Haughey

Gary Murphy

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780717193646
• eBook ISBN: 9780717194445
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

With exclusive access to the Haughey archives, Gary Murphy presents a reassessment of Charles Haughey's life and legacy.

Saint or sinner? Charles Haughey was, depending on whom you ask, either the great villain of Irish political life or the benevolent and forward-thinking saviour of a benighted nation. He was undoubtedly the most talented and influential politician of his generation, yet the very roots of his success – his charisma, his intelligence, his ruthlessness, his secrecy – have rendered almost impossible any objective evaluation of his life and work.

That is, until now. Based on unfettered access to Haughey's personal archives, as well as extensive interviews with more than eighty of his peers, rivals, confidants and relatives, Haughey is a rich and nuanced portrait of a man of prodigious gifts, who, for all his flaws and many contradictions, came to define modern Ireland.

'A superbly balanced exploration of the life and politics of one of the most fascinating figures in 20th century Ireland.' Professor John Horgan

'An indispensable read for anyone with an interest in modern Irish history.' David McCullagh

'Offers much new detail – and not a few surprises – about the personality and career of a political titan who is still, in equal measure, revered and reviled in 21st century Ireland.' Conor Brady

CHAPTER 1

CATHAL

INTRODUCTION

On 21 January 1980 the Department of the Taoiseach received a letter for the newly installed incumbent of the office, Charles J. Haughey. Haughey had been in office just over a month, and his incoming mail was filled with congratulatory letters, telegrams and cards. This particular letter came from one of Haughey’s regular correspondents, the founder, publisher and editor of Magill magazine, Vincent Browne, who was at that stage working on his own biography of the Fianna Fáil leader. Browne and Haughey had known each other for over a decade and just six months later, Browne would publish his explosive arms trial material based on the diaries of the former secretary of the Department of Justice, Peter Berry. The day after Haughey had unexpectedly won the Fianna Fáil leadership contest against George Colley, Browne had told Haughey that Magill was running a special ‘Making of the Taoiseach’ feature and urged Haughey to contribute to it.¹ Haughey refused. Browne had known Haughey for over a decade. He was constantly offering Haughey advice in his letters and kept demanding an official interview, which the Taoiseach’s private secretary, Seán Aylward, on his boss’s behalf, kept refusing. Haughey’s post into the department was triaged by his private secretary and a number of secretaries, who decided what he would see; but he did want to know who was writing to him, and there were a number of people whose correspondence he would demand to see. Browne was one of them.² In this particular letter Browne told Haughey that for his book he had ‘interviewed your mother, sister Maureen and brother Fr Owen in the recent past and they have revealed terrible things about your childhood’.³ What these terrible things were was left unsaid.

We know something of Haughey’s childhood, but there is no real evidence of anything awfully terrible in it beyond the usual deprivations experienced by the northside working classes. Much of the poverty the family endured was due to Johnnie Haughey’s illness. Johnnie was born in Knockaneill, just outside Swatragh, Derry, on 26 December 1897 (some put the date as 18 January 1898) into a staunch republican household and played an extremely active role in the Irish revolutionary period. After the War of Independence and the Civil War he stayed in the new national army, but ill health forced him to resign his commission in April 1928, when he was only thirty years of age. In 1928 the army was being reduced in strength and senior officers were offered two years’ pay as inducement to retire. Haughey, knowing his health was rapidly declining, took the offer and retired. It was a bitter pill for his professional pride and a savage economic blow to his wife and young family. They temporarily moved to Burrow Road in Sutton before Johnnie Haughey attempted a career in farming at the Riggins in Dunshaughlin, County Meath in 1929. The Haughey children were sent to the local school in Cushinstown.

