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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
60 March/April 2022
Both the source of the Haughey money
and his energetic libido deserve more
detailed exploration
G
ARY MURPHY of Dublin City University hit
the pre-Christmas market with a -pae
tome on Charles J Hauhey. Unfortunately
it will not be the last word on his subject.
It is not a criticism of this book to state that many
more books will emerge on the topic of Mr Haughey.
Murphy has provided the most exhaustive account
to date. The DCU academic has been greatly helped
by his access to the Haughey private papers and
assistance from the Haughey family. The result is a
colour portrait of a man who has often been painted
in black and white.
My own book, ‘Haughey - Prince of Power’, written
in 2015, drew from my own connections with the
former Taoiseach. The pressure for me was to pare
the material down to make my biography readable
and accessible to younger readers. Gary Murphy, as
befits an academic, has written at length and in great
detail. His portrait of Haughey’s early years and fam
-
Haughey: Conor Lenihan reviews
the well written, but unfortunately
authorised, biography of the
disgraced former Taoiseach
His assertion that “there was no evidence of
any political impropriety by Haughey in relation
to the monies he received” counts as one of
the most egregious misjudgements in recent
Irish political biography
ily background is new and insightful.
However, Murphy treads carefully and too cau
-
tiously on the two explosive aspects to the Haughey
career - his corruption and his 27-year relationship
with femme fatale Terry Keane.
The first Moriarty report concluded that Haughey
“unethically” received more than £9m from busi
-
nessmen between 1979 and 1996, and that he had
done corrupt favours for some donors including
a youthful Revenue-challenged Ben Dunne and a
passport-seeking Arab sheik. The incidence and
scale of these payments, Moriarty declaimed,
“particularly when governments led by Mr Haughey
were championing austerity, can only be said to
have devalued the quality of a modern democracy”.
CULTURE
Flsh, for the 1960s
March/April 2022 61
Murphy unwisely downplays this. His assertion that
“there was no evidence of any political impropriety
by Haughey in relation to the monies he received”
counts as one of the most egregious misjudgements
in recent Irish political biography. Certainly the book
suers as the ocial or authorised biography and
UCD professor Diarmuid Ferriter inferred that Murphy
was derailed by deference.
It as if Murphy has both a disdain and mental
reservations on Haughey’s prime delinquencies.
Wide-ranging existing research on his seamier sides:
corruption and Keane, goes unreferenced. Keane
gave a series of very telling interviews about her fiery
and longstanding relationship with Haughey. Both
the source of the Haughey money and his ener
-
getic libido deserve more detailed exploration. For
instance with the Haughey millions stashed in the
Crown colony of the Cayman islands it is hard not to
believe that CJH was fatally compromised in relation
to dealing with the British, a belief propounded by
his successor Albert Reynolds. Haughey’s furtive
oshore accounts can hardly have passed unnoticed
by hostile UK security services.
I knew Terry Keane and conclude the opposite to
Murphy - she was very influential and did act as a
political confidante to Haughey throughout their
time together. My father, Brian, often dined with
the couple. He often noted that in many respects
her political judgements were far more acute than
Haughey”s. Terry Keane also brought an eclectic
string of new admirers to the Haughey table - drawn
from the world of media, the arts, and fashion and
not naturally supporters of Fianna Fáil.
Haughey’s supreme failure was his caution. He
rarely refound in his late career as leader and Tao
-
iseach the extraordinary reforming and enlightened
approach that he purveyed as Minister for Justice
and Finance in the 1960s - the Succession Act, the
tax exemption for artists and free travel for the el
-
derly. The decisiveness of the early years years was
later superseded by a surprisingly dithering Charvet
modality.
The Arrns Trial, a serious car crash and repeated
health problems seem to have rendered him risk
averse on key agendas. On the positive side, unlike
his nemesis Garret FitzGerald, he had tremendous
executive skills and could both conceive and imple
-
ment big, some might say grandiose, projects or
plans; the IFSC, Temple Bar, the Museum of Modern
Art. Haughey was also the first Taoiseach to hire an
advisor on the environment, academic ornithologist
David Cabot, well before ecology was normalised in
the Irish public consciousness.
For ocial Ireland his greatest shame is his naked
venality and criminal pursuit of money to support
his lavish lifestyle and high-maintenance political
career. Ownership of racehorses, a Gandon Mansion
with a stocked cellar and an island o Kerry, sparked
rumours but embarrassingly little media investiga
-
tion. It’s honestly dicult to say if the same caution
would prevail today.
Unfortunately, very few villains of Irish public life
actually go to jail. The irony in Haughey’s case was
that it was prejudicial gauche comments by the often
zealous Mary Harney that
allowed him to avoid the rap
of the criminal law.
In the Gary Murphy version
Haughey’s dodginess reads
like the prosaic graft and cor
-
ruption of US city bosses like
Boss Croker and James Cur
-
ley of Boston. Such carry-on
was of course antithetical to
statesmanship. Counter-intu
-
itively the abrasive Haughey
was chronically insecure ap
-
parently preferring to play as
a big fish in a small pool than
risk his strokes in a big pool.
The novelist Francis Stuart
once acerbically remarked
that the problem with
Haughey was that he wasn’t
gangster enough.
Disillusioned with his early
experiences as Taoiseach
Haughey confided in Terry
Keane that he wanted to quit
public life and settle in the
South of France, with her of
course. Sadly he spent so
much eort becoming Taoise
-
ach he was either too cynical
or too exhausted by the time
he ascended. His success
after 1987 was largely due
to an under-appreciated
new-found humility and the
knowledge that he only had
a very short time to confound
his critics.
Insecurity didn’t cut across
his ego. PJ Mara recorded that Haughey had “a great
sense of himself”. But neither insecurity nor ego can
excuse his disgraces. One day Anthony Cronin came
in to Leinster House to meet me for lunch. It was the
time when the Tribunal of investigation was afire and
Terry Keane had just gone on the TV to tell her side
of the aair. Cronin and I talked books rather than
politics. Eventually I asked Cronin, a writer, and life
-
long friend of, and cultural advisor to, Haughey, what
he thought of the latest revelations about his former
boss. The Cronin reply was all-knowing. “ He sort of
let himself down, a lot”. It was an interesting take
from the man who subsequently gave Haughey’s
funeral eulogy
The journalist and editor Vincent Browne has
been working for the best part of twenty years on
his biography of Haughey. It may well be that this
will be something of an antidote to Gary Murphy’s
academic but well-written book. The lesson from
the Haughey career is a reminder of the psalm’s
counsel: “put not your faith in princes”.
Conor Lenihan is a former Minister,TD and journalist.
His second best-selling book ‘Albert Reynolds - Risk
-
taker for Peace’ is in shops now.
Put not your trust
in princes
