Haughey was not one-dimensional comic figure that Charlie portrays

The RTÉ drama, Charlie, was entertaining, if more Callan’s Kicks than history. Despite its portrayal of Mr Haughey as venal, shallow and one-dimensional, many of the incidents seem based on truth.

It stylised Mr Haughey’s 1979 meeting with Helmut Schmidt, at which the German Chancellor told how his annual meeting with union leaders to agree wage and economic policy was “the most important date in his calendar”. It portrayed — in rather comic-opera fashion — Mr Haughey’s subsequent meeting with Irish union leaders. The source for this, I presume, is a paper Haughey wrote — or dictated, as he was too ill to write — some months before his death. He always regarded social partnership, along with redirecting policy on the North, as his “greatest achievement”. For research I am undertaking at DCU, I acquired a copy of that Haughey paper.

I also checked the State papers for 1979 and these, indeed, confirm the centrality of State-union relations during that meeting with Mr Schmidt. But Mr Haughey was no simple opportunist, and had always been interested in this question.