Kevin Myers takes Fine Gael to task in yesterday’s Irish Independent for the party’s failure to adopt a Tallaght Strategy type cooperation with the Government. It wasn’t easy at the time, he says, for Fine Gael to cooperate with a “truly dreadful man like Charles Haughey” he continues:
“He was, moreover, personally horrible, a sneering, ridiculing bully, a hypocrite who escorted his mistress to fine restaurants as he preached Catholic values. And he was visibly corrupt (though just how spectacularly so, we didn’t know for decades).”
“We didn’t know for decades”??? I’m about average when it comes to adding numbers and ditto on ability to join up dots.
Since the early 80s I’ve been adding the numbers and joining the dots and the result has always been the same. Haughey was not just ‘visibly’ corrupt; he was corrupt to the core.
For all those decades when Myers wasn’t quite sure of Haughey’s pedigree I was ranting on to anybody who would listen that this man should be stopped, that he was very, very obviously doing enormous damage to Ireland and its people, that he should be rotting in jail to prevent him from spreading the deadly disease of corruption throughout the land.
Haughey’s career of corruption was a resounding success principally because people like Myers were, and apparently still are, incapable of seeing the brutal reality right before their eyes.
Let me spell out that reality to Mr. Myers, it may save us all from having to read of his shock and horror at some point in the future (hopefully not decades) when he finally realises just how ‘spectacularly’ corrupt Ireland has become.
The corrupt Haughey did not operate in a vacuum. He carried out his crimes within the comfort of a corrupt Fianna Fail party. Many of the people who unquestionably supported the corrupt Haughey are still in the party, some of them at the highest level.
The party leadership almost to a man unquestionably supported the chancer Ahern even when he was swearing under oath that he won his dodgy money on the horses.
Fianna Fail has been in power for most of the history of this blighted state and it has corrupted the state to its core, not just some ‘visible’ corruption, but to its very core. Nothing will change until that reality is faced up to, until the rot that eats away at the heart of Irish society is ripped out and destroyed.
It is that corrupt entity that is still in power; it is that corrupt entity that Mr. Myers apparently thinks has the vision, courage and honesty to take us out of the crisis.
Myers tells us that if Fine Gael continues to oppose in order to court popular approval. . . the road ahead will lead to a wasteland.
No, Mr. Myers, if Fianna Fail is not destroyed as a political entity as a first step towards reform of our corrupt political system – then we are indeed heading for a wasteland.
Copy to:
Kevin Myers
After Charlie died, Maureen sold Kinsealy for a reputed 45 million euro.
She (or other family members) retained the several additional properties (such as Inishvickillaun) and more, probably places all over the world where Charlie stashed money.
What I fail to understand is why the CAB (Criminal Assets Bureau) didn’t seize the property or proceeds.
They are supposed to seize property derived from crime.
They do it for drug dealers. Even the drug dealer’s wives and families are stripped of property and money.
Maureen Haughey should have had CAB take the properties because they were bought with money made from criminal activity.
Ireland is as corrupt as any other ‘banana republic.’
I could not agree more, we have been a “One Party State” since its foundation and like all such States corruption is rife. Things will not change until the Irish public see Fianna Fail for what it is, a totally corrupt political party. We all know about Haughy but Ahern was just as bad. The man who never said “No” to any vested interest be it Developer, Builder, Union, Public Servant, Bank, Social Welfare recipiant. Of cource he was loved, “the man who liked to say YES”. Now we pay for his folly. What is the future, for me I don’t care but for my children and grandchildren the legacy of Fianna Fail will last for generations. What a horrible prospect.
Excellent article as usual. The problem is that FF and corruption is so deeply ingrained in Irish society that I can’t see how it can be changed? Can it be extirpated from within FF? I doubt it. What you are talking about Anthony is a seismic cultural shift in Irish society. A political and cultural revolution the likes of which we have never seen in Ireland.
If FF’s history has proven anything it is that the 1970’s and 1980’s the interests of the ‘men in the mohair suits’ (TACA) became preeminent. It was never about ruling for the people, but for the elite (the Golden Circle).
Haughey’s relatives should have been left peniless and the CAB SHOULD have gone to town on him. Instead he was allowed make a ‘settlement’. Banana Republic territory.
I fear for Ireland. In the Sindo today there was a poll of business leaders taken. If there was an election tomorrow 44% would vote FF…..
FYI
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6088204.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
Brian Cowen, the Irish prime minister, is facing legal action in the English courts over his ownership of a buy-to-let flat which his landlords say he is illegally sub-letting to Leeds University.
…
The purchase of the student apartment block, which cost around £12.5 million, was financed through mortgages taken out by the investors with Allied Irish Bank, whose share value plunged 98 per cent in the last year because of bad property loans.
Last September, amid fears that a bank was about to go bust, the Taoiseach and his finance minister Brian Lenihan stepped in to extend a 440 billion euros government guarantee to six mainly-Irish owned financial institutions, including Allied Irish with whom Mr Cowen secured his mortgage for the Leeds apartment.
At the time no cabinet minister declared, nor was asked to declare, an interest in any of the guaranteed banks.
I wanted to say that, as an American, I find your website absolutely essential and important. Not only for those in your country but for Americans as well. I fear that the travesties your nation suffers will eventually become our reality. We have much to learn from what is happening in Ireland.. Thank you for your dedication and hard work in this blog..