By John Spain

IT was easy for us news hacks to be cynical about the state funeral last week for former Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Charlie Haughey.

The procession of large limos up the driveway to his Abbeville mansion to pay their respects before the body was taken to the church looked like a scene from The Godfather. The black motors, the elderly men in dark suits solemnly shaking hands, the lived-in faces it was all there.

The joke the next day at the church was that the collection box at the entrance had been changed for a large bin and that it was for brown envelopes only. We even imagined a recording of Haughey intoning “thanks a million, Big Fella,” as he had said to the supermarket boss Ben Dunne when he was given large amounts of money.

We didn’t even have to make up jokes. With timing you could not invent, news emerged on the day of the funeral that the Bailey brothers, two of Ireland’s biggest builders and heavy Fianna Fail funders, had made a settlement with the Revenue for *25 million, a record for unpaid taxes.

It seemed to sum up the culture of corruption that Haughey had come to represent, with politicians on the take all the way from himself and some of his ministers down to the local councilors who were bribed to rezone land around Dublin. If The Boss was at it, how could you blame the rest of them for dipping their fingers in?

Uniquely in Irish political history, Haughey had hoovered up money from businessmen and used it to indulge laughable delusions of grandeur. The Moriarty Tribunal has established that he got around *10 million, much of it from sources still unknown.

He had been on the take on a spectacular scale. More than anyone else, he corrupted the system. And now he was being given a state funeral.

So yes, it was easy to be cynical. But it was different for many people. A lot of ordinary people and even some of his fiercest critics from the early days like the leading journalist Vincent Browne were so moved by his passing that they played down his murky past and concentrated on his achievements. In death, as in life, Charlie Haughey was a contradiction.

Browne revealed that he had been a regular visitor to Abbeville in recent years and that he and Charlie had become good friends. In an emotional piece for his Village magazine, Browne quoted what Haughey had said about the money, that Churchill had been kept in style for years by members of the British aristocracy and no one had thought anything wrong with that.

For the ordinary people of Northside Dublin it was more simple. Of course he was a bit of a rascal, but sure who is perfect? They seemed to take pride in what he had made of himself, given that he had been one of them when he was a kid.

So on the day of the funeral, you had the wealthy Fianna Fail power brokers whispering to each other inside the church. Outside you had the ordinary people of Northside Dublin, where Haughey had grown up and which he later represented in the Dail (Parliament), applauding the Haughey family as they went inside for the service.

Haughey personified a particular time in Ireland 30 or 40 years ago — the mohair suits, the builders making fortunes, the dodgy political donations, the fast money, the golden circle. Mixed in with that, of course, was the Republican mystique he had picked up from the arms trial and the stories about a mistress that made him a sexy figure.

He was all that but above all to so many ordinary people he was a lovable rogue, a character, one of their own who had made it all the way to the top and could still talk to them in a language they understood.

His stomping ground was the North Dublin working class suburb of Donny- carney, where he grew up. A few years back, well after Haughey had retired from politics, he called to the Donnycarney old folks center and invited them to his mansion for tea. He sent a bus for them and they had a great day, with Haughey proudly showing them around Abbeville and pointing out his proudest possessions.

That says a lot about the man. He was, like us all, a prisoner of his background. He never lost the chips and aspirations his humble origins had given him. To understand him you have to look at where he came from.

Years ago in the 1960s I spent a while at a big Christian Brothers School in Dublin called O’Connell’s. It was a tough place, even though it was the upmarket CBS school of its day.

Far tougher, however, was another CBS school a few miles away in Fairview called St. Joseph’s. The kids in Joeys, as we learned on the football field, were deadly hard, a lot of them coming from the East Wall Road area on the way down to the docks.

If it was tough in those days, it is a safe assumption that it was even tougher 20 years earlier when Haughey went to school in Joeys. When you look at the pictures of the kids in Joeys from those times you can see the poverty. But you can also see the determination on the shiny faces.

That’s where Haughey’s drive came from. It’s not all that surprising that he ended up as taoiseach, given how bright he was. But the background explains why he so desperately wanted the mansion, the paintings, the wine cellar, the horses, the yacht, the island, and why he ignored the rules to get what he wanted.

It was also why he, a dreamy Republican, aped the lifestyle of an Anglo Irish country squire. He was a mass of contradictions.

