Haughey, the TV version, is fine but his true legacy is another story

THE programme-makers of the current series of documentaries about Charles Haughey could not have wished for better timing.

In the run-in to the first instalment of the series on RTÉ last Monday night, there was the untimely death of Sean Doherty, a central political personality during the rise, reign and fall of Haughey.

Then, after months of silence, the Moriaty Tribunal investigating Haughey’s finances reopened public hearings this week with new lines of enquiry about the circumstances in which the former Taoiseach apparently arranged meetings between Ben Dunne and the then chairman of the Revenue Commissioners.

The relative blandness of our politics in recent years is bemoaned by some who, no doubt, will see further evidence of this in the fact that much of the political coverage of the last 10 days or so has been dominated by reflections and controversies about events 15 or 20 years ago.

I, for one, have no great nostalgia for the politics of the 1980s. It was a period of almost constant political drama, but it was also a time of deep political strife - especially within and around Fianna Fáil. It came at a price. While in the later part of the 1980s the party did get its act together, especially on the economy, for much of the early 1980s the personality clashes and internal wars sapped Fianna Fáil of energy and undermined much of its political effectiveness.

The damage done to the party by the events of the early 1980s was not confined to that decade. The subsequent revelations about that era at the various tribunals have also damaged the party and impacted on its electoral support.

When the history of Fianna Fáil in recent decades comes to be written, then the 1990s and early 21st century will be up there with the late 1950s and 1960s as one of its best eras - but the early 1980s will rightly be remembered as a time of shame for the party.

All revisiting of recent history should come with a health warning that should apply equally to the current assessments being propagated from several sides on the Haughey era.

When political events come to be reconsidered only a decade or two later, it is usually the case that some of those who are prominent in that reconsideration were also key participants in the events being revisited, either as politicians with backroom roles or journalists reporting on the events.

These people often avail of the occasion to overstate their involvement, to protect or rehabilitate their reputations or indeed often to settle old scores.

It is true that when the dramatic revelations about Haughey and some of his cabinet members of that time exploded in the media and tribunals in 1996 and ’97, many of the attacks on Haughey’s reputation were over the top and there was much downplaying of his overall contribution to politics.

However, now too, only 15 years or so since his fall from power, the extent to which some have endeavoured to rehabilitate his reputation has swung the balance too far in the other direction.

It’s very hard not to have an opinion on Charles Haughey. I worked in Fianna Fáil headquarters, with responsibility for the party’s youth wing, in the last couple of years of the Haughey leadership. From that peripheral perch I saw the most attractive and unattractive of the man’s traits as a political leader. He exuded charm, charisma and political flair; he wanted to, and could, get things done, but he also had a ruthless determination to protect his own interest irrespective of the cost to others or to the party (particularly during the ill-fated Lenihan presidential election campaign) and, of course, his fondness for the trappings of power and the fine things in life was all to apparent.

However, the time I was most conscious of Haughey’s impact within the party was not during the 1980s but rather during the late 1990s when the revelations first broke about the large gifts of money he received from Ben Dunne. In the summer of 1997, when Haughey ultimately came to give evidence at the McCracken Tribunal, I was travelling around the country talking to Fianna Fáil councillors as part of a Seanad election campaign and was struck by how many of them were devastated by the series of revelations about his finances. The extent of the political trauma suffered within Fianna Fáil in late 1996 and early 1997 has not truly been appreciated by many outside.

For Haughey’s enemies the revelations flowing from the Dunne family feud did no more than confirm what they had always assumed was true, but for those who had believed in Haughey and who had defended him against his attackers, the revelations that some of the rumours were true was genuinely a shock.

THESE were the men, and some women, who had been local party officials and who had invited Haughey to their cómhairle Dáil ceanntair supper dances on his tours of the party chicken-and-chips circuit during the wilderness years in the 1970s. These were stalwarts who had stood by Haughey against the various heaves from opponents within the parliamentary party who had impugned his suitability for high office and who, it was felt, were undermining democracy within the party by seeking to displace the party’s elected leader. When media reports of the million pound gift first broke, many of Haughey’s internal party admirers had initially harboured hopes they would prove untrue, but as the McCracken Tribunal followed the money trail to various offshore island banks, Haughey’s cover story was blown apart and the reality became all too stark for those who had been the lieutenants of his grassroots support.

For me, the defining conclusion of the McCracken Tribunal report was the judge’s point that, while the tribunal had established no quid pro quo for the monies gifted by Dunne, it was wrong for Haughey, given the political office he held, to receive monies on this scale in this secretive manner and thereby leave himself open to potential manipulation by those who had given it to him.

Now evidence at the Moriarty Tribunal has revealed a wider range of very large gifts to Haughey from other prominent business people. That tribunal, in its final report, is likely to be even more stinging in its criticism of the extent to which Haughey left himself beholden to such interests.

In recent years some of Haughey’s acolytes and advocates have sought to rebalance what they have seen as a negative depiction of Haughey’s legacy by reminding us of his contribution to the economic turnaround, to his flair for advancing projects like the International Financial Service Centre and his earlier ministerial initiatives like artists’ tax relief, free travel and other initiatives for senior citizens.

To an extent, they have a point, but the reality is that history will also have to reflect the fact that Haughey was subsequently exposed as a multi-million pound tax dodger, and that were it not for publicity surrounding him he would have been in the dock facing criminal charges for failing to co-operate with the McCracken Tribunal.

Like many, I am looking forward to the next three instalments of the Haughey series, but of course they cannot be the last word on Haughey. We are still too close to those times to get a clear picture of the man and his legacy.