The Trib (30 page)

At around this time, Fianna Fáil was also facing criticism over what were believed to be growing links between politics and business, best epitomised by Taca, the fundraising organisation of 500 businessmen who attended monthly dinners at the Gresham Hotel and, in return for contributions to the party, were given special access to ministers.

Although traditionalists in the party also attended Taca dinners, Haughey, who organised the first dinner, was the politician most associated with it. Kevin Boland later recalled that first dinner attended by all the cabinet.

‘We were all organised by Haughey and sent to different tables around the room. The extraordinary thing about my table was that everybody at it was in some way or other connected with the construction industry.' Inevitably, Taca provided plenty of ammunition to opposition TDs who questioned the ethos of the organisation.

There were also persistent rumours about a link between Haughey and property developer John Byrne, who had built O'Connell Bridge House, which was then leased by the government.

The sense of unease about Fianna Fáil's changing values was not confined to the opposition. In 1967, Haughey's rival George Colley urged those attending an Ogra Fianna Fáil conference in Galway not to be dispirited ‘if some people in high places appear to have low standards'. Despite Colley's denials, the comment was widely regarded as a reference to Haughey.

But Fianna Fáil and Haughey were soon to be facing into a crisis far more serious than questions about the appropriateness of the links between ministers and the building industry.

For the first forty years of its existence, Fianna Fáil only had to deal in abstract with what Kevin Boland described as ‘the fundamental reason for the existence of the political party to which we all belonged' (i.e. the ending of partition).

The outbreak of the Troubles in the North would bring an end to this cosy situation and threaten the very existence of the party.

Haughey had never been seen as a particularly hardline Republican, in the mould of Boland or Neil Blaney. It had not gone unnoted within the party that his Fianna Fáil lineage was non-existent ... his father had been a Free State army officer. However, his father and mother had come from Swatragh in Co. Derry, and the plight of northern Nationalists was a regular dinnertime conversation in the Haughey household when the future Taoiseach was growing up. On VE Day in 1945, a young Haughey, a student in UCD at the time, had burned a Union Jack outside Trinity College.

Yet it was still a shock to many when it emerged that Haughey was one of the hawks in a cabinet divided over what to do about the deteriorating situation in the North during 1969. Haughey was put in charge of a £100,000 fund to relieve distress for the Nationalist population in the North. But the evidence available suggests that Haughey and Blaney were following their own Northern strategy. Haughey summoned army intelligence officers and IRA leaders to meet him, and even invited British ambassador Gilchrist to Abbeville to discuss the future of the North. At that meeting in early October, Haughey told the ambassador there was nothing he would not sacrifice, including the position of the Catholic Church and neutrality, if the British would give a secret commitment to move towards Irish unity. He offered NATO bases on Irish soil as part of the deal.

Matters came to a head in May 1970 with the sensational sacking by Lynch of Haughey and Blaney from the cabinet. The two men were brought before the courts and charged with attempting to import arms. The meteoric rise had come to a shuddering halt.

Acquitted of the charges, Haughey make vague challenging noises in the direction of his party leader but it quickly became apparent that Lynch was in total control of Fianna Fáil.

While Blaney and Boland left Fianna Fáil, Haughey swallowed hard and stayed. He knew he would never be Taoiseach if he left the party, but the medicine was particularly unpalatable.

Not only did he have to suffer the indignity of backing Lynch, but Haughey had to vote confidence in former cabinet colleague Jim Gibbons, whose testimony at the arms trial had flatly contradicted his own.

As well as eating humble pie, Haughey had to stomach hundreds of chicken-and-chip meals as he set about his own rehabilitation by travelling the length and breadth of the country talking to any group in Fianna Fáil willing to invite him. He was accompanied on these trips by PJ Mara, who was to become one of his closest political confidants and a legendary government press secretary to Haughey's governments.

It was hard work, but the slog paid off, building on the huge reservoir of support for him in the grassroots of the organisation. Although he had always denied the gun-running charges, the arms trial only added to the whiff of sulphur around him and appealed to many in the party who remained steadfastly anti-partition.

