| Corruption and crime is still
rife in brave new Ireland
Joe Horgan
IT is too easy to make erroneous links in order to make a point but the
year just gone ended with a few signposts about some true aspects of this
new Ireland and they ended up connecting the Taoiseach’s mentor,
a self-styled grandee, the Taoiseach himself, a self-styled ordinary Dub
and an apprentice plumber — a genuinely ordinary Dub.
The Moriarty Tribunal finally passed a judgement on Charles Haughey that
everyone was already aware of yet seeing it in cold print was still breathtaking.
During his time in power Haughey took over the course of 17 years the
equivalent in today’s money of ¤45million.
With that he financed a lavish lifestyle whilst the country itself was
seeing yet again the scourge of emigration and unemployment.
He even made a speech to the nation in 1980 about the need for everyone
to tighten their belts whilst he himself sent to Paris for handmade shirts.
The hypocrisy is staggering.
Of course the present body politic wishes to intimate that those days
are well and truly gone and have no bearing on today’s Ireland.
If that were true we could view all of this merely as something of an
historical curiosity.
But it is not true.
The powerful friends who lavished Haughey with money back then are still
powerful today. The business powers that connived in the corruption of
Irish politics by buying favours from the Taoiseach of the day are still
business powers in Ireland this year.
The Haughey family — including powerful business sons and politically
powerful junior minister sons — still finance their lifestyles from
money from their father.
He ensured this by transferring such things as his yacht and his lands
and his private island into their names once it became clear he would
face investigation.
To this day not one of that powerful family sees anything wrong in anything
he did.
Perhaps even more shocking though and in many ways more revolting than
the Haughey family’s arrogance is the craven dishonesty of another
Irish political dynasty: The Lenihans.
The Moriarty Tribunal has also revealed that Charles Haughey kept for
himself money that was raised to provide a life-saving operation for his
best friend Brian Lenihan.
The personal corruption involved in that action couldn’t be more
damning. Yet in the week these findings were published Brian Lenihan’s
sister and son — both leading figures in the present Fianna Fail
party — publicly washed their hands of the affair.
Neither had the honesty or the guts or the basic human instinct to condemn
the man who stole from their dying brother and father.
If that doesn’t tell us something about the kind of heart that beats
away inside the government that has presided over the creation of this
new country what does?
Of course the links between Charles Haughey and Bertie Ahern are well
documented.
Only last summer Bertie Ahern delivered the oration at Haughey’s
funeral.
It wasn’t the first time that he had written kind words for Haughey
as Bertie was the man who signed a rake of blank cheques that his boss
went on to use at his own discretion.
Bertie claims he asked no questions. He claims he had no inkling of Haughey’s
corruption despite being surrounded by the man’s opulence.
Now would it be far-fetched to suggest that this culture of greed and
personal acquisition at whatever expense, even that of a dying friend,
has not seeped into the make up of this new country Bertie built on the
back of being Haughey’s most skillful, most devious, most cunning
lieutenant?
Would it be ludicrous to link the nature of power as displayed by Charles
Haughey as being the nature of power in Ireland now — seeing as
all those developers and bankers and landowners and business concerns
who connived in his corruption are still powerful concerns in the country
today and indeed on the back of the boom are even wealthier and more powerful
than before?
And what about this link? Hand-in-hand with Ireland’s boom has been
a boom in violent crime. Every statistic backs that up.
In the same week that the Moriarty Tribunal reported a Dublin gangland
figure was shot dead in his bed. Tragically a young man was in the house
at the same time working as an apprentice plumber and with a savagery
that dismayed even the gardaí working amongst the gangsters the
gunman shot him too.
Anthony Campbell was 20 years old and was in every way a genuinely authentic
working-class Dub. His young teammates from his soccer club tearfully
carried his coffin from the church. Meanwhile at the very same time as
Anthony Campbell was being buried the grotesque excess of the Celtic Tiger
having ended his innocent life the self-styled ordinary Dub was just a
few short minutes away.
You can see the photo. Surrounded by his smiling business friends and
his political cronies — so many of them crowding in they actually
delayed the opening — Bertie Ahern cuts the ribbon.
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