Charlie at 80

Charlie Haughey is 80 on 16 September. The irony is that his sins were less damnable than has been claimed and his good deeds less virtuous. But as he surveys his own record on his 80th brithday, he could hardly care less what the verdict is of any of us commentators, detractors or friends.

There was a party starting around noon on Sunday 11 September at Abbeville, Kinsealy, to celebrate his 80th birthday. It was a subdued affair, family and friends. He had been in hospital for a week shortly beforehand and he seemed very frail. But he is feisty in the face of death, no longer in any doubt about its imminence.

He still rises every day at 7am. Wakes up unprompted and immediately gets out of bed. It has been a habit for decades and decades. He used to go horse riding on Portmarnock strand but, obviously, no longer. Now he attends to his post, listens to the radio, reads and papers and awaits the arrival of one of his secretaries to whom he dictates letters.

There are usually callers during the day but not the steady stream of callers claimed by one of the newspapers. These are entertained either in the study or in the bar he had constructed at the side of the house, getting to which one has to pass through the drawing room.

The house retains its grandeur but seems lonely with only himself and his wife Maureen there nowadays. She often joins in the conversation with callers. Her memory is almost as good as his.

Among the callers are neighbours, some of whom call in unannounced and are made welcome immediately. A few politicians call, including Senator Martin Mansergh, his former adviser on Northern Ireland. Bertie Ahern called briefly last Christmas but has kept his distance over the years and his neglect of his former mentor is not appreciated. The former foreign minister, Michael O'Kennedy calls occasionally. Paul Kavanagh, the former fundraiser calls, as does Dermot Desmond, Frank Wall, the former Fianna Fáil general secretary, Des Peelo the financial adviser and accountant, and, of course, PJ Mara. Seamus Collimore, a former Fianna Fáil TD for Wexford calls regularly as does Oliver Barry, who has known Charlie for years.

The family calls frequently. Their duughter, Eimear, married to John Mulhern, lives in Kildare but she is very much in touch and in their lives. Their sons, Sean, Conor and Ciaran, live nearby and are at the house frequently, as are their children. Charlie delights in the grandchildren. He had hay cut in the field at the back of the house over the last few years to give the young ones a sense of agricultural life. The closeness of the family is very apparent.

He goes out now very rarely. He and Maureen used to go to a restaurant in Malahide with family friends on Saturday nights for years but that is not possible any longer.

He takes a lively interest in current happenings both here and internationally. Television seems to be on continually in the drawing room, invariably tuned into a French news channel. His comments on current events are insightful, bringing a seasoned judgment to bear. His condition inevitably depresses him but he is in no way self-pitying.

He used to say he would never die; there is no more of that.

It is extraordinary to observe him now. The most enthralling, most-talked about, most dominant figure in Irish politics for 40 years (Maire Geoghan Quinn said something like that in an oration at his last Ard Fheis as leader and in referring to him in the past tense she was signalling his departure from the political stage in a way few of us understood at the time). Since the early 1960s he has been the object of fascination, like no one else here, certainly since de Valera, maybe since Parnell. Although not as towering and influential a figure as Sean Lemass – and he would readily agree with that assessment – he has prompted more obsessive curiosity than the sober Lemass ever did.

Historians will muse about his significance, his influence, even his motivation (perhaps particularly his motivation about which they will write expertly, knowing little or nothing about his psyche) for perhaps a century from now. Assessments will be revised, then revised again, and revised back to the original revision, almost certainly all wrong.

There were queues of would-be documentary makers to Abbeville over the years trying to persuade him to go on record "for history". History cut no ice with him. His family at one stage would have liked him to put on record his story and, briefly, he dabbled with that but then dismissed it.

The McCracken and Moriarty Tribunals and attendant court cases took over his life for almost a decade. A few years into his retirement Ben Dunne broke the ranks of his otherwise silent benefactors and played the Charlie card in a row within the Dunne family and the sluice gates opened. Ben Dunne had been the one in 1987, when told there was a whip around being organised to get Charlie out of a financial pickle, said unbiblically "Jesus was crucified by one of his disciples". He stepped in, picked up the bill on his own, lest others would speak later. To say Ben Dunne transpired to be the Judas himself would be a failure to do justice to his innocence.

It seemed briefly a few months ago that a link could be established between the millions Ben Dunne gave over and a favour Charlie did as Taoiseach to the Dunne family but detractors' hopes were disappointed. Although Charlie did set up a meeting between Ben Dunne and the then chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, Seamus Pairceir, and although an initial tax demand on the Dunne family trust was slashed from £35million to £18 million, the fact is that the Revenue Appeals Commissioners found the Trust owed nothing at all and, on grounds that a very eminent senior counsel, Niall Fennelly, now on the Supreme Court, said was unimpeachable.

In fact, although the Moriarty Tribunal has spend nearly eight years now investigating Charlie Haughey for corruption they have found no corruption. It and the McCracken Tribunal certainly found he got millions from a variety of benefactors and raised questions about his use of the party leader's account and the Brian Lenihan transplant fund, and have documented significant tax illegality, no connection has been established between the receipt of monies and the doing of anything to benefit those benefactors. It seems as though Charlie Haughey regarded his very willingness to take money from these people as favour enough in return.

A peculiarity of all this is why anybody was persuaded that he needed any money anyway. He had the hugely valuable estate at Kinsealy, worth millions and largely unencumbered, at times when it was put around on his behalf he was in financial trouble. How was it nobody questioned how he could possibly need money when he was manifestly so rich? And how was it he didn't sell off bits of the Abbeville estate to pay his mounting bank debts, instead of compromising himself by getting money from others? Actually, why didn't he continue to tell AIB where to get off, as he had done in the period from 1970 to 1979?

It is certainly true Charlie Haughey acted improperly in accepting huge sums of money from various benefactors, and acted illegally in not paying taxes on that, while tightening the tax belt on the rest of us, and there are those questions about the party leader's account and the Brian Lenihan fund, but, arguably, the greatest criticism that can be levied against him is not at all on those scores but on policies he pursued while in office. In other words, what he should be most criticised for is that for which he is most praised.

It was the Des O Malley/Mary Harney wing of Fianna Fáil that got the country into such deep financial trouble in the period 1977 to 1979. Charlie Haughey promised to rectify what was going on and failed in the period December 1979 to June 1981, when he lost office for the first time to Garret FitzGerald. But the calamity prone government for which he has been much derided, the government of March 1982 to December 1982, did start to correct the damage done by the O Malley/Harney branch of Fianna Fáil, in the face of rank treachery on the part of that wing of the party. Had that government survived, the pain of the correction would have been far less than it proved to be. Garret FitzGerald returned to office in December 1982, refused to take up the prescription laid down by Haughey in the months before, took ages to come up with an alternative plan of his own and then was unable to handle the crisis because of tensions within that Fine Gael-Labour government and the international recession and spiralling interest rates.

When Charlie Haughey returned to office in March 1987 he did set in place the corrective mechanism to get the public finances back in check, borrowing under control and a new social partnership pact agreed between the social partners. But he did it at the expense of precisely those people he promised to defend in the 1987 election campaign, the old, the sick and the poor. The health and educational services were devastated and we are still paying the price today.

But it is precisely what he did then – along of course with his courageous initiative on the Northern Ireland front – that critics grudgingly acknowledge the record was not all bad. The irony is that his sins were less damnable than has been claimed and his good deeds less virtuous. But as he surveys his own record on his 80th birthday, he could hardly care less what the verdict is of any of us commentators, detractors or friends.