MAUREEN HAUGHEY

What some mothers could learn from her reserve and stoicism

MARY CARR’S COMPELLING COLUMN

WHEN Maureen Haughey is laid to rest tomorrow beside her husband in St Fintan’s cemetery in north Co. Dublin, she takes the secrets of her long and extraordinary life with her to the grave.

The daughter of one of the State’s founding fathers and wife of the country’s most electrifying politician, she had a ringside seat at some of the country’s most tumultuous events.

But unusually, she has never been interviewed or, that we know of, penned an account of her life and times despite the public appetite for her point of view.

She gave a sparing insight into her father’s legacy for the centenary of 1916, under the gentle urging of her politician son Seán but apart from that, she resolutely remained in the shadow of the men in her life. Her private life too was, as we all know, far from conventional or rather utterly conventional in the way that it mimicked the freewheeling marital arrangements of many spoilt, charismatic and highly driven men.

Rollicking

In the twilight of her life, Maureen had the unenviable experience of sitting through Charlie, RTÉ’s rollicking threepart drama, an ordeal which, in the words of Seán, the family found horrific.

The drama suggested that Haughey set out to replicate France’s François Mitterrand’s grandiose lifestyle with its many perks, double standards and hypocrisies, including the luxury of having a mistress in private while in public paying homage to pieties about marriage and the sanctity of family life.

At the age of 89, Maureen relived every moment of her marital betrayal through that drama. ‘She’s a divil for punishment,’ said Seán at the time. ‘She always reads everything that’s written about him so she watched the three episodes all right with my sister Eimear. The main shock was the prominence given to [journalist and Charlie’s mistress] Terry Keane and the pillow talk scenes and so forth. I think that was quite explicit so I think that was quite a shock all right.’

That Maureen and the Haughey children were written out of the script was a mixed blessing perhaps.

While loyal Seán was irked at his mother’s life of public duty being ignored, ‘serving tea and making sandwiches, maybe there’s not much drama in that,’ he noted wryly – he admitted that ultimately maybe it was best her privacy wasn’t violated.

Like many long-suffering wives, Maureen loyally kept the home fires burning while her husband paraded around town like a bachelor.

She was the innocent victim of his cheerful infidelity and once it became public knowledge, every broadcaster and journalist in the country would have given their right hand for her side of the story.

But there was as much hope of the darkhaired Maureen Haughey disclosing her secret pain, of having a pop at her husband’s paramour or holding up her suffering for public consumption as there was of, well, Dessie O’Malley signing up to the cult of adulation that had sprung up around her fearsome husband.

‘Never complain, never explain’ is the pithy maxim coined by Disraeli and credited to everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Kate Moss who adopts a stiff upper lip in public.

It helps explains how Maureen Haughey’s sphinx-like silence eventually helped create a certain mystique around her.

Private

Not that it was part of any pre-conceived plan on her part to win public favour. Perish the thought – she was instinctively a private person who shrank from the spotlight, the polar opposite of her late husband, who liked nothing more than throwing his weight around and being the centre of attention.

But perhaps just as important as her natural reserve was her belonging to a now-fading generation who prize decorum and discretion and the timeless wisdom of not washing one’s dirty linen in public – values that fly in the face of our shameless show-and-tell culture.

The over-arching drive to keep up appearances may have been a stultifying force in society.

Indeed it could be argued that its suffocating constraints made it easier to cover up the sordid underbelly of Official Ireland and the various scandals that have rocked the institutions of Church and State like the mother and baby home in Tuam, Co. Galway.

But the flipside of the old-school style of reticence embodied by Maureen Haughey is that it avoided the tawdry squabbles and unseemly kiss ’n’ tells that as we now know thanks to so many shocking exposés about society’s leading lights, often cause profound pain and damage to their nearest and dearest.

For women of Maureen Haughey’s generation, their first duty was to husband and children and she went to her grave, her conscience clear about serving their interests, of not adding to their mortification and always setting an example of dignity and stoic restraint.

She must have been severely tested in 1999 when Terry Keane famously exposed her long-running affair with Haughey on The Late Late Show, admitting that he was the character known as Sweetie in her popular newspaper column.

Regret

Overnight, Maureen became a figure of pity, the embodiment of the passive, downtrodden and subservient woman who no-one could look up to or admire.

Although friends of the family perhaps predictably spoke out, suggesting that Terry was guilty of exaggerating the length of the romance and indeed the depth of her influence on Charlie, Maureen said nothing.

Terry Keane, for all her effervescence and outspokenness lived to bitterly regret exposing the affair in such a public fashion, adding on a subsequent Late Late Show that she deeply regretted ‘all the pain I caused to so many people... innocent people got hurt’, she said.

Along with Annie Murphy, who a few years earlier had also scandalised the nation by lifting the lid on her clandestine romance with Bishop Eamonn Casey in another seminal Late Late Show, Terry represented a new archetype of femininity, one that was modern and self-confident and keen to enjoy the freedoms that men took for granted.

But they also helped pioneer the trend here for ‘oversharing’ and a certain wallowing in victimhood that has since, for good and evil, become part and parcel of today’s society. Over the years, Annie Murphy has frequently stated her regret at the effects of her bombshell interview on Bishop Casey – particularly his becoming an outcast from the Irish Church.

But her son, Peter was also dragged into the quagmire created chiefly by his father’s refusal to have anything to do with him – but also by his mother’s declaring open-season on her private life.

A likeable man who lives in Boston where he works in sales, there is a sense that his life has yet to get off the ground.

In a recent interview with the Irish Times, he described himself self-deprecatingly as ‘a fat single white guy, with a cat... I’m basically any comedian’s wet dream.’ Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not exactly a sales pitch for the joys of having one’s private life turned into a soap opera.

By her silence and reserve, the late Maureen Haughey saved her offspring that ordeal.