By 1975, Lynch bowed to the inevitable and returned Haughey to the front bench. Two years later, Fianna Fáil was back in government with a twenty-seat majority and, seven years after being fired from cabinet, Haughey was back as a minister – this time in Health. In his new job, Haughey added to his populist image by distributing free toothbrushes to every child in the country. He also introduced the Family Planning Bill that allowed married people to buy contraceptives with a prescription, memorably describing it as ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem'.

However, Haughey never lost sight of the bigger prize. Despite, or maybe because of, the large Dáil majority, Lynch started to lose his grip on the party. The party establishment was firmly behind George Colley to succeed Lynch who, it was widely known, intended to step down. If Colley had the insiders in his camp, Haughey was relying on newer, younger and hungry TDs outside the centre of power – the likes of Ray MacSharry, Albert Reynolds, Padraig Flynn, Seán Doherty, Charlie McCreevy and Bertie Ahern.

There was a feeling among some sections of the party that Fianna Fáil under Lynch had drifted from its Republican roots and they saw Haughey as the man to return them there. In December 1979 Lynch announced his resignation as Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader. Unlike thirteen years earlier, there would be no compromise candidate. It was a straight fight. Colley against Haughey: The old guard against the young Turks.

The entire cabinet bar Haughey and Michael O'Kennedy supported Colley, but it wasn't enough. To the horror of the Colley camp, Haughey won the day by forty-four votes to thirty-eight. The party was hugely divided.

It was that knowledge of the bitterness and division in Fianna Fáil that would colour the speech made by opposition leader Garret FitzGerald on the day of Haughey's nomination for Taoiseach. FitzGerald would be sharply criticised for referring to Haughey's ‘flawed pedigree' in a speech that was witnessed by Haughey's elderly mother sitting in the visitors' gallery.

But the savaging by FitzGerald wasn't the most pressing issue for Haughey at that time. We now know that his personal finances were deep in the red, and with AIB pressing for Haughey's £1-million-plus debt to be repaid, it required urgent intervention.

While Haughey would later claim that his devoted friend and accountant Des Traynor had handled his financial affairs, it subsequently emerged that Patrick Gallagher was told by Haughey days after his election that he needed £750,000 to clear his debts. With help from wealthy benefactors, Haughey's financial problems eased for a time.

The same could not be said for the public finances. After an impressive start, when Haughey told the nation in a televised broadcast that it was living way beyond its means, the new Taoiseach bottled out of making the tough decisions required. He caved in to vested interests and massively increased exchequer borrowing.

Haughey did achieve some early successes on the North. He refused to accept a purely internal solution, and in his famous bout of ‘teapot' diplomacy with Margaret Thatcher, he persuaded the British to discuss the North in the context of the totality of relations between Ireland and Britain.

But he then infuriated Thatcher by overhyping the breakthrough, implying that changes in the constitutional status of the North were on the way. To make matters worse, Haughey stood almost alone in the EEC by taking an anti-British stance over the Falklands War in 1982.

And, while this played well with the FF grassroots, it was a diplomatic disaster and ended any chance of further progress on the North.

In the general election of 1981, Haughey was facing a Fine Gael revitalised under FitzGerald. Despite taking a populist line on taxation, spending and Northern Ireland, Haughey lost power. Fianna Fáil's performance was more than credible, winning 45.5 per cent of the first preference vote, but the loss of two traditional FF seats to H-Block candidates put an end to Haughey's chance of winning the day.

However, by January of 1982, the Fine Gael-Labour government had collapsed and the ensuing general election produced another inconclusive result.

Thanks to the votes of the Workers Party and Tony Gregory – with whom Haughey had personally negotiated the controversial ‘Gregory Deal' – Haughey was back as Taoiseach and felt sufficiently emboldened not to offer the position of Tánaiste to Colley.

However, the failure to win an overall majority gave Haughey's many opponents within Fianna Fáil fresh ammunition. While moves to put Des O'Malley forward as an alternative candidate for Taoiseach after the election came to nothing, in October Charlie McCreevy, frustrated at Haughey's performance on the economy, put down a motion of no confidence. McCreevy's unilateral action caught the rest of the anti-Haughey wing wholly unprepared. And, with Haughey insisting on an ‘open roll call', only twenty-two parliamentary party members voted against their leader.

