about a dozen established anti-Haugheyites: O'Mal ley, Colley, Brennan, Molloy, Kenneally, David Andrews, Wyse, Ciaran Murphy, and more cautiously Tom Fitzpatrick, Gerry Collins, Sylvie Barret, Padraig Faulkner. The election has brought in some new men — Peadar Clohessy of Limerick who is friendly with O'Malley, Dennis Foley of Kerry who was close to Lynch and didn't much like his treatment during the election by Haughey's man Tom McEllistrim, Hugh Byrne of Wexford who didn't relish Lorcan Allen traipsing around the constituency with Jock Haughey and who had a blazing row with Haughey over his statement on Tuam Sugar factory. Sean French of Cork is a bit fed-up since, to show their displeasure at the treatment of Jack Lynch, he was for a time refused entry it is said, to the Glen Rovers Hurling club.

Since the row in the Waterford constituency organisation, and headquarters took a dim view of Jackie Fahey's part in that, it isn't clear how things stand between Jackie and his leader. And there are some disgruntled souls in the Senate, apart from Eoin Ryan, there are Senators Walshe, Hussey and Leonard, all of whom regard themselves as casualties of Haughey's favourable treatment of their rival Fianna Fail constituency colleagues.

Haughey has failed to heal the wounds his election created within the party and the divisions are sapping Fianna Fail's energy. “It needn't have been like this. He could have made an effort to be reconciled with people after he became Taoiseach, but he didn't. He perpetuated the split”. His supporters and the middle-grounders in the party say he wasn't given a chance to make it up, those who opposed him were too hostile towards him personally to be reconciled.

The indecision which marked his period in government continues in opposition. The front bench obviously needs reshuffling. “We've been waiting for an announcement for weeks but the man can't make his mind up. Does he dump Colley and bring back Molloy and O'Donoghue? Can he afford to alienate his own backwoodsmen by doing so?” said a party critic. “Yes, he does agonise, he procrastinates” admitted a loyal supporter. “He can't make his mind up about any little thing”. The expectation is that Colley will be removed from the post of deputy leader and may retire to the backbenches; that Reynolds will be made finance spokesman, a brief he is sharing more and more with Gene FitzGerald; that O'Donoghue will be offered Education. Pushing Gene FitzGerald sideways will not meet with much resistance, it is calculated, in Cork, where he was not regarded in the best circles, as Finance Minister calibre. Charlie McCreevy will probably be given ajunior post to shut him up. Paddy Power, Sylvie Barret, Tom Nolan may be for the chop.

As well as the reshuffle, the development of positive party strategy is long overdue. Haughey's think-tank at the moment consists of Dr. Martin Mansergh, the Trinity economist, and a few established friends like Brendan Menton formerly of the AIB and certain civil servants close to him in government.

If his relations with the press are anything to go by, he is a suspicious man, still behaving as politicians did in the sixties when reporters did not criticise, did not ask impertinent questions, and took gratefully whatever statement a government minister deigned to make to them. Typical is a showdown he had with Barry White of the Belfast Telegraph recently when White dared ask him if he still felt as he did at the time of the Arms Trial.

And party relations with the press have changed. Gone is the camaraderie which existed with Frank Dunlop, once press officer, and former party secretary Seamus Brennan. The new press officer, Tony Fitzpatrick, whose main experience is in the public relations area, concentrates mostly on non-committal, efficiently delivered press handouts. New party secretary Frank Wall is cautious to the point of monastic silence, and concentrates mostly on internal party administration.

Critics and supporters alike agree that Haughey's position as leader is probably secure until another lost election. But, once the February budget is passed, if it is passed, the government and opposition will settle in for the long haul. And it is then, when the party will take itself off its present snap election alert, that questions will begin to be asked and dissatisfactions emerge.

But until then Charlie Haughey will sit in his hated opposition seat, waiting for the break he so badly needs. The election was lost in June, but to Haughey the government has temporarily changed, that's all. He says “this government” referring to the coalition, “the government” usually when referring to his own. And of course the Taoiseach is almost invariably, “the present Taoiseach”. Like Miss Haversham and her wedding cake, he concedes nothing. Expectations intact, he waits, and watches, and waits.

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