We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole

Author:Fintan O'Toole [O'Toole, Fintan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784978280
Published: 2021-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

22

1980−1981: A Beggar on Horseback

In May 1981, I went to the first political press conference I ever attended. Charles Haughey had called an election and Fianna Fáil was launching its manifesto. I wanted to take the opportunity to ask him a fairly innocuous question about arts policy for the little magazine I wrote for, In Dublin. It was all dull stuff until Vincent Browne, editor of Magill magazine, stood up at the back and asked Haughey: ‘Where did you get your money?’ Haughey grunted and literally waved the question away with a grand gesture of contempt. He had probably expected it: Browne had asked the same question at Haughey’s first press conference as Taoiseach in 1979. As editor of the magazine, as I discovered a few years later, he would give every young journalist looking for work a list of projects. At the top was ‘Charlie Haughey’s finances’.

Browne asked the question again, and this time Haughey said something about how he was not going to respond to ridiculous trivia when there were such serious issues facing the country. Browne asked again: where did you get your money? And then the most interesting thing happened. I could sense that almost every other journalist in the room was becoming intensely irritated, not with Haughey’s refusal to answer the question but with Browne’s persistence. There were sighs of weariness and impatience. Somebody grumbled, ‘Shut up, Vincent.’ Vincent asked the question again, but he was drowned out in the general hubbub. Only one journalist, the RTÉ broadcaster John Bowman, spoke up, addressing Haughey directly: ‘You called a press conference. You should answer the questions.’ But everybody moved on. There were important stories to write.

These were all good, professional journalists. But Haughey’s money was not really a journalistic question. It was, like child abuse or abortion or Magdalene Laundries, one of those things that was both known and unknowable. On the one hand, it was entirely obvious that the country was now in the hands of a man who had been a professional politician since the year before I was born, yet who had a mansion, a stud farm, a yacht, even a private island. On the other, there was nothing about this that could be properly comprehended. It could not be assimilated into public consciousness, so it floated there in the peripheral vision of Irish politics. Like the sun, its light was everywhere, but you could not look at it directly. Browne’s question was unanswerable which made it, for working journalists with deadlines to meet, also unaskable.

Running things for his boss that day was Haughey’s press secretary, Frank Dunlop. He would later recall the nature of the epistemic vacuum. He recollected that, although Irish reporters other than Browne did not raise the issue of Haughey’s money, they would often prompt visiting foreign journalists to do so – itself an indication of the roundabout approach to the question. But ‘Charlie never commented on the stories and I never asked him to. While people might say

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