Charles Haughey: 1925-2003

Works
‘Rural Sociology and Ireland’, in Éire-Ireland, 1, 4 (Winter 1966), pp. 63-68; The Spirit of the Nation, ed. Martin Mansergh (Cork: Mercier Press 1986). Also, an entry on ‘Aosdána’ in W. J. McCormack , ed., The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture (1999; 2001), p.21.

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Commentary
Brian Inglis, Downstarts (London: Chatto & Windus 1990): ‘Soon there was to be a different form of temptation for me to return to live and work in Ireland. “When, a hundred years from now, they are casting round for suitable centenaries to celebrate, I like to think that 1970 will be remembered as the year when poets first began to be repaid for their services as the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, I wrote at the time. “In the Republic of Ireland, this financial year, anybody who produces or has in the past produced ‘a book or other writing, a play, a musical composition, a painting or sculpture which is original and creative and which is regarded as having cultural or artistic merit’ will no longer be required to pay income tax on the proceeds”. The Minister for Finance in the Lemass government, Charles Haughey, had belied his reputation as “the Hard Man” by introducing the measure “to create a sympathetic environment here in which the arts can flourish”. It was a noble gesture; but, as Haughey himself admitted, it was unlikely to bring artists and writers in droves to Ireland. Few of them earned enough to pay much income tax anyway. […]’ (p.276.)

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Anthony Cronin relates: ‘When Haughey, whom he had known and admired at University College Dublin, asked him, after the funeral of Pádraic Colum, in 1972, for help with a speech on the State and the arts he was due to give at Harvard, Cronin had the feeling that “if I got him to deliver some of my ideas on support for the artist in his speech he could be locked into them”. It turned out to be a good bet on a politician who was then in the wilderness, and the result is Aosdána.’ (Fintan O’Toole [interview article], ‘Unfairly Neglected? Not Now’, The Irish Times (Thurs, 26 Nov. 2004.)

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Jarlath Killeen, ‘Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction’, in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 1 (Oct. 2006): ‘However, the Irish Gothic, understood as a form of perpetual hesitancy, may not be altogether possible in Celtic Tiger Ireland since it appears that the Irish have finally made a choice and rejected the hyphenated mind of the past. Gothic Ireland now exists only as a tourist virtual reality. Perhaps the last great Irish figure who could be considered a Gothic ‘hero’ was Charles J. Haughey, a monumental cultural hesitator in the best sense of the term. A political and social modernizer and innovator (seen in his judicial reforms, especially the Succession Act, his development of Temple Bar, his handling of the presidency of the EC in 1990), he was nonetheless reviled by his fellow cosmopolitans because he spoke in the language of what they considered atavistic tribal nationalism (despite his importance to the Peace Process), and, in the eyes of the high priests of modernity he was seen as a monster needing a stake through his heart. Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s often appeared to resemble the plot of a Gothic novel, Garret the Good chasing down Charlie the Bad across an increasingly improbable plot, a battle won when Brian Lenihan – closely associated with the Haughey element in Irish politics – lost the Presidential election to the liberal Mary Robinson, a woman associated with the ‘right’ side of recent ideological battles between stereotyped traditionalists and modernisers.’ [Cont.]

