Posted on 06/18/2006 7:26:22 PM PDT by aculeus
De mortuis nil nisi bonum was one of the few Latin phrases my father had, and in the main I stick by it.
I could barely bring myself to watch the television coverage of the funeral on Friday of Charles Haughey, the former Taoiseach of my country, liar, fraud, cheat and, to coin a phrase once used in another context by another politician of a colleague, "a thundering disgrace".
Mr Haughey was accorded a state funeral. A state funeral! The honour you give to those who have served, rather than used, their country.
This is the honour you accord to heads of state who have been truly loved, or men or women who have led you through war, or by their dignity have exemplified all that is best in their nation.
Charles Haughey exemplified all that was, thanks to him, worst in the Irish nation: trickery, smoothness, conceit, cronyism (Tony Blair isn't even in the foothills of Haughey's skill in that area) and downright abuse of power. So de mortuis on this occasion goes out the window.
Of course, his friends, those who benefited from his patronage and favours, excuse his failings as being part of a character who, as one of them said when he looked at his face in the open coffin, "was wearing the smile of old devilment".
Great! He was a card, a bit of a lad. You can almost hear them saying, a la Blair about John Prescott, "sure Charlie is Charlie".
Charlie Haughey was, indeed, Charlie Haughey, and in a real sense polluted the air of Irish politics for the best part of half a century.
His rules were his own. His vanity breathtaking, his dismissal of enemies, either real or imagined, vicious. To have accorded this man a state funeral is nothing short of a disgrace, and one that makes me feel ashamed.
I gather that a year or so ago, when it became apparent that his illness was inevitably going to take him away, he planned his own funeral.
Thus do dictators wish to leave their spiritually impoverished people the world over. For make no mistake, a crucial part of Haughey's legacy to Ireland was to introduce crude cynicism to almost everything he touched.
He even walked like some quasi-Napoleonic character. The walls of his study at his home were festooned with framed menus from the world's best restaurants.
His fawning acolytes, who padded after his every step and applauded his every utterance, can best be summed up by the phrase from his long-time friend and press officer, P J Mara, who in a call for unity during one of the many divisions in Haughey's Fianna Fail party turned to gathered reporters, of which I was one, and said with a grin: "Fianna Fail must support the leader.
Uno duce, uno voce." It was the only time I ever heard Mussolini being quoted as a role model in Irish politics.
Haughey's legacy will one day hopefully evaporate but the myths about him are spectacular. Myth: he was the architect of Ireland's economic prosperity, even the father of the Celtic Tiger.
Wrong. After his disastrous economic policies it took people like Dr Garret FitzGerald and John Bruton, both Fine Gael Taoiseachs, to right his wrongs.
He loved the shoulder-rubbing with writers and artists and gave them tax-free status - welcome, obviously, to struggling poets and novelists - but if you were to ask his constituents what it meant to them, few would know what you were talking about.
The evidence presented to the various tribunals still going on in Ireland into Haughey's shenanigans demonstrate that, had he been a private citizen, he would have gone to prison for perjury.
This point has been made, for example, by Ruairi Quinn, former leader of the Irish Labour party, an even-handed and even-tempered man who, like so many, was constantly revolted by Haughey's behaviour.
Much is often made of Haughey's interest in Northern Ireland, the suggestion being that he wanted a rapprochement with Ulster Unionists and a gradual coming together of North and South. Charles Haughey had no feel whatsoever for Ulster unless it was Catholic and Republican.
Once, in the 1970s, he asked me to lunch when I was a reporter in Belfast. True to his presentation of himself as a smooth operator, we met, not in a mainstream restaurant, but in the long-gone restaurant in Dublin Airport!
I recall vividly the burden of Haughey's conversation: that Ulster Protestants were secondary to the future of Ireland, and that - his own words - "they've never achieved anything".
At this point I must declare a minor family interest. When my father, Harry, retired from the civil service, he helped to set up the taxation department in a firm of Dublin accountants, Haughey Boland: sleeping partner because of political commitments, one Charles Haughey.
In the days before PAYE, my father twice a year helped Mr Haughey with his tax returns.
Well, obviously not all his tax returns, because there was always one puzzling aspect to Haughey's finances: where did a Dail deputy, even a minister, get the money to buy racehorses, helicopters and even, for heaven's sake, an island off the Kerry coast?
We still don't quite know, but what we do know is that whenever he was stuck for cash for the lifestyle he loved, he could borrow from at least two prominent Irish businessmen.
This was not someone asking a pal for a few quid here and there: this was an elected government minister and later Taoiseach in the ultimate position of power, getting money from those who might someday need the favour returned.
He even managed to get one of Ireland's leading banks to reduce a million-pound overdraft and eventually managed to stumble across more than £3 million to settle a tax bill.
My father would never talk to me about anyone's private business but it angers me that a decent man could have unwittingly been drawn into giving advice based on only half a story.
The writer of a letter to the Irish Times last week remarked on Haughey's demand when Minister for Finance to " 'tighten our belts' while he lived like a prince".
The writer mourned his passing as a man, husband and father but noted that we are entitled to judge him as a politician and supposed public servant.
On every single one of those counts his legacy is not just flawed, it is disgraceful.
Another letter-writer noted that the saddest thing about him was that by his behaviour he helped to make so many of the electorate indifferent to politics and politicians.
Haughey was handed a decent political pedigree, marrying the daughter of another Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, a gruff but sound man who could in large measure have genuinely laid claim to have started the 1960s rescue of a post-war Irish economy.
Haughey cynically used pedigree and office for his own ends. This is what makes the honour of a state funeral so repellent. From here on such an honour is permanently devalued.
When he made his final resignation speech to the Dail, Haughey had the nerve to quote from Othello. "I have done the state some service."
If he had possessed half a conscience he might have plucked another line from the end of one of the sonnets: "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."
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He was some piece of work.
I get the feeling that Henry Kelly doesn't like him.
Excellent obituary - really captures the spirit of the man and his admirers, has some (biting) humour, anecdotes of his life and times, well done!
Given the vicissitudes of Irish history, it sounds to me as though he was all too Irish.
Does Lard Ass Kennedy get a State Funeral? How soon????
I reckon he might get a similar obituary, too!
That was Frank McCourt's (author of Angela's Ashes) humorous take on Irish Alzheimers -- you forget everything but the grudge.
I first met Haughey in 1968. He was a mean little bastard then and maintained that through the rest of his life and death.
A strange combination - a strongly anglophile Irishman who greatly disliked Unionists!
A strange combination - a strongly anglophile Irishman who greatly disliked Unionists!
Selling arms to the Hibernofascists was bad enough on it's own!
BTW.. I notice I can't find any 'compromising' pics of Haughey on Google.ie...
*tries Yahoo*
It's amazing an Irishman has to write the truth in a British newspaper.
I don't like him either.
Kennedy is a good comparison! ;)
I have to give him credit for consistency!! LOL
Good thing - you were better to save your money for something worthwhile! ;)
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