DERRY

Johnnie Haughey’s military pension file was released in 2018. It tells a grim story from when he first applied for a military pension as early as 1925 to the death of his wife Sarah Haughey in 1989. The file, in which Haughey is called John, relates to his receipt of a military service pension in respect of his service with the Irish Volunteers, IRA and National Forces in the service periods between 1 April 1919 and 30 September 1923 during the War of Independence, the truce period and the Civil War. He claimed unsuccessfully for service in the periods between 1 April 1917 and 31 March 1919. The file refers to his receipt of a disability pension under the Army Pensions Acts and further refers to Sarah Haughey’s (née McWilliams) receipt of a widow’s allowance in respect of John Haughey under the Army Pensions Acts between 1962 and her death in September 1989. Sarah McWilliams, who was born in Stranagone on 18 October 1901, received a military pension for her service in Cumann na mBan from 1 April 1920 to 31 March 1923 during the War of Independence, truce period and Civil War.

The curator of the military archives provides a very useful summation of Haughey’s army activities as described in his file.⁴ During the War of Independence and truce period John Haughey served with the IRA as a company officer commanding, a vice-battalion officer commanding, a battalion officer commanding and a vice-brigade officer commanding. According to Haughey and the references he supplied when applying for his pension, in 1919 and 1920 he took part in a number of Irish Volunteer and IRA arms raids on homes of members of the Ulster Volunteer Force and retired British Army officers. He was also involved in organisational and training work. He stated that he was on the run and his family home was constantly raided, including on ten different occasions in one year alone. He further claimed that as a result his father and sister were forced to emigrate to the USA.

During 1920 and 1921 Haughey was involved in the disruption and destruction of communications links in his area. He took part in an IRA ambush at Swatragh in June 1921 in which, he stated, two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) were killed and one wounded; and in another ambush at an unnamed location, the outcome of which does not appear on file. He claimed to have been in receipt of information from named members of the RIC. He also took part in what were described as ‘Divisional reprisals’ at Doon, County Tyrone in which ‘a creamery, dwelling houses, shops [and] ... mills were destroyed.’ Haughey stated that during the truce period he took part in an IRA officers’ training camp at Glenasmole, County Dublin in August 1921, and established training camps and munition manufacturing in his own battalion area. According to Haughey and a reference from Patrick J. Diamond, he also took part in the IRA capture of Maghera RIC barracks in March 1922 and attacks on Draperstown Barracks in May 1922 and on Pomeroy Barracks at a date not on file. John Haughey joined the National Army in August 1922 and served throughout the remainder of the Civil War. Despite the fact that the truce with the British was signed in July 1921 the situation in Northern Ireland was violent and volatile well into 1922 and there was no hope that John Haughey and Sarah McWilliams could marry in their native Derry. They decided that they would cross the Foyle and wed in Donegal and were duly married on 1 August 1922 in St Patrick’s Church, Murlog, by an uncle of Sarah McWilliams, Fr Robert Fullerton, who had helped to found the Gaelic League in Belfast. The witnesses were James Mallon and Ellie McEldowney, and the newly wed couple had their wedding breakfast in Argue’s Hotel in Lifford. They travelled by boat from Magilligan to Greencastle, where they stayed the night and afterwards started their brief honeymoon. When Charles Haughey was Taoiseach, John Hume, with whom he had a friendly but at times difficult relationship, tracked down the boatman, John McCormack, and brought him to a pub in Greencastle from where Haughey spoke to him by phone from Dublin with what he described as a hilarious, but alas unrecorded, result.⁵ In October 1989 Haughey, while he was Taoiseach, travelled to Derry and met informally with Bishop Edward Daly of the Roman Catholic Church, Bishop James Mehaffy of the Church of Ireland and representatives of the other churches in Derry. Daly presented him with a copy of his parents’ wedding certificate, prompting Haughey to remark that it was ‘another of the many links in the chain which will always bind me to Derry.’⁶

