The Great National Bastard? (RIP)

As I write the Angelus bell is ringing. Somehow fitting as I attempt to eulogise a life without parallel.

A few years back, the former Minister for Health and Supreme Court Judge, Thomas O'Higgins, passed away. O'Higgins was notable for two events; the establishment of the VHI in 1957 and a Supreme Court decision that upheld the illegality of homosexual relationships in 1982. Neither of these moments would have found favour with me had I been alive at the time, and I said so in numerous conversations with friend and foe alike, questioning the fawning adulation afforded to him by editorials in the national media. I was berated for criticising the dead before the warmth had left his veins. Many friends who I've known and loved for years were appalled that I could be so cold.

This morning I announced the death of Charles Haughey to a number of colleagues in the tea-station. Aroused from their World Cup musings, they laughed and hollered. Their response to the passing of another human being reminded me of John Cleese's eulogy at the funeral of his dear friend, Graham Chapman; 'Good riddance to him, the free-loading bastard, I hope he burns'. Unfortunately the savage irony present on that occasion made no appearance in the tea-station this morning.

Never has a man evinced such a mixed reaction. I can easily imagine staunch FFers on their knees today, shrouded in melancholy and grief, mourning the passing of great man. I can imagine other FFers dancing reels and jigs at the temporal demise of the man who tore their party's unity to shreds. I can imagine Garret being genuinely disappointed at the loss of his adversary, accompanying his sadness with an elongated sigh that the great legislator eventually failed to realise anything other than a flawed pedigree. I can imagine Mara laughing at memories of his master's acerbic wit on the backroads of Ireland as Haughey courted the Cumainn. I can imagine students and righteous indignants howling and hoping that his last hours were more painful than the cold winters visited upon O.A.P.s in the early eighties as the fuel allowance was cut. I can imagine more than a few nod and wink merchants leaned against fences across the land revelling in the romance of it all, the undeniable reality that their man never suffered for being a cute hoor, and neither would they. Most of all, I embrace a vision of Brian Lenihan, perched on a silver cloud, delighted that his partner in crime is coming home, brimming with aphorisms that he's been saving up since his own death, redolent of his wit the day Charlie retired from politics. Surveying the pandemonium that was playing itself out within the party, Lenihan jibed, 'Look at them, they haven't a clue what do to! The bland leading the bland!'

Haughey was a brilliant legislator. Free Travel for Over 65s. The Succession Act. While his tax exemptions for artists allow greedy bastards like U2 to avoid putting something back into the society that created them, it also allows marginal artists to scrape by, thus enriching our society. The favours for the bloodstock industry, while less easily defended, prevented that industry's collapse; we need only to look to what happened in France when incentives were withdrawn as evidence that treating Magner et al favourably was on the money. Furthermore, his presence in government in the sixties with O'Malley and Lenihan represented a changing of the guard and a new, proactive approach to the problems of the day. One can only wonder what he might have achieved if the Arms Trial - on which I am no expert, so I will refrain from comment - hadn't cut his career short.

And then there was the dark side. Fine living while the country starved. A man dressed in Charvet suits while pensioners wrapped themselves in moth-ridden blankets. Island life while his own native island ejaculated its children to the furthest reaches of the globe. And his relationship to Ben Dunne.

I find it difficult to become irate when commenting on those payments. Did Charles Haughey create corruption in Irish life, or did corruption in Irish life create Charles Haughey? His dedication to the country in the early years of his career cannot be denied. As time passed, he became corrupted by the allure of power. Which one of us doesn't. We tend to look at Haughey now and see a distant murky past that has been left behind along with emigration and bosco. That murky past lives on in three words. The Galway Races.

My main criticisms of his tenure relate to his clenched fist approach to the corridors of power. In 1981, he informed the country that it needed to rationalise. He subsequently awarded a MASSIVE pay rise to a bloated public sector that had bled the country dry throughout the late seventies. It was an act of wanton political cowardice. As was his sacking of Lenihan - although the latter was more understandable; it was what the party wanted, and what Lenihan himself wouuld have done had the roles been reversed. But the eighties are littered with events that compromised the onward march of Irish society, motivated by short-term political gain, and the man at the centre of it all was Charles Haughey.

But such is politics. And such intrigue did not begin or end with the Squire of Kinsealy. You have the IFSC. You have Government Buildings, one of Dublin's most awesome architectural sights. You have DIT and Limerick as modern universities, at the forefront of global research. And you have the Bert, who was blooded by Charlie.

A mixed legacy. Undoubtedly. But in many ways, a brilliant one.

When Haughey bid adieu to Leinster House in 1992, the scent of Shakespearean tragedy hung in the air. On this momentous day, the words of the bard ring true once more.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;