Category: Haughey

Hutch and Haughey – Two of a kind

Gerard ‘The Monk’ Hutch hasn’t been convicted of any crime for the last 25 years but anyone listening to Prime Time last night would find that fact difficult to believe as RTE Crime Correspondent Paul Reynolds accused him of being involved in at least one armed robbery.

“Why do you say you didn’t do the robbery when you know you did and everybody else knows you did?”

So much for the principle of being innocent until proven guilty.

It’s interesting to observe how RTE treats people like Hutch in comparison to more ‘respectable’ criminals. For example, Miriam O’Callaghan introduced the piece by telling us that people are often outraged at how some individuals seem to be almost immune from prosecution.

For years I’ve been outraged at how politicians and white collar criminals seem to be immune from prosecution and yet I’ve never witnessed any of them get the grilling that Hutch received.

It’s also interesting to observe the parallels between Hutch and the most corrupt politician of all, Charles Haughey, a criminal who was always treated with the highest respect by RTE.

Hutch claims he made his money from shrewd investments in the property market. How many times did we hear Haughey supporters make the same claim – and expect us to believe it?

Hutch denied any knowledge about the source of dodgy money in his bank account. Haughey was just as barefaced in relation to dodgy money in his accounts.

Hutch was asked:

“The money that you made, the figures just don’t add up, the compensation doesn’t really wash, the evidence is there in the figures that don’t add up because one minute you’re a guy who has no money, you get a compensation claim and now you’re a multi-millionaire. – Do you really expect people to believe that?”

Haughey was a guy who initially had no money and then suddenly he was a multi-millionaire. His figures never added up but somehow he was never asked the hard questions.

Hutch said he didn’t care what people believed. Haughey adopted the same attitude.

Hutch claims that he was ignorant of tax laws but when he realised the error of his ways he was more than happy to settle with Revenue. Haughey also claimed ignorance of his tax obligations and also made a deal with Revenue.

But by far the most interesting comment was made by Detective Superintendent John O’Mahoney of the Criminal Assets Bureau.

“There are people out there who would have you believe that a certificate of tax clearance meant that people were innocent of criminality. A certificate of tax clearance is just that, it is not a certificate of innocence.”

Couldn’t agree with you more Superintendent.

Copy to:
Prime Time

Mafia country

Padraic O’Connor, the former director of NCB has stated that he is not and never was a friend of Bertie Ahern’s. In spite of this Ahern is adamant that they were very good friends. In effect, Ahern is calling O’Connor a liar. It’s as if O’Connor said that black is black and Ahern retorted, no; black is white.

This kind of fantasy world speak is common throughout all of Ahern’s evidence to the Tribunal. Only a fool would believe he is telling the truth and only someone from Mars would be in any doubt as to what really happened.

So why is he still the Prime Minister, why isn’t he being questioned by the police, why is it that, as sure as black is black, Ahern will never be brought to account for any of his actions?

Less than a week ago it emerged that the UK Labour Party had received large donations from a businessman using middlemen to pass on the money.

The next day there was a resignation. Three days later an opposition politician asked the police to investigate the matter. To my knowledge this has never happened in Ireland despite years of rampant political and business corruption.

Four days later the UK Electoral Commission also asked the police to investigate. The Irish equivalent, The Standards in Public Office Commission is debarred by law from initiating an investigation until it first receives a formal complaint.

This commission is a joke. The law debarring the commission from acting seems to have had only one function – to assist and protect the corrupt.

The reason Ahern will not be brought to account is because Ireland is a corrupt state. There is no authority in Ireland with the power, will or courage to bring rogue politicians or corrupt businessmen to justice.

This is why corrupt politicians like Haughey and Burke can successfully live out careers of rampant corruption doing untold damage to Ireland and its people.

It’s the reason politicians like Lorcan Allen can go on RTE and arrogantly admit that he doesn’t bother with obeying the law.

He knows with absolute certainty that nobody, no authority in the land can touch him. Allen is merely doing what any ruthless and unprincipled politician will do when he knows that the country he operates in is a corrupt entity. He allows his greed and arrogance full rein despite the massive damage done to society by his actions.

Jim Flavin of DCC possesses the same arrogant confidence that is common to those who know they are untouchable.

Found guilty (2nd item) of insider trading by the highest court in the land, a crime that sees long jail sentences in real democracies, Flavin knows he has nothing to worry about, he knows that there is no authority in the land that will take any serious action against him, he knows that the pathetic attempts by the ODCE to make him accountable are just that – pathetic.

Financial institutions and in particular the banks have robbed millions from consumers over the years. Not a single bank official has ever been questioned by the police. The banks too are supremely confident that they operate in a country where the system is specifically geared to protect their criminal behaviour.

