State funeral for a 'liar and cheat was repellent'
Monday June 19 2006
BROADCASTER Henry Kelly, whose father once helped C J Haughey with his tax returns, has hit out at the "repellent" state funeral for the former taoiseach.
The one-time Irish Times London correspondent who later moved into TV and radio, said he could barely bring himself to watch the funeral of a man he labelled "a liar, fraud, cheat and to coin a phrase once used in another context by another politician of a colleague, a thundering disgrace".
"Mr Haughey was accorded a state funeral. A state funeral. This is the honour you accord to heads of state, who have been truly loved, or men or women who have led you through war, or by their dignity have exemplified all that is best in their nation," he told Britain's Telegraph newspaper.
"Charles Haughey exemplified all that was, thanks to him, worst in the Irish nation: trickery; smoothness; conceit; cronyism and downright abuse of power."
He had, in a real sense, polluted the air of Irish politics for the best part of half a century, Mr Kelly said.
"His rules were his own. His vanity breathtaking, his dismissal of enemies, either real or imagined, vicious."
"To have accorded this man a state funeral is nothing short of a disgrace and one that makes me feel ashamed," he wrote.
Haughey's legacy would one day "hopefully" evaporate but the myths about him were spectacular.
One was that he was the architect of Ireland's economic prosperity, even the father of the Celtic Tiger.
"Wrong. After his disastrous economic policies it took people like Dr Garret FitzGerald and John Bruton, both Fine Gael taoiseachs, to right his wrongs," he said.
Much had been made of Haughey's interest in Northern Ireland, the suggestion being that he wanted a rapprochement with Ulster Unionists and a gradual coming together of North and South.
"Charles Haughey had no feel whatsoever for Ulster unless it was Catholic and Republican," he said.
Mr Kelly added that when his father, Harry, retired from the civil service, he helped set up the taxation department in a firm of Dublin accountants, and in the days before PAYE, twice a year helped Mr Haughey with his taxes. "Well, obviously not all his tax returns, because there was always one puzzling aspect to Haughey's finances: where did a [TD], even a minister, get the money to buy racehorses, helicopter and even, for heaven's sake, an island off the Kerry coast?"
"We still don't quite know, but what we do know is that whenever he was stuck for cash for the lifestyle he loved, he could borrow from at least two prominent businessmen."
His father would never talk to him about anyone's private business but it angered him that a decent man could have unwittingly being drawn into giving advice based on only half a story.
Haughey had cynically used pedigree and office for his own ends. "This is what makes the honour of a state funeral so repellent. From here on, such an honour is permanently devalued," Kelly wrote.
- Michael Lavery
