A titanic battle that defined Irish politics for the next decade
Haughey, he said, came “with a flawed pedigree”.
It set the scene for their titanic political battles over the decade that followed, with FitzGerald dubbed “Garret the Good” and Haughey seen as the grasping, scheming politician. FitzGerald would later say he regretted the remark, saying its meaning had been misunderstood. “They were badly chosen words,” FitzGerald said in an RTÉ interview aired in August 2006. “That speech was written at 4.30 in the morning. But the wording was completely misunderstood. I just wanted to point out that he was different from previous taoisigh in that he didn’t have the support of a large amount of his own party, but nobody noticed that context.
