The injury and the irony of Deputy Doc

John Waters jiving at the crossroads with Seán Doherty

In December 1991, a few weeks after the publication of my book Jiving at the Crossroads, I was asked by Shannonside Radio to take part in a live debate with Sean Doherty on the issues raised by the book. The producers were unable to enlighten me as to what line Doherty might take in the debate, but I accepted the invitation. I headed for Roscommon with some trepidation, however, having become somewhat unnerved by Doherty's silence about the book thus far.

As it happened, he was very gracious and said on air that the book was "very interesting", a typically loaded Dohertyism. He then went on to excoriate Charles Haughey, though, as was his wont in those years, deftly side-stepping the key questions he was so memorably to address within the next couple of months. In the pub afterwards, he winked at me and declared, "For a minute there I thought we might have had a scoop on our hands!"

Then, more gravely, he fixed me with his ironic gaze and asked: "What kind of a response have you been getting to my role in your book?"

I said that I had been getting four distinct responses: one, people who said that I'd rehabilitated Sean Doherty and should be ashamed of myself; two, people who said that I'd rehabilitated Sean Doherty and fair play to me; three, people who said I'd finally buried Sean Doherty and what had he ever done to me?; and four, people who said that I'd finally buried that fucker Doherty and a good thing too.

He pondered this for a moment. "And tell me, John, says he, "which of the above, exactly, WERE you trying to achieve?" None of the above, I told him, truthfully. I had, in fact, set out with a simple objective: to explain why someone who was reviled as an untouchable in one part of the country could be hailed in another as a hero. I had wanted to explain the culture, more to myself than anyone else, from the roots up. And I had wanted to tell the story of an epiphany that had occurred in my relationship with my father, who had died two years previously, perhaps as a way of mourning him. This moment related to the 1987 general election, when my father and I walked out of the polling station in Castlerea and realised that, for perhaps the first time in our lives, we had cast our votes for the same candidate. We had both voted for Sean Doherty.

Jiving at the Crossroads, like many books, took on a life of its own in the mind of each individual who read it, but for me it was less about Doherty than about politics as a language I had come to use to continue to communicate with my father, who, like many men of his generation, was consumed by the history and the drama of public events. Such events resonated loudly in the collective consciousness of Ireland then – and in a way that already seems odd to those who grew up in the meantime – but they also resonated between people who used the stories of public life as the very stuff of their personal relationships. My father wasn't interested in sport and we were not great men for getting in touch with each other's feelings. What we had was politics, its dramas and its passions, and we made the most of it. The point of my book was to tell how Sean Doherty became the means by which my father and I had come as close as we ever did to embracing each other. Doherty declared himself happy with this explanation and we moved on to other matters.

The next development I would regard as relevant to all this occurred just after Christmas that year. I returned to work to find a large parcel in my Irish Times pigeonhole. It contained about a dozen copies of my book and a note from Terry Prone of Carr Communications asking me to sign them for a number of friends of hers to whom she wished warmly to recommend it. I signed the books and, I think, left them downstairs to be collected.

Then, about three weeks later, came Nighthawks. The programme was planned as a special on my book, which had been number one in the bestseller lists since its publication in October. Castlerea featured because it was my hometown, and the place where the early part of the book was mostly set. Nighthawks was a late night programme aimed at young people, and featured the life of a fictional bar run by Shay Healy. One of its features was a rolling, simple soap opera storyline, involving various regular characters and occasional visitors.

It had been decided to build a storyline around me and my book, the hook of was the idea that I had come up from Castlerea to meet Shay Healy, while he had gone down there to meet me. The interview with Doherty was one of the Castlerea inserts. It was conducted in Hell's Kitchen, the public house and museum owned by Sean Browne, who had been a great friend of both my father and myself.

It has been recalled during this week that Nighthawks was a live programme, which perhaps gave an erroneous impression of spontaneity in relation to Doherty's interview. But this isn't strictly true. In fact, the Doherty interview was one of several inserts pre-recorded over the weekend and slotted into the live show, which was broadcast on a Wednesday night. Come Wednesday, there was in fact very little left to be done. I was in studio in Dublin on the Wednesday and, as part of the soap opera style of the programme, pretended to call Shay Healy in Castlerea from a deserted Nighthawks bar. By my recollection, a brief interview with me was spliced into the prerecorded interview with Doherty.

