Unwavering, stoic and respectful right to the end, a lot can be said for the legacy of Mrs Haughey...

WHEN Charlie Haughey sold Abbeville, his stunning Gandon mansion in Kinsealy, Co. Dublin, for an eye-watering €45million in 2004, he became an overnight multimillionaire.

The colourful former leader had, as we know, some heavy debts to settle from the sale but with only a few more years to live, his fortune passed to his long-suffering wife Maureen.

Now, just over a year after her death, aged 91, papers show that Maureen left more than €9million in her will, one of the largest personal legacies recorded in the Probate Office this year.

The settling of her affairs, and the passing of her considerable wealth to her four children is the final chapter in a fascinating life that spanned almost a century and gave the late Maureen Haughey a ringside seat at some of the most tumultuous events of recent Irish history.

But it’s not as witness to history that Maureen Haughey is most remembered but as wife of probably the most divisive, some say corrupt, figure ever in Irish politics who cut a swathe through the corridors of power and enjoyed an adulterous and staggeringly ostentatious private life.

Like many a scorned spouse, particularly of her generation, dutiful Maureen turned a blind eye to her husband’s infidelities, sacrificing her pain to keep her family together.

Betrayal

But marital betrayal turned to public humiliation on a scandalous scale in 1999 when a Late Late Show audience watched aghast as her husband’s mistress, Terry Keane, discussed their great passion in vivid detail – an act of treachery which Keane later regretted.

More lurid accounts of their affair followed. It emerged that when Maureen’s back was turned, her husband brought his fancy woman to admire the lavish family home and have a few drinks in its special sunken bar.

Charlie wined and dined his paramour among friends and political cronies on his yacht and on his private island off the Kerry coast. Far from their affair being a discrete and clandestine arrangement, it was an open secret in what then passed for Irish high society .

In her Sunday newspaper gossip column, the late Keane would coo endlessly about ‘Sweetie’, her audacity about identifying him as a former taoiseach growing with every year.

To many of those who were by turns entertained and appalled by the remorseless public flaunting of an illicit romance, Maureen Haughey was a figure of pity and a doormat.

No amount of wealth, they reasoned, could compensate for a loveless marriage; no grand mansion could soothe the aching loneliness and despair of nights spent waiting for her cheating husband to come home.

Her €9million nest egg, sadly of no use to her now, may seem to cast her decision to put up with her husband’s infidelity all her married life in an even more wretched light. Was €9million the price of his betrayal?

But it would be a mistake to paint Maureen Haughey in the same light as every woman married to a serial philanderer. If there is such a thing as a textbook wronged wife, then she defies the category as much as Hillary Clinton.

When Maureen Haughey came of age in the 1940s, it was far more common for women to use marriage as a means of upward mobility than it is today.

Mothers still schemed about making excellent matches for their daughters and often for good reason, as there were so few decent career paths open to women.

The reverse held true though for the Haughey marriage in 1951 – it was the ambitious groom who lucked out that day. As the daughter of Seán Lemass , the founding father of the modern Irish State, a veteran of the Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War who served as taoiseach from 1959 to 1966, Maureen was from patrician stock, unlike her husband who had no connections or family wealth to speak of.

Unusually for a woman of her time, she was well educated and she met her blisteringly intelligent husband while taking her commerce degree in University College Dublin. She didn’t marry him expecting social status, wealth or any of the other trappings which make the pill of marital betrayal easier for some women to swallow. Unlike her husband – who aped the landed gentry, riding to hounds and sitting for his portrait – Maureen, who had actually been raised in relative privilege had no airs and graces, and never lived it up as the chatelaine of Abbeville. Visitors to the mansion with its sweeping driveway and lush parklands and lakes were often surprised that she, rather than a butler dressed in livery, would open the door for them and even serve the tea and sandwiches – sometimes dressed in the humble nylon housecoat worn by housewives of the time.

After her death, Fianna Fáil’s Mary O’Rourke summed up her charm. ‘I always enjoyed her company. She had a difficult life keeping pace and faith with Charlie Haughey, but she was a very strong family woman and she kept ordinary in every sense, not in the least puffed up that she was the wife of An Taoiseach or anything like that,’ she said.

‘She had a job to do and she did it for her husband and for her family despite the many difficulties in her way.’

During her eulogy for her mother, Eimear Mulhern gave a clue of what originally drew Maureen Lemass to the brash go-getter Charlie Haughey while they were university students and why she was loyal to him for the duration of their 55-year marriage.

Life with Charlie was ‘never dull – whether for good or bad,’ said Eimear. ‘She was fiercely proud and loyal to him… she was in his corner at all times.’

The wounds inflicted by Charlie Haughey on his spouse continued into her widowhood, a time when she might have expected to be finally beyond his reach.

Affair

Charlie, the TV drama starring Aiden Gillen, zoned in so much on his torrid affair with Terry Keane that his family were understandably horrified.

As the self-appointed custodian of her husband’s legacy, Maureen, who was then aged 89, insisted on watching every painful minute of the series.

‘She’s a devilment for punishment,’ explained her son Seán. ‘She always reads everything that’s written about him, so she watched the three episodes alright with my sister Eimear.

‘The main shock was the prominence given to Terry Keane, and the pillow talk and so forth. I think that was quite explicit, so I think that was quite a shock alright.’

But Maureen Haughey said nothing. As with every other humiliating episode in her life, her attitude was of the ‘never complain; never explain’ variety.

She was born into a world of powerful men where women were expected to serve loyally in the background, and keep the home fires burning.

She played that part with dignity and fortitude but the traditional female values she embodied are thankfully as much a part of history as the famous men she loved.