1982 is now best remembered as the year of ‘GUBU'. When the most-wanted man in the country, Malcolm Macarthur, was apprehended in the home of the Attorney General (who was unaware that Macarthur was a fugitive), Haughey described the strange series of events as ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented' to which Conor Cruise O'Brien applied the acronym ‘GUBU'.

But it would not be until Haughey's government collapsed that a fuller picture would emerge of what was going on in that government. Ironically, it was Haughey's belated attempt to address the country's economic crisis that precipitated a general election. The Workers' Party and Gregory withdrew their support over ‘The Way Forward', a Fianna Fáil document which envisaged major cuts in public spending.

Fine Gael and Labour swept back into government in the following general election, with Fine Gael coming within five seats of Fianna Fáil. But Haughey's problems were only beginning. His leadership would be tested yet again when revelations emerged that the phones of two leading political journalists had been tapped.

Seán Doherty, who was a controversial justice minister during the GUBU government, took the fall for the phone taps, but there was enormous pressure on Haughey and it appeared that finally his enemies in the party would be able to overthrow him. However, the tragic death of Clem Coughlan in a car accident led the crucial party meeting to be postponed. A fierce lobbying campaign by his supporters in the days following saw Haughey once again defy the odds and scrape through.

The leadership contests had taken their toll on everyone. The party organisation reacted almost hysterically to every challenge and there were stories of threats, intimidation and inducements. The pressure on everyone was enormous, with a number of Fianna Fáil TDs suffering physical collapse under the strain. One story from the time speaks volumes of the atmosphere within the party. A couple of days after Martin O'Donoghue was dropped from the cabinet, he received a special delivery at his home. When he and his wife opened the parcel, they found two dead ducks inside along with a short message from Haughey.

‘Shot on my estate this morning.' O'Donoghue regarded this as both a bad joke and a menacing gesture.

Longtime ally Albert Reynolds recently recounted that he went to Haughey's office after the heaves to tell him face to face that he couldn't count on his support from then on. But it was also the end of the line for many of his critics in the party, who understandably yearned for a return to normal politics.

By February 1985, with the expulsion of Des O'Malley from the organisation for refusing the vote with the party against the government's Family Planning Bill, Haughey was finally in complete control of Fianna Fáil.

Typically, Haughey took a wholly opportunistic approach to opposition politics, opposing the government's divorce referendum and the historic Anglo-Irish Agreement, while also strongly criticising the Fine Gael/Labour coalition's (admittedly limited) efforts to rescue the economy. With the economy in the grip of the worst recession since the 1950s, the coalition's popularity plummeted and Haughey at last seemed destined to win that elusive overall majority at the fourth time of asking. The only cloud on the horizon was O'Malley's decision to create a new political party, the Progressive Democrats, where he was joined by high-profile Fianna Fáil figures Mary Harney, Bobby Molloy and Pearse Wyse.

In the general election, Fianna Fáil attacked the government for spending cuts, running posters declaring that ‘Health cuts hurt the old, the sick and the handicapped.' Fine Gael had a bad election, losing nineteen seats, but the PDs' surprise success in getting fourteen TDs elected meant that, once again, Fianna Fáil fell just short of an overall majority, with Haughey needing the casting vote of the Ceann Comhairle to be elected Taoiseach in the Dáil.

Yet, despite being three seats short of a majority, it proved to be Haughey's best period in office. Seven years after talking the talk on rescuing the country's finances, Haughey finally began to walk the walk.

With Ray MacSharry as finance minister and Alan Dukes' Fine Gael lending support in the Dáil for tough economic policies, budget cuts were introduced in all government departments. The positive impact on the economy and public confidence was almost immediate. There is little doubt that the basis for the future Celtic Tiger was laid during the last three years of the 1980s. Haughey's other major success from that time was his backing of the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), which despite the many sceptics, has proved a massive success.