The quiet dignity of a stoic political wife
In september 2005, sam smyth (now of this parish) visited Abbeville, Charlie Haughey’s mansion in Kinsealy, and drew a sad picture. The occasion was a joint celebration of the former Taoiseach’s 80th birthday and that of his wife, Maureen, who had turned 80 a fortnight before. Maureen, as usual, fulfilled all the requirements of hospitality, taking charge of the party ‘with practised ease’.
The Haugheys had been married 54 years, and to say they had ‘weathered storms’ would be an understatement.
Maureen’s errant husband had been responsible for humiliating her countless times and must have broken her heart to pieces.
But by then his hypnotic, dangerous flame was all but extinguished. shrunken and weakened by the cancer that would kill him the following year, Haughey was, in smyth’s words, a ‘terminally ill old man sitting in silence’, knowing it would be his last birthday.
When Haughey made his final address to the Dáil in 1992, he famously quoted from shakespeare’s Othello: ‘I have done the state some service; they know’t. No more of that.’
sean Haughey once said of his mother – who died on st Patrick’s Day at 91 – that she had ‘done the state some service as well’.
But while historians will find rich pickings for generations in the tainted legacy of Charlie Haughey, the role of his wife will probably always be an enigma. Plenty of political figures have cheated on, demeaned, side-lined and embarrassed their spouses – John F Kennedy, Bill Clinton and even John Major and Edwina Currie (who together knocked off two humiliations in one).
Maureen Haughey, though, put up with a lot. Yes, there were the financial transgressions that defiled the family name. But what was more wounding, morally, was that affair with Terry Keane. The hurt of it.
Charlie Haughey didn’t just have a meaningless fling, or even a string of meaningless flings one after another. He had a 27year relationship – one that was boasted about almost every week in a national sunday newspaper, that was satirised almost every week on scrap saturday, that was an ‘open secret’ long before there were watercoolers.
Terry Keane even admitted she had been to Abbeville for ‘intimate suppers’ when Maureen wasn’t there, and spent time with Haughey at the family’s holiday home on Inishvickillane.
Entertaining your mistress in your children’s home is wilful cruelty. But through it all, Maureen kept mum – silent and barely visible, almost as if she were the Other Woman instead of the wife.
People stay with unfaithful spouses for many reasons – concern for the children, tanked self-esteem, the hope that things will change, and love, of course, because you can keep loving someone after they hurt you. The political spouse has the dread of scandal, and Maureen Haughey, daughter of sean lemass, had early training in what is expected of a political family. she had early training in stoicism too, having spent a year in hospital with TB in her teens.
We will never know, though, why Maureen stayed. The only thing we do know is that, having made up her mind to stay, she never opened her mouth on the subject in public. she did not complain; she did not publish a tell-all memoir; she did not do tearful TV interviews or serialised newspaper confessions.
Stainless and steely, like Caesar’s wife she was above suspicion – smiling and hosting and taking care of her children, her grandchildren, and ultimately her husband in his last illness. We never saw the swan’s feet.
It was an outstanding display of dignity – all the more outstanding in an age when people are prone to sharing their every emotional hiccup with the world at large.
All three parties in this sordid love triangle are now dead. One of the three – and the least celebrated – behaved beautifully. Another shakespeare quote may express it better, this time from Julius Caesar: ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’