The so called Irish Financial Regulator is a joke, it monotonously issues just one piece of advice to consumers –shop around. You want advice on buying a car, a house, a condom, a politician, the regulator has the answer – shop around.

In the meantime it enthusiastically enforces a secrecy law that forbids any consumer from knowing which financial institution is engaged in criminal activity and which, if any, is honest.

Nobody has even hinted that Ahern should resign or be fired for his behaviour. The only discussion that comes near to any possible consequences is that he might have damaged his chances of landing a job in Europe or that the controversy might damage his legacy – that’s it.

A Prime Minister who, when he was Minister for Finance, accepted very large amounts of cash from ‘friends and businessmen’ who insults the intelligence of all thinking Irish citizens with his ‘Alice in Wonderland’ explanations is not expected to resign, not expected to be accountable, not even expected to come up with a decent lie.

Let’s be absolutely clear about the situation. Ireland is not a normal country, it is not like any other Western democracy. It is a country run more along the lines of a mafia operation than a modern democratic state. It is a country where the powerful can do as they wish without the slightest fear that they will face justice.

David Cameron, leader of the UK Conservative Party speaking about the ongoing scandal said;

“There is a time in the life of every government when it slips over from complacency into arrogance, and from arrogance into even indifference for the law”.

To paraphrase him, I would say: There is a time in the life of many states when they slip over from the democratic process and become a country that operates principally for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

The corrupt Haughey began that process in the 1980s and his faithful and admiring protégé Bertie Ahern, has been successfully following his masters low standards ever since.

Copy to:

Fianna Fail
Standards in Public Office Commission
ODCE
Financial Regulator
Revenue
ISE
Dept. of Finance

Haughey and coalition gobshites

The subject of Fianna Fail in coalition came up on Saturday View.

Sean Haughey suggested that leading Fianna Fail into coalition will be seen as an important aspect of his (corrupt) father’s legacy. Apparently, we are supposed to believe that the corrupt Haughey acted in the higher national interest, which is exactly what the criminal claimed at the time.

The reality, as always with Haughey, was very different.

In 1989, after yet another failed election, Haughey had to choose between going to the country again or abandoning the Fianna Fail core ‘value’ on coalition. He knew that if he failed again he would be finished in politics.

Given that power was always his primary objective he had no problem doing what was necessary in his own interests. He completely bypassed his cabinet on the matter, calling them “a crowd of gobshites.” Some legacy

Haughey, corruption and denial

Vincent Browne does not know what corruption is and he has no idea whatsoever of the very serious consequences that follow from the disease. This was very clear from a discussion on last Monday’s Tonight with Vincent Browne.

In an acrimonious exchange with Colm Mac hEochaidh, barrister and member of Fine Gael, Browne defined political corruption as the taking of money in return for favours.

Here’s the relevant exchanges:

Mac hEochaidh:

Charles Haughey, Liam Lawlor and Ray Burke were people who occupied very high positions in Fianna Fail and who self evidently not only exercised low standards but were profoundly corrupt men.

Browne:

There’s no proof that Charles Haughey ever did anything in return for monies he got which seems to me the definition of corruption.

Mac hEochaidh:

No, that is not the definition of corruption. First of all there is no definition of corruption but if you have any political standards at all…

Browne:

The word corruption, what’s the understanding of that in terms of politics. That a politician receives money in return for giving a favour and therefore in order to prove corruption or to use the word intelligently with regard to a particular politician you’ve got to show that a politician received money and in return he did a favour and I’m just simply pointing out there’s no evidence that Charles Haughey did any favours for anybody he got money from.

Cleary, Vincent Browne, who for decades questioned the dodgy activities of Haughey but eventually came to see him as a heroic figure has now entered the final phase of Haughey worship – Total denial.

By Browne’s narrow definition the following events do not constitute corruption. The theft of millions through tax evasion by a citizen/politician/Prime Minister; the acceptance of millions from rich businessmen while holding public office; the theft of large amounts of money from the Party Leaders Fund and most tellingly the plundering of a fund set up to save the life of Brian Lenihan.

Respect for the dead

There was a fierce row on Liveline recently over a poster put up by Fine Gael councillor Jim O’Leary. The poster depicted Bertie Ahern and Charlie Haughey with the legend ‘Let’s break with the past’.

Seems reasonable to me, O’Leary is a young candidate anxious for a future free of political corruption. Haugheyites, including Jimmy Guerin, brother of murdered journalist, Veronica Guerin, were not so reasonable. Indeed, they were extremely angry that this ‘great Irish patriot’ should be denigrated in such a manner so soon after his death.

