Haughey documentary was gripping television
I was doubly glad I refused the poisoned chalice when I heard producer Niamh Sammon saying on last week's Sunday Supplement that they had decided not to get bogged down in that particular morass. After all, the chief actor had always adamantly refused to discuss the episode publicly, or it appears, privately.
Haughey was gripping television from beginning to end, produced with brilliant professionalism. As historical documentary it wasn't in the same class as Sean O Mordha's magnificent Seven Ages but then it didn't purport to be. Besides, its focus was much narrower.
Nonetheless, it will be an important source for the history of Fianna Fail in the Haughey period. The running commentary was blandly neutral throughout, though a firmer judgment was made in the final programme which spoke of "a legacy forever tarnished". But a background commentary was hardly necessary: the observations and body language of Haughey's colleagues and associates said it all. The corruption of the man and his party did not need to be spelt out.
The film footage made for great television - Brian Lenihan at bay before the cameras, all his wriggle-room gone; Haughey himself running the gauntlet of the booing and jeering crowd at Dublin Castle. Eimear was the only one of the Haughey children who had anything interesting to say. Their father had given them permission (!) to participate and they could hardly appear other than as loyal to him. Eimear felt he had been "totally betrayed by the State": interestingly in the same week, the dutiful daughter of Sinn Fein TD, Martin Ferris, also complained that he had been persecuted by the State. The occasion was her election as Mayor of Kerry (with FF support).
The most frank - and significant - contributions throughout the series came from Albert Reynolds, PJ Mara and Padraig Flynn. Together they unwittingly exposed FF for what it was - an unsavoury party single-mindedly preoccupied with getting and retaining power. Flynn came across as a comic Mayo Soprano, claiming to have dealt ruthlessly with those who presented a threat to his gang . . . "Suddenly we had a little call to make . . . we knew what had to be done . . . let's say, we persuaded some."
PJ Mara didn't sound mad like Flynn, simply menacing ("We nailed them to the cross"), the Mask of Bonhomie removed, the grin staying in place.
All three expressed their deep aversion to the Progressive Democrats. Albert reacted with nausea ("Sick") and P Flynn with rage ("Dirty Little F'ing Deal") as they recalled Haughey forming the coalition with the PDs in 1989. Their attitude was hardly surprising: they had been sent out to the media to defend FF's "No Coalition" core value whilst the Boss did the dirty business all on his ownio, thus displaying characteristic contempt for his lieutenants. And even the loyal PJ found Haughey's cynical sell-out of Brian Lenihan hard to stomach in the end.
There were some intriguing vignettes. The contributions of Katherine Butler, Haughey's private assistant (1981-'92) were interesting throughout. Dermot Desmond was disarmingly frank: he would have no hesitation in throwing Haughey a lifeline of "a million or two million" tomorrow morning. And why wouldn't he? The financial climate Haughey helped to create was extremely beneficial to Desmond and his ilk. The largesse from Desmond, Ben Dunne and others helped Haughey to indulge his fantasy of being a neo-Gaelic lord and all republicans dearly love a lord, even a soi-disant one.
Our present Taoiseach made some fleeting appearances. He deplored political corruption, but of course, it had nothing to do with him. Sure, he signed "books of blank cheques" but "I didn't see my role as being the watchdog of what the party leader did with the leader's funds". But wasn't it grossly irresponsible, to say the least, to sign blank cheques and didn't his role as treasurer oblige him to be a watchdog?
As for the main man, the footage reminded us of Haughey's absurd pretensions (for example, the pompous and ludicrous Charlie Haughey's Ireland video), his delusions of grandeur and his posturings in international circles. Where did he cultivate that languid handwave which sometimes turned into an Episcopal blessing? The style and content of his rhetoric now seemed very dated - those ringing platitudes, that declamatory intonation (part-platform, part-pulpit) inherited from a previous generation of politicians. Haughey's short stature was only occasionally obvious on film, as when he reviewed a guard of honour, for instance. Small men sometimes compensate by being aggressively ambitious. If you think that's psycho-babble it is no more so than the stuff we heard from amateur psychologists on the programmes.
More seriously, the now fashionable attempts to rehabilitate Haughey were evident throughout, particularly in relation to the economy and the North. A similar revisionism is at work in both areas and it runs like this: "maybe he got it wrong earlier on, but he made amends in the late Eighties and he will be remembered for not only fostering the Celtic Tiger but for laying the foundations of the peace process".
If Haughey is to be credited for finally helping to put the economy on the right track, he must also take the blame for the savage cuts from which the poor and the old have never recovered. And economists will surely point out that the roots of prosperity from the Nineties were much more complex than setting up the International Financial Services Centre.
Similarly, it is tenuous and fanciful to link the approaches of Fr Alex Reid (Gerry Adams's favourite sagart) to Haughey, with the Belfast Agreement ten years on. In any case, this initiative hardly redresses the balance of Haughey's cynical and self-serving attitudes to the Northern conflict over the years - the efforts to give the Thatcher meetings an all-Ireland spin, the partisan exploitation of the New Ireland Forum, the opposition to Garret FitzGerald's "constitutional crusade" and the attempt at sabotaging the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.
Senator Martin Mansergh, the then FF Northern adviser had the grace to admit that he got that one very wrong. When the "patriot" Henry Flood criticised the inadequacies of "legislative independence" in 1782, Henry Grattan said this was because Flood "was not the man who obtained it". Haughey's criticism of Garret FitzGerald's achievement in 1985 was in the same petty category of jealousy.
The series never adverted to the failure of Haughey, the leader of the "republican" party to make a secular stand in the church-State sphere. His positions on contraception (was there ever a more cynical maxim than his description of his sectarian Family Planning Act (1978) as "an Irish solution to an Irish problem"?) and on divorce constituted a hypocritical and craven capitulation to ecclesiastical power.
The series would have benefited from a wrap-up programme, giving a panel of historians and other commentators the opportunity to pull the whole thing together and to assess the Haughey legacy overall.
John A Murphy is Emeritus Professor of Irish History at University College Cork.
- John A Murphy