According to Major Daniel McKenna, the senior IRA commander in the North, John Haughey had ‘done his utmost to make British law impossible in his area’ and his ‘enemies were of the opinion, and indeed not without reason, that he was the cause of all their woes in his area’.⁷ McKenna and Haughey were involved in a number of operations transferring guns from Donegal to Tyrone. Tim Pat Coogan’s biography of Michael Collins recounts an affidavit of another IRA volunteer, Thomas Kelly, who told of a dangerous mission in which ‘rifles and ammo were brought by army transport to Donegal and later moved into County Tyrone in the compartment of an oil tanker. Only one member of the IRA escorted the consignment through the Special Constabulary Barricade at Strabane/Lifford Bridge. He was Seán Haughey, father of Charles Haughey.’⁸

One of Charles Haughey’s later correspondents, Louis Walsh, told him in the early 1980s of a conversation he had with James McCloskey of Derry, who had served with Commandant Haughey and who was then eighty-seven years of age. McCloskey reminisced that ‘he often slept in a dugout with your father around his home. Apparently, your father could not sleep in his own house after a certain incident in Swatragh and after a time McCloskey acted as your father’s bodyguard when he got across the Lifford. I asked him about Dan McKenna and he said your father was a brave man.’⁹

According to John Haughey and references he supplied, he served in counties Donegal, Mayo and Sligo as well as at Athlone, Limerick, Dublin and the Curragh during that conflict. He retired to the Defence Forces reserve with the rank of commandant on 21 April 1928. The large file includes original handwritten material submitted and signed by John Haughey in support of his service pension application; material relating to the subject’s National Army and Defence Forces service record; undated unsigned handwritten notes of evidence given by John Haughey before the Board of Assessors, Military Service Pensions Act 1924 and signed handwritten statements and letters regarding John Haughey’s service from Lieutenant Michael Quinn, N. Collins, Eoin Ua Dubhaigh (Eoin O’Duffy), Major Domhnaill Mac Cionnaith (Daniel McKenna), Garda Síochána Sergeant Patrick J. Diamond, and Garda Síochána Inspector Thomas Kelly.

Johnnie Haughey’s service in the War of Independence and Civil War hit him hard. He was now an officer in an army that faced much resentment from those on the losing side in the Civil War. In his pension file, Commandant A. Fitzpatrick said that in 1923, when Haughey was stationed in Mayo, he operated in an environment where the civilian population were ‘almost entirely hostile to the army’.¹⁰ A former soldier under Haughey’s command, Seán Clancy, later recalled that while the army was not by any means popular with the civilian population in those days, the personnel of the 4th Battalion integrated reasonably well and several officers and men of other rank married girls from Mayo.¹¹ Nevertheless, it is clear that conditions both within the barracks and in the wider community were tough.

Haughey and his men often had to sleep out and their clothes were ruined. They were billeted in accommodation in Ballina which had no heating, lighting or windows. Fitzpatrick bluntly stated that all ‘these hardships endured by NCOs and men had a very detrimental effect on the health of ex-commandant Haughey as he continually endeavoured to improve the conditions of the men under his command, without result.’¹² And indeed the health of Johnnie Haughey dramatically worsened during the 1920s. In his application for a military pension, Haughey said that his disseminated sclerosis, or MS, was ‘caused by nervous and physical strain during my service in the IRA’ and claimed that he was suffering from what he termed nervousness, which led to bouts of insomnia and him traipsing around the house in the middle of the night. Haughey’s claim that his MS was a direct result of his service was not accepted by the Army Pensions Board in 1925, but reconsidered and granted on appeal on 6 October 1927, when it was decided on re-examination that the disease was ‘excited by service’.¹³ In a profile of the then Minister for Finance Charles Haughey in June 1969, the Irish Times claimed that Sarah Haughey believed it was a fall from a horse which was responsible for the gradual onset of Johnnie Haughey’s MS.¹⁴