Here’s some of what Guerin had to say:

“He’s speaking ill of the dead and that’s not something the Irish electorate will tolerate. The reality is he has taken a man who is revered by some, who has undoubtedly made a huge contribution to this country, a man who had faults but what he’s forgetting is the man is not dead a year and it is disrespectful to behave like this towards someone who has passed away.”

So, respect for the dead is apparently important to Haugheyites. When President Erskine Childers (a man who stood up to Haughey) died in 1974, Haughey was asked why he was attending the funeral. He replied;

“To make sure the fucker is well planted”

Ah yes, respect.

Bizarre Haugheyisms

Joseph Goebbels was of the opinion that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. I think those who refuse to accept the hard fact that Haughey was a corrupt politician have a tendency to apply this dictum to themselves.

Here are just a few of what I call bizarre Haugheyisms.

Tim Pat Coogan, former Irish Press editor and historian thinks that Haughey’s ‘bad judgements’ resulted from head injuries he received in a car accident in the 1960s.

Anthony Cronin, poet and close friend of Haughey feels that it was the artist in Haughey that led him to think he was entitled to ‘patronage’.

Conor Lenihan, (Labouring under the amazing assumption that Irish politics is now free of corruption) thinks that the sheer scale of Haughey’s corruption played an important role in the clean-up of Irish politics.

So, Haughey was an artist who got a bump on the head and decided to clean up Irish politics.

Joseph would have been proud.

The crook is back

Next Tuesday RTE broadcasts the first of a series of programmes on art in Ireland.
The first programme features the corrupt politician Charlie Haughey. Could this be the first step in the rehabilitation of this crook? Fintan O’Toole gets it about right in this article.

CultureShock: For the arts in Ireland over the past 40 years, Charles Haughey’s presence is almost as unsettling as it is for Irish politics

When Edward McGuire was painting his series of portraits of Charles Haughey, he was living in a remote part of Wicklow. Knowing that Haughey was coming for a sitting, he asked the famously extravagant politician to stop at the post office and collect a telegram that was waiting for him. When Haughey arrived at the painter’s door, his cheery greeting was “You owe me 2/6” – the cost of the telegram. Charles Haughey’s patronage of the arts – the subject of the first film in the new series of RTÉ’s fine Arts Lives documentary strand – had its limits. Whatever Irish art got from him, it paid back with interest.

For the arts in Ireland over the last 40 years, Charles Haughey’s presence is almost as unsettling as it is for Irish politics. As someone who long regarded Haughey as a pernicious fraud, I have always been haunted by the evening in October 1991, when the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing was being launched. Walking into Newman House in Dublin, late as usual, I almost literally bumped into four men. Three of them – the Field Day directors Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, and Seamus Deane – are great writers, committed in their work to the hard search for emotional and intellectual exactitude. The fourth was Charles Haughey, whom they had chosen to launch the book and who is flattered in it by Seamus Deane as a man who “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”.

It struck me at the time that, for all the prevalent notion of Haughey as a supporter of the arts, the reality was more the other way around. Haughey gained stature from the association; the artists were diminished by it. Nothing, perhaps, said more about the marginalised position of the arts in Ireland than the sheer gratitude of artists that a powerful man should seem to care about them at all. In a political culture with a deep and wide seam of philistinism at its core, Haughey’s propensity to read some books and look at some paintings evoked an almost pitiful sense of indebtedness. But did it also buy a certain silence? Haughey’s sympathy for artists was undoubtedly real. The tax exemption scheme he introduced as minister for finance was an imaginative gesture. His support for the establishment of Aosdána and for the creation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art showed that artistic concerns at least had a place on his agenda. But, in real terms, that support was minimal.

It is now forgotten that in 1968 he announced in the Dáil that “a careful study of the problem” had led him to conclude that there should be three arts councils and that he was going to “make reasonably adequate funds available to ensure that their work will be effective”. He simply forgot the plan and at no time, either as minister for finance or as taoiseach, did he ever provide anything approximating “reasonably adequate funds” for the arts. He axed the Film Board in 1987. His longest period in office as taoiseach in the early 1990s was characterised by empty promises. In 1991, he committed himself to a funding level of £12-£13 million for the Arts Council. In 1992, the council was stunned to get exactly the same funding as the previous year (£4.9 million from the State) – in effect a cutback. Grand gestures and photo opportunities were always more important to Haughey than actual delivery.

And in return, Haughey got a touch of class and an air of mystery – both useful assets for a cynical crook. In 1972, his long speech on “Art and the Majority”, delivered at Harvard and written by the poet Anthony Cronin, won plaudits that were invaluable to a politician who was then, after the Arms Trial, in disgrace.