Why this detail is important, in my view, is that it is not possible to perceive Doherty's motivation without the context created by my book. I don't say this with any sense of self-importance, because I, in fact, completely missed what he was up to, and indeed wrote in the Irish Times after the Nighthawks programme to the effect that the whole thing was a bottle of smoke. Doherty had been mouthing off for many years about how he was going to settle the score with Haughey, but, as in the debate on Shannonside, always seemed to shrink from the kill. I did not expect him to follow through on what I had taken to be another feint, and was astonished when he gave his Montrose Hotel press conversation the following week to say, expressly, that he had told Haughey about the taps and given him transcripts.

Sean Doherty, I believe, read my book and got something from it that I had never consciously set out to offer him. Reading another version of the events with which he had been associated for a decade, he perceived that, even if his political rehabilitation was out of the question, it was possible to achieve rehabilitation of what might be called a more metaphysical kind. Jiving at the Crossroads, by telling a story of his scapegoating in a culture divided over the personality of Charles Haughey, had given him a little of his confidence back. A couple of years beforehand, he had told me that things had got to the stage where he was thinking of hiring someone with a bell to walk in front of him shouting, "Unclean! Unclean! Because of his demonic political image, it was easy for people to forget that he was, in his own way, a sensitive man, who was deeply wounded by his depiction, and equally so by what he perceived as its unfairness.

There are some senses in which Doherty was to blame for much of what happened to him. He was a scapegoat, but never quite a victim. He had a perverse streak in his character that caused him to play up to the role allotted to him by his enemies. He was so full of mischief and such a convincing actor that there were times when he seemed to be relishing the notion of himself as this crazed lynch-lawman, standing in personal judgement on his adversaries by virtue of his office. Part of the trouble was that the media presentation of Doherty as some kind of tribal backwoodsman led his enormous intelligence to be totally underestimated, and this meant that nobody quite gave him credit for the irony he exuded much of the time. It was Bruce Arnold, of all journalists, who caught this aspect of his personality most accurately, in an open letter to the voters of Roscommon in 1987 in which he advised them not to vote for Doherty again. Even long after the tapping of his telephone had been exposed, wrote Arnold, Doherty, far from shrinking back in embarrassment, would make jokes about it every time they met. "It is a form of pantomime," he wrote, "where accusations of high treason and threats of the dungeon are interspersed with moments of uproarious comedy and farce. He and his audience pause for a moment of wild slapstick, but he goes on to pass sentence nonetheless."

Whatever the factors feeding into his public image, it hurt him far more than was generally understood, as did the failure of Charles Haughey to reward him for carrying the can for the GUBU period. In this context also, the Ray MacSharry aspect is interesting. Much of Doherty's growing resentment towards Haughey from the time of the latter's return to government in 1987 was down to his failure to rehabilitate Doherty as he had rehabilitated MacSharry. Both men had become embroiled in the GUBU period, Doherty for reasons that are recalled with great clarity, and MacShary for reasons that are almost totally forgotten. The MacSharry episode involved a tape recorder obtained for him by Doherty (from a senior Garda officer) to secretly record a meeting at which it was belived MacSharry would be offered a bribe to withdraw his support from Charles Haughey in a confidence vote. In the event, no bribe was offered, but the incident added greatly to the growing sense of sleaze attaching itself retrospectively to that ten-month Haughey government of 1982. Remarkably, however, both Haughey and MacSharry were able to put these events behind them, while Doherty, at least initially, was not. After the 1987 election, MacSharry became "Mac the Knife", the swashbuckling Minister for finance who "turned around" the economy, while Doherty languished on the backbenches.

It should not be forgotten, as well, that Doherty had lost his Dáil seat in 1989, partly because of the dramatic rise of the hospital candidate Tom Foxe, but also because Doherty, brooding over been depicted as the villain while Haughey was re-embraced by many of his detractors, took his eye off the constituency ball and temporarily lost the confidence of some supporters.

The way Doherty saw it, his main sin had been loyalty to his leader, and this had neither been acknowledged nor rewarded. For him, all his alleged sins were down to an, at worst, misplaced loyalty to his mentor and leader, Charles Haughey.

There is some truth in this. The only coherent meaning for the colourful and mysterious events of what is known as the GUBU period resides in the political culture war which began with the Arms Trial and continued virtually up to the present. It was all about Haughey, about the determination of those who had decided that he was the political Antichrist to banish him from the political life of Ireland, and the resolve of his defenders to ensure they did not succeed. Doherty had from way back been one of his most loyal henchmen.