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Jarlath Killeen (‘Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction’, 2006) - cont.: ‘The truth was, as usual, more complex. Haughey, like the Anglo-Irish writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had his feet firmly in two camps, and pointed in two directions: towards an unreal and weird landscape he called (in a now notorious Channel Four documentary) ‘Charles Haughey’s Ireland’, and towards the virtual reality future of the Irish Financial Services Centre. Perpetually hesitating between these two modes, Haughey effectively instantiated a schizophrenic Ireland unable to decide whether its future lay in the past or the present. In the end, as Ivana Bacik has put it, Ireland was dragged ‘kicking and screaming’ into postmodernity through three abortion referenda, two divorce referenda, and a host of other, bitterly divisive, changes. When Haughey died in June 2006, the Gothic Ireland recognised by Maturin, a place where all manner of things were possible, a GUBU land of the imagination, also passed on. While some popped unseemly corks of celebration at Haughey’s death – the death, so it seemed to them, of an Ireland they despised, an dark Ireland of the deep past – others reflected, like Lord Glenthorn in Edgeworth’s Ennui, that perhaps with the coming about of this new modern Ireland something frightening, fractious, dangerous, but exciting and stimulating had been lost. However, as Declan Kiberd has reminded us, Irish traditions are at their most vital when they have been proclaimed about to die [Irish Classics, 2000, passim], so perhaps the ghosts of Maturin, Le Fanu, Stoker, and Haughey are ready for a dramatic and truly terrifying revival.’ [End; online.]

Catriona Crowe: ‘Testimony to the Flowering’, in The Dublin Review [n.s.; ed. Brendan Barrington] (Spring 2003): ‘Mr Haughey must have taken some pleasure in Seamus Deane's words about him in the anthology: “he skilfully combines de Valera's meticulously crafted republicanism with Seán Lemass’s best possible blend of cosmopolitan modernity and ancestral loyalty for present-day Ireland”’. (Available online; accessed 07.11.2011.)

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Notes
GUBU: ‘Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’ (GUBU) were the epithets employed by Haughey in response to the arrest of the homocide MacArthur in the home of the Attorney-General in 1982, became Conor Cruise O’Brien’s name for the Haughey ethos and the title of a collection of satirical poems by W. J. McCormack. (See also his remark professing not to wiling to believe that Haughey is politically dead until he sees him staked at the crossroads and bedecked with garlic - copied under Bram Stoker, infra.)

Failed pol. entity: Charles Haughey coined the phrase ‘a failed political entity’ to describe Northern Ireland in his first speech as Fianna Fáil leader in 1979. (See Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992, Four Courts Press 2000, p.11, quoting The Spirit of the Nation, ed. Martin Mansergh, Mercier Press 1986, pp.327, 335.)

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In the flesh?: Charles Haughey is the putative subject of a play by Sebastian Barry (Hinterland, 2002), which met with strong opposition from the critical establishment for its dramatic treatment of the politician’s private life and for its supposed failure to engage with the moral seriousness of the issues raise. (See under Barry, infra.)

The Moriarty tribunal [found] that the late Charles Haughey took payments of €11.56 million, the equivalent of up to €45 million in today’s money, between 1979 and 1996, and granted favours in return. (Irish Times, 20 Dec. 2006). See also response of TDs to published report in the Dáil debate (The Irish Times, 15 Feb. 2007).

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Inishvickillane (1): Inishvickillane Island (off the Blaskets): A voluminous archive of papers and photograps relating to Haughey's ownership of the island donated by his family has been digitised and displayed at the Blascaod Centre in Dun Chaoin. Haughey attempted to restore sea eagles to the island but these were mobbed by the big gulls and ravens so that Aillil, the male, was found dead on the beach at Waterville and Maeve, the female, an intermittent visitor, finally disappeared. Nine red deer were also flown in from Killarney and now number 90, having been interbred with Sika deer from the mainland. See Michael Viney, “Another Life”, 16 April 2011, Weekend Review, p.6.) Also reports that the Haughey family have offered his yacht Celtic Mist to the Irish Whale and Dolphin group, having previously been offered for sale at €175,000. On the Haughey archive at Dun Chaoin, see also report in Irish Times, 11 April 2011.

Inishvickillane (2): see Mícheál Ó Dubhshláine, Inisvickillane: A Unique Portrait of the Blasket Island (Drandon Press 2009), 284pp. + 24pp. of photos. Written by a Kildare-born schoolteacher who spent thirty years at Dun Chaoin NS in Corca Dhuibhne. The work is not Haughey-centred.

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