An encounter with The Boss
In Dublin to interview would-be Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, just before the 1997 general election, I was leaving the National Gallery and heading for Leinster House when I spotted the dapper figure of Mr Haughey along the corridor.
Hastily returning my coat to the cloakroom, I approached the former Taoiseach, with whom I had crossed swords at many a press conference, and asked him how he was enjoying his retirement.
For reasons later to emerge, he was taken aback on seeing me.
“What are you doing in Dublin, Mr Musgrave?” he growled, in that way of his.
“Interviewing your successor” I explained.
“Which one?” he snapped, under lidded eyes.
“Bertie.”
“Give him my regards.”
“How are you enjoying your retirement?” I ventured, hoping to get an insight into how he was spending his days. “Tending the roses?”
At that moment, a porter approached and Mr Haughey was outwardly suave but probably relieved to shake my hand as he was ushered into the lift for a meeting of the gallery’s fund raising committee of which he was chairman at the time.
As we settled down for the interview, I informed Mr Ahern that I had met an old friend of his.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“Charlie Haughey.”
“Jaysus! Where did you meet him?” he asked, seemingly startled.
“In the National Gallery, and he asked me to give you his regards.”
Later that evening, watching the 6 o’clock news in my hotel room, the main story made me sit up and I suddenly knew why the surprise.
A warrant to search his Kinsealy home for documents had been served on the former Taoiseach that very morning.It was the start of the Ben ‘Big Fella’ Dunne affair which would lift the lid on a can of worms that would end in Mr Haughey’s political disgrace.
The only journalist in the country to meet him on the day — and I didn’t know.
If PJ Mara had only known he would have given his Medici smile and said: “Hard luck, Mus.”
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