How seriously you regarded things depended on where you stood, which side of the tracks you came from. The telephone tapping incident was either an outrageous abuse of office for party political purposes or an entirely justifiable attempt to protect the Taoiseach of the day from the subversive energies of his internal enemies. Doherty, like other ministers at the time, was concerned about leaks from the cabinet table, suspecting George Colley. In tapping the phones of two journalists, however, he stepped outside the party political arena and embroiled senior Garda officers in what was undoubtedly an illegal, as well as wholly bizarre, burst of activity. Perhaps his real mistake was in tapping the phones of Arnold and Kennedy, when he should have been tapping George Colley's.

It was all, as I say, a matter of perspective, which in turn depended on which side you were on. When Haughey and Doherty were on the same side, they were equally derided and excoriated by the puritans of what, for the sake of simplicity, I portrayed in Jiving at the Crossroads as "Dublin 4". This, crudely, was the modernising tendency of Irish society in the second half of the 20th century, which repudiated as embarrassments residual elements of what they regarded as an outmoded Ireland, especially Catholicism and Fianna Fáil. Haughey came to embody all of these prejudices, not because he was of the culture that was so despised (he was but had left it far behind) but because, in seeking to rebuild his own political reputation after the Arms Trial, he had appealed successfully to this constituency and had secured his rehabilitated persona on a rhetorical genuflection in its direction.

In the 1980s, however, a strange thing happened. Haughey had been banished after GUBU and spent four years in opposition. Only the dire state of the economy and the abject failure of the Fine Gael/Labour coalition to deal with the emergency gave him a second chance. The reluctant consensus among media commentators and economists was that Haughey might make a better fist of running the economy, and GUBU was, as far as it concerned Haughey at least, not so much forgotten as set aside.

But it would be more accurate to say that the ghosts of GUBU had been temporarily removed from the persona of Charles Haughey and transferred to the enigmatic persona of Sean Doherty, who had become the whipping boy for events now as inconvenient for one side of the culture wars as they had previously been traumatising for the other. It was ironic that, in the end, when Doherty and Haughey became adversaries, many of those who had been loudest in their fulminations against him suddenly turned and began defending him against Doherty.

This underlines two very interesting aspects of the culture wars: at one level it was as though whatever negativities Haughey and Doherty together represented were in some sense perceived to be more acute in Doherty than they had ever been in Haughey. But there is also the fascinating possibility that the anger of those who opposed Haughey was never really personal against him – what they mainly hated was that he had "chosen" the "ordinary" people of Ireland over them. There is what you might almost call a psycho-sexual aspect to the thing: the Dublin 4 calumniators as jealous lovers, consumed with a neurotic rage against someone that, really, they quite admired, or at least craved in some profound way, like a grandee craving a bit of rough. When the wedge became visible between Doherty and Haughey, some of Haughey's most celebrated media detractors bizarrely rushed to defend him, at least to the extent of relishing in the opportunity of kicking more determinedly his former friend.

This odd sociological drift was already discernible in Haughey's late flirtation with the PDs, which began in 1989, after the election in which Doherty lost his seat. The utter extraordinariness of Haughey's alliance with the PDs is now almost overlooked. By then, he had become quite respectable, by virtue of being useful in relation to the handling of the economy. So that, by the time Doherty came to wield the dagger, some of those who had longed for such an eventuality for a generation suddenly found themselves having to choose between what had once been their heart's desire (the final removal of Haughey) and the sudden reminder that Doherty was the incarnation of everything that desire had arisen from.

And Haughey even briefly tried to exploit this tendency by playing to the fact that the prejudices of his own enemies were even more strongly pitted against Doherty than against himself. There was a remarkable moment in the press conference held by Haughey in January 1992 to respond to the allegations of Sean Doherty that he, Doherty, had told Haughey about the tapping of the two journalists's phones and had given him transcripts of the taps. Asked by one journalist if he thought Doherty's initiative was related to the leadership bid of Albert Reynolds "and the so-called Western alliance", Haughey threw back his head, laughed and corrected him: "You mean the COUNTRY and western alliance!" For a moment, the hostility of the press conference dissipated and Haughey had most of the journalists again laughing and eating out of his hand. This pandering to the smug prejudices of supposed sophisticates whose self-confidence went no further than a snobbish sense of superiority based on living in a street rather than a field was the moment when Charles Haughey betrayed the very people he had courted to become Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach, and so lost the moral basis of his leadership.

