Charles J. Haughey: an apology

I wrote a post six months ago on the death of Charles Haughey, the former Irish Prime Minister. In it I stated:

Haughey turned out to be as financially corrupt as he was politically sinister. He received secret payments of more than €10 million from businessmen while he was in office, and was eventually forced to pay tax on them only in 2003 after a fierce legal battle. He was a disgrace to his office and his nation.

I apologise to my readers for the unthinking and unreasonable generosity of this judgement. Yesterday the Moriarty tribunal, established to investigate "payments to politicians and related matters", issued its report (available here). As The Times summarises the findings:

The report confirmed what Ireland had already suspected, explaining the yawning chasm between Haughey’s relatively modest state salary and his acquisition of racehorses, yachts, handmade French shirts and a well-stocked wine cellar in his Georgian country mansion.

Haughey claimed to have “done the State some service” when he retired from politics. However, the tribunal concluded that Haughey had generated for himself an undeclared income of nearly £8 million, equivalent to about £30 million today. That amount represented 171 times the value of his prime ministerial salary and pension between 1979 and 1996.

It included a sum of £42,000 paid in 1985 to one of his private bank accounts by a Saudi diplomat in connection with the granting of Irish passports to relatives.

The tribunal also found that Haughey had plundered funds raised for an operation for Brian Lenihan, a friend and Cabinet colleague, who was suffering from cancer. A total of £226,000 was raised for a liver transplant in the United States but only £60,000 was spent on the treatment.

The last paragraph quoted is something I would not have believed in advance, even of the gun-running, lying, corrupt demagogue. As the journalist Ruth Dudley Edwards said in her obituary for the old fraud, published in the Irish Independent:

Charles Haughey did the state little service and a great deal of damage. But at least the voters refused him an absolute majority. Otherwise, we would have a catastrophic rather than a shameful period to look back on. May we not see his like again.

Amen to that.