While this profile mistakenly calls Haughey the second son in the family and misspells Eoghan Haughey, the story about Johnnie Haughey’s fall from a horse would appear to be true. Charles Haughey was always intrigued about his heritage and where his family came from. Once he became a minister he was inundated with letters from Haugheys all across the globe wondering if they were related to him. In the mid-1970s he asked a local history teacher in St Aidan’s CBS in Whitehall, Tommy Broughan, to undertake research into the Haughey family name. Broughan completed his mammoth 400-page work on the Haughey name and sent it to Haughey in January 1980, just after he had become Taoiseach. Haughey replied to him on 6 February declaring that he could see ‘even at first glance that it is a marvellous piece of work on your part’.¹⁵ In his account of Johnnie Haughey, Broughan stated that during his time in Mullingar, where he had been stationed after Castlebar, Haughey was becoming worried about a physical disability which he could not shake off. Although an enthusiastic and skilful horseman, something his second son inherited from him, he fell badly on one occasion. Broughan notes that it is impossible to tell if this aggravated a condition that was already present. It certainly could not have helped, and Johnnie’s illness was made worse by the fact that he refused over a number of years to go to hospital to have treatment or to be X-rayed for his progressive disability.¹⁶

Johnnie was officially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1933 but was manifestly showing signs of the disease five years earlier when he left the army. He had difficulty walking after 1934. His youngest son, Eoghan, who was born in 1934, never saw him walking.¹⁷ By 1941 Haughey was so incapacitated that he was completely bedridden. He was so affected by the disease that his pension statement had to be marked with an X as he was unable to write his own name. In 1942 a doctor who had examined him over the previous decade and a half noted his fits of ‘marked moroseness and depression’ and that his gait was ‘definitely spastic in character’.¹⁸ He died five years later on 3 January 1947, just over two weeks short of his forty-ninth birthday, leaving a devastated wife and seven children. His condition had been such for over a decade that it was considered to be 100 per cent debilitating.

The family home that Charles Haughey grew up in was one in which the father figure was an invalid who was forced to lie in bed all day and could only get out of it to be fed. In that context there were indeed terrible things about Haughey’s childhood. He and his siblings went to school while their father was in bed and when they came home he was in bed. But Haughey was immensely proud of his father and, as Taoiseach, instructed his private secretaries that any letter about his father was to be given directly to him. One of Haughey’s earliest congratulatory letters came from Henry MacErlean from Belfast who told him it was a ‘source of considerable pleasure to me personally that the son of a county Derryman, with whom I was once associated in the fight for the freedom of the country, has been elected to membership of Dáil Éireann’.¹⁹ Moreover, Haughey asked the officer in charge of the Military Archives, Commandant Peter Young, to notify him directly of any records he might come across pertaining to his father. In May 1983 Young contacted Haughey to pass on a variety of documents about Johnnie Haughey’s service, including one describing the difficult conditions under which Haughey and his fellow soldiers operated.²⁰ A number of years later Lieutenant Colonel Bill Egar sent Haughey a copy of An Cosantóir (the Defence Forces’ journal) of November 1983, which recounted much of the history of the 4th Infantry Battalion, noting: ‘your father contributed to the foundation of this proud unit, being commanding officer from April 1924 to April 1928.’²¹ That edition of An Cosantóir featured the reminis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1. Cathal
• 2. Education
• 3. Charlie
• 4. In the Dáil
• 5. Justice
• 6. Agriculture
• 7. Of Farmers and Elections
• 8. The Minister for Finance
• 9. Horseman, Pass By
• 10. Mr Haughey’s Attitude to Illegal Organisations and Activities
• 11. This Tiresome Business of the Trial
• 12. Isolation
• 13. A Corinthian, a Lad of Mettle, a Good Boy
• 14. I Have the Votes
• 15. Taoiseach
• 16. Rise and Follow
• 17. 1982
• 18. Phone Tapping
• 19. Haughey’s Ireland
• 20. National Recovery
• 21. We Will be Relying on You
• 22. The Pulse of the Nation
• 23. Afterdeath
• Notes
• Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill Books
• Reviews
• Photo Section