The obsession with being as good as those born into privilege and his insatiable hunger for the best things in life compelled him to cut corners. Yet his background also gave him a genuine concern for the underdog and a determination to drive the Irish economy forward so that everyone would benefit.

Both his parents were from Derry, which may have been the basis of his republicanism, but they came south Haughey was born in Mayo and settled in Dublin, in the working class area of Donnycarney on the Northside of the city.

From early on it was clear that he was a bright spark, and he made it to university where he met the daughter of the Taoiseach Sean Lemass and eventually married her. Already in Fianna Fail, his rise was rapid. His early time as a minister marked him out as ferocious and impatient, with a grasp of detail that intimidated senior civil servants twice his age.

He was such a divisive figure, however, that the leadership was given to Jack Lynch when Lemass retired. Haughey’s career was blighted then, of course, when the North exploded and he was caught up in the attempt to secretly import arms for Nationalists. And there is no doubt that his activities played a role in creating the monster that the IRA was to become in later years.

But looking back now, it may have been an understandable mistake. I was a young student at the time and I remember the emotions at meetings on O’Connell Street as reports came in about Catholic areas under siege in the North. One thing is certainly true Haughey quickly saw the advantage of cultivating his Republican image.

For him, Republicanism was as much a career move as a conviction. It was a convenient way of creating a mystique, of building his support after Lynch had consigned him to the wilderness.

Of course he made it back and became taoiseach. But by then he had accumulated so much hurt and anger that he seemed to be permanently bitter and suspicious. This angry side of him surfaced in some famous stories.

A junior minister who had displeased him was given a lecture and then dismissed from his third floor office but could not find the door in the wood paneled walls. “Try the window,” suggested Haughey.

On another occasion he was dining out with some ministers. Haughey ordered beef. “And the vegetables?” inquired the waiter. “They’re having the same as me,” said Haughey.

That cutting edge struck fear into both colleagues and opponents and made him a legend. But it also meant that he was someone who got things done.

Looking back now on his list of achievements as minister and taoiseach, no one else can match it for imagination and daring free travel and free TV licenses for old folk, big welfare increases, the Irish solution that opened the door to contraception, turning Temple Bar from a derelict area earmarked for a bus terminus into Dublin’s Left Bank, turning an abandoned dockland area into the Irish Financial Services Center, now so big and successful it’s a city within the city, the bloodstock tax breaks which revived the horse breeding industry and made his pals millions at the same time ... and so on and on, including most importantly the changes that started the Celtic Tiger and the very first moves in what became the peace process in the North.

And there was his interest in the arts. Pretentious, some said, but there was no arguing with what he did the refurbishment of the old King’s Hospital (for British soldiers) into the Museum for Modern Art, the tax exemptions for artists which brought so many writers to live here, the Aosdana organization of artists with its annual grants to help artists survive, the refurbishment of Dublin Castle and the now magnificent government offices among other buildings of national importance.

No other taoiseach can point to a legacy of specifics like this. Of course it’s easy to be cynical about Charlie, about him telling us to tighten our belts in a national TV address in the early 1980s when the economy was on its knees, and at the same time he was spending like an Arab sheik (some of whom he was supplying with passports), but his achievements showed vision that was on a different level to other politicians.

Yes he was a rogue, and he was a pretentious little preener, with his Charvet shirts, his rakish hair and his ponderous speechmaking, heavy with phony gravitas. He was easy to mock.

But he had something. He had that mystique about him, that ability to fascinate people, that sense of danger, that connection with ordinary people that drew them to him. Like a lot of small men, he overcompensated wildly.

In the last few days, it has been suggested that history will treat him kindly because of all he did. Perhaps. But it will also have to take account of the damage he has done to politics here, the pervading smell of corruption he leaves behind him.

Which brings us to the mistress. As a good Catholic boy from an ordinary family who had made a political marriage he was an easy mark for the sexual wiles of the liberated Terry Keane, who presumably pushed the limits of what he had experienced up to that point and had a combative, intellectual superiority to add to the fascination in bed.

The truth is, as we now know, she was a grasping, nasty piece of work whose upper class affectations were completely phony. But he was so obsessed by the mixture that she was able to lead him along and regularly humiliate him for nearly 30 years.

That was part of his tragedy. The rest was of his own making, a result of a ferocious determination to rise above the ordinary background he had come from. A bit like that other rogue, Bill Clinton, in a way.