Certainly from 1987 onwards, Doherty was broadly hinting to anyone who took the time to listen, that he had a score to settle with Haughey and would settle it in his own time.

As to whether his 1992 initiative was part of an orchestrated plot to remove Haughey and open the way for Albert Reynolds, there remain difficulties with even intelligent speculation in this connection. For one thing, some of the key players have repeatedly made explicit and implicit threat of legal action against anyone who speculates on the common sense interpretation of the facts beyond a certain line; for another, there were a number of invisible actors whose roles cannot be properly discussed for, also, legal reasons.

There is no doubt that Doherty's attitude to Haughey was by then such as to motivate him to act alone. There is also, I believe, evidence that he read in my book a subtext that suggested to him a way of seeking some kind of redemption by exorcising himself of the GUBU demon and sending it back to where he believed it properly belonged. There is also no question that he chose a moment when he would be able to inflict maximum damage on Haughey, knowing that his statements about Haughey's knowledge of the telephone taps would put pressure on the Progressive Democrats to act of their "principled" approach to riding shotgun on the government, and so make Haughey's position untenable.

Albert Reynolds says that Doherty was not acting on his behalf, that he did not put him up to it, and, in fact, that he did not regard Doherty's intervention as helpful to his leadership bid. But he said also, on various programmes during the past week, that on the day the Nighthawks programme was aired he heard that Doherty was going to spill beans on the show that evening and made strenuous efforts to contact him to dissuade him from doing so. It may well be that Mr Reynolds' memory is hazy about such distant events, but things are unlikely to have occurred in precisely the way he recalls. Since the Doherty segment of the Nighthawks programme was already in the can, any account that Reynolds was given of what Doherty would say on the programme was likely to have been fairly precise. But, equally, it would by then have been too late to do anything to stop the interview. It is possible that, hearing of the impending bombshell, Mr Reynolds was chagrined to hear that Doherty was taking it upon himself to wield the dagger, perhaps sensing that any association with Doherty was more likely to damage him than anything else. This would seem to add credibility to the substance of Albert's denials and point back to the lone-gunman theory. However, there is no doubt that several key actors in the Reynolds camp were also involved in coaching and advising Doherty in the run-up to the Montrose Hotel press conference in which he elaborated precisely on the broad hints of his Nighthawks interview.

We may never discover exactly what occurred, but it unlikely that future historical detectives will be able to avoid the conclusion, based on the circumstantial evidence, that some degree of orchestration was involved, possibly without the direct knowledge or approval of the chief beneficiary.

As to the accuracy or veracity of what Doherty actually claimed, the historical detectives are likely to be less certain. The few remaining Haughey loyalists have long sought to portray Doherty as the solo villain who tapped journalists' phones of his own volition, while those who see Doherty as small-fry seek to take from his statements things he never actually said. He never, for example, claimed that Haughey had either ordered or suggested the phone taps. He said that, after disquiet had been expressed in cabinet about leaks from the cabinet table, he had been "required" to take some action. This was another typically ambiguous Dohertyism. Subsequently, he claimed, he told Haughey what he had done and gave him transcripts of conversations transcribed from the telephones of Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy.

The most obvious inference from a literal interpretation of both the Nighthawks interview and the subsequent press conference is that he, Doherty, decided on the phone taps in consultation with senior Garda officers, and received retrospective approval for this action from Charles Haughey. His use of the word "required" – and this must remain speculative – suggests a relationship between him and Mr Haughey based on a form of mutually deniable mind-reading. Haughey leadershipo style was very much hands-on, and indeed one of the criticisms moutned against both him and Doherty was the allegation that Doherty's appointment as Minister for Justice was part of a pattern in which Haughey appointed people who would run their departments in precise accordance wuith his wishes and instruction, explicit or otherwise. Doherty's depiction of himself as "required" to take action suggests a mindset in which he was aware of an unstated demand that something be done, a process that might, by the sound of it, have occurred in many other contexts as well. This, together with what he presented as Haughey's non-committal response when, as he claims, Doherty told him about the phone taps and gave him the transcripts, amounted, according to Doherty's version, to an approval of his actions. Haughey denies he was told about the taps or that he received transcripts. We may never know which version is the more accurate or truthful. In death, Sean Doherty's legacy is the ambiguity he courted in life. It was hardly to be expected that Charles Haughey would outlive him. It remains to be seen whether Mr Haughey will make use of this unforeseen opportunity to have the last word.p