President’s usual good judgement failed her in the case of Haughey

THERE was nothing unusual in the way the year ended in this country. It was seen out with a bang — or was it a silencer?

Either way, another gangland murder saw the old year out, part of our daily news, and nothing to worry about unless you happen to be an innocent victim.

Just as the latest victim may well have been because it was not clear immediately whether he was the intended target or another case of mistaken identity.

The man who was shot was just 28 years old, and the killing happened just after midnight in a house off Sheriff Street in Dublin’s inner city, as he slept on a couch. Other people were in the house at the time.

The shooting brought to 27 the number of gangland murders in this country since the start of the year.

Before the latest murder, President Mary McAleese was able to tell us middle class drug-users were directly responsible for the gangland killings.

In her comfortable radio chat with Marian Finucane, the President said that the middle classes who saw nothing wrong in using drugs must accept their share of the blame for the spate of gangland murders.

“It worries me sick. Who creates the market that allows these people to become so powerful?”

She answered the question herself by saying it was the people with the good jobs and those who enjoyed a great social life.

Well-off people who bought drugs were culpable to an extent that society was not prepared to face up to, she said.

In other words, without the users, there would be no drug dealers and, consequently, no gangland murders.

Put more simply, without receivers of stolen goods, there would be no thieves.

Put a totally different way, without the corrupters, there wouldn’t be corruption.

President McAleese is well positioned to speak out, and has done on a diverse range of topics.

Both by her word and act, her judgement is largely unflawed.

That is with one glaring exception when, earlier this year, she accorded one of the biggest crooks this country has ever seen, Charles J Haughey, the full panoply of the presidential office.

She was not resident in the Park when he was Taoiseach and taking money like the country was a personal ATM machine that would never run dry. He extracted more than £9 million, or the equivalent of about €45 million in modern terms.

Her first term of office began on November 11, 1997, and she was re-elected on October 1, 2004. She is a barrister, a former professor of law and a former broadcaster.

But she was President when he died earlier this year, and she was in a position to make a very important point about a man who singularly abused the most important political office in the land. She failed to do so.

Instead, she heaped the entire panoply of the presidential office on him.

The guardian of the Constitution paid homage to the man who would have flogged that same constitution had he been offered a price.

As it was, he sold Irish passports and, in the judgement of the Moriarty tribunal, “devalued the quality of a modern democracy”.

Rather than treating him with presidential disdain, she interrupted a three-country tour of southern Africa so she could attend his State funeral.

The obvious answer is that protocol demands that a President attends the State funeral of a former Taoiseach.

Another obvious answer is that someone who was so corrupt should have done a long term in jail, but he did not.

Still, he was no ordinary Taoiseach. He had used that honour to debase the office to an inordinate extent in order to sustain a millionaire’s lifestyle.

He should have died in ignominy as a politician, yet he was said by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, in a graveside oration, to have been “a patriot to his fingertips”.

President McAleese, on hearing the news of his death while she was abroad, said she remembered “a very proud Irishman”.

It may not be that she felt obliged by protocol alone to return home for the State funeral.

When asked by RTÉ if she had a view on whether or not he should have been accorded a State funeral, she replied: “I will be home for Mr Haughey’s funeral on Friday. I would have thought that is a very strong view on that.”

He was, in her own words, “a rare phenomenon,” and in that she was entirely correct, although not in the context she meant.

It must be remembered also that Charles Haughey had recruited her as an election candidate for Fianna Fáil in 1986, a time when she had the opportunity “to see him at reasonably close hand”.

WITH all due respect to the President, her powers of observation at the time must have been clouded by his charisma because, even then, there were pound signs in his eyes.

Any younger person who may not be familiar with the background to Haughey could be forgiven for thinking he was some kind of hero, instead of the crook he was.

That false impression would have been created by the way the State honoured him, from the President and the Taoiseach down.

Why else would he be given a State funeral, with flags flown at half-mast on public buildings, the President interrupting a foreign visit and the Taoiseach describing him as a patriot?

Certainly, there are very grave matters like the number of gangland killings that President McAleese should speak out about. But she is President for all the people and there were other fundamental issues that warranted her attention and her voice.

Like the undermining of democracy in this country. Free travel for old age pensioners is one thing: scamming the country on a huge scale, which Haughey did, is altogether different.

While gardaí are bracing themselves for an escalation of violence in the Taoiseach’s own constituency, the Association of Hunt Saboteurs made what was described as a “major anti-hunt protest” at the Waterford Foxhounds meet in Tramore town centre on St Stephen’s Day.

Apparently, this major protest involved nothing more than holding placards and standing on the footpath outside a car park where hunt members were gathering for a pre-meet drink.

Such activities are rather innocuous and hardly compare with some of the tactics employed by their counterparts across the water.

I would hate to think I was being paranoid about the title of their organisation, but when you think about it, there is an implied threat contained in it.

By including in the title of their association the word “saboteurs”, there is more than a suggestion that they will resort to means other than peaceful to achieve their aims. In a country where criminality is such an emotive issue now, it seems strange that an association is allowed to promote sabotage.

After all, a saboteur is somebody who commits sabotage, which involves deliberately damaging or destroying property or equipment to undermine or destroy somebody’s efforts or achievements.

It is the intention of the likes of that organisation to make animal rights a major issue in the general election next year.

Well, there are too many other vital issues affecting humans at present and politicians — if they have any sense — should simply ignore this one.