Dunne blames himself for ‘some hurt’ endured by Haughey

THE former supermarket tycoon Ben Dunne, yesterday said he blamed his own behaviour on causing some of the hurt and humiliation endured by Charles Haughey in the last decade of his life.

Revelations of payments of over £1 million by Mr Dunne to Mr Haughey led to the setting up of the McCracken and Moriarty Tribunals, in which deeply embarrassing details of his financial and personal life were exposed.

Yesterday, Mr Dunne said Mr Haughey’s death had a profound effect upon him as he felt partly responsible for the disgrace that was faced by the former Taoiseach in his latter years.

He thought some of his behaviour had a bad effect on Mr Haughey.

Speaking on RTÉ, Mr Dunne said he did not think he had been responsible for all the difficulties Mr Haughey had faced.

“What I am certainly sure of is that I caused him some hurt and that hurts me,” he said.

Asked had he talked to Mr Haughey about that, Mr Dunne replied: “No, and that hurts me even more.”

He said the last time he had met Mr Haughey was coming out of the District Court in Dublin in 1999, where the late Taoiseach faced charges of misleading the McCracken Tribunal.

In his own assessment, Mr Dunne said: “He was a man full of life. He had a fantastic brain and I always said I admired him because he could read the future extra clear and well in lots of areas.

“He had a huge knowledge over a wide range of subjects. That impressed me.”

During his long political career, any attempts to probe Mr Haughey’s personal financial dealings were curtly rebuffed by him and were considered off-limits.

However, all that changed when news broke about the payments made by Mr Dunne to him. Further revelations in the McCracken and the Moriarty Tribunals left virtually no area of Mr Haughey’s private life free from public scrutiny.