Did his much-vaunted patronage of the arts also contribute to the general failure of Irish artists to function as any kind of national conscience during the Haughey era? There may be no simple answer to the question, and certainly the Arts Lives film doesn’t provide one. Irish art, in spite of Swift, lacks a satiric language. Some attempts to portray Haughey – Hugh Leonard’s kill, Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland, Peter Cunningham’s The Taoiseach – fudged the issue by calling him by some other name and got bogged down in the no-man’s-land between fact and fiction.

What is certainly true, though, is that there was no concerted artistic effort to solve these formal problems. No one tried too hard.

It is ironic, indeed, that the truest artistic representation of Haughey is what was meant to be a flattering one, commissioned by Haughey himself from Robert Ballagh. The portrait, Charles Haughey – The Decade of Endeavour, hung in the Boss’s own study. But its image of a tiny Haughey in front of a huge photograph of himself now has an air of the little Wizard of Oz meeting from the machine through which he projected his giant, godlike presence. In it, the cowardly lions of Irish art, albeit accidentally and retrospect, get some courage.

Charlie Haughey: Patronising the Arts, the first documentary in RTÉ1’s new Arts Lives series, is on Tue at 10.15pm. Other subjects in the series include Michael Colgan, Donal Lunny, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Jinx Lennon, popular fiction, landscape painters, Fergus Bourke, Sheila Wingfield , Eileen Gray, Paul Durcan and Thomas Lynch.

Hilarious denial

Journalist John Drennan, writing in Magill magazine in September 2005, defends Charles Haughey in what can only be described as the most amazing (and hilarious) case of political denial in Irish history. There is no need to analyse the article, the quotes speak for themselves.

Why Haughey was never found to be corrupt:

“Mr. Haughey was merely following precedents set by such illustrious figures as O’Connell and Parnell.”

Reason for perception that Haughey was corrupt:

“Haughey’s ‘corruption’ is the fantastical creation of a petit bourgeoisie of Tim Healy-style hysteria mongers, whose insipid viciousness explains their expertise in the price of everything and their ignorance about the value of anything.”

Haughey’s love of beautiful things:

“The narrow minded shrieks of false incomprehension about Haughey’s elevated desire to possess beautiful things failed to understand that the sort of Gatsby who appreciates beauty within the personal realm is far more likely to seek to replicate this in public.”

On Haughey’s ‘fiscal probity’:

“Mr. Haughey did make money courtesy of some good advice from patriotic sources.”

On taking money from businessmen:

“Of course Mr. Haughey did take money from Ben Dunne and other public-spirited businessmen. However, this was for life-style as distinct to political purposes.”

On Haughey’s ‘insourcing’ of the FF leader’s allowance:

It was in payment for putting his home at Kinsealy at the service of the nation.

On Haughey’s tax problems:

“Mr. Haughey did have some minor tax problems. However, unless you are in love with the lifeless technicalities of accountancy it would be easy to believe a gift is not a salary.”

On Haughey’s refusal to cooperate with tribunals:

“Some would argue that a refusal to obey those semi-legal, amoral instruments of oppression that collude with simpering creeps like Frank Dunlop as both try to save their respective skins was a genuine act of patriotism.”

Real reason for hatred of Haughey:

“The hatred of Haughey is all about the challenge he posed to a society which was petrified by notions of class…” (Quotes PJ Mara; ‘Haughey’s enemies thought they were ‘the fucking aristocracy.’).

Ireland without Haughey’s type:

“…a dandified, foppish, lattefied, hygiene-obsessed, anti-smoking and anti-drinking (unless it’s a glass of red wine for the heart) school of bourgeois.” “…a hissing, pissy, sanctimonious hysterical desert, which could only be invented by the petite bourgeoisie.”

Drennan ends the piece by suggesting that it would serve the people of Ireland right if Haughey and his family were to deny them the ‘great reward’ of a state funeral.

“After all, Mr. Haughey knows better than anyone that betrayal is never rewarded.”

(Brian Lenihan, I suspect, would disagree. Haughey made a tidy sum by betraying his ‘friend’).

Personally, I was delighted that Haughey opted for a state funeral and even more delighted to learn that he made all the decisions and arrangements himself in the arrogant expectation that the people of Ireland would turn out in their droves to pay homage to a ‘great statesman’. His final selfish scheme, like his entire life, was a failure.

So, what have Mr. Drennan and Magill magazine had to say since the publication of the Moriarty Report? Well, er. Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Public crook

For me, the highlight of the year has been to be in a position to call Charles Haughey ‘a crook’ in a national newspaper. The destruction of this man’s false legacy is the most important event for Ireland in 2006.

Madam,

Now that Charles Haughey’s true pedigree has been officially established, would it be too much to ask his supporters in Dingle to replace their recent monument to this crook with a representation of the hard-pressed taxpayer – the actual source of their good fortune?

Yours, etc,
ANTHONY SHERIDAN,
Carraig Eoin,
Cobh, Co Cork.