A feud even after death
The political lives of Dessie O’Malley and Charlie Haughey are as entwined as the existential struggles of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty – so much so that the combat continues long after the late taoiseach has gone to his grave.
Even the title of Dessie O’Malley’s memoir, Conduct Unbecoming, is a gloriously ironic reference to a phrase used by Charles Haughey’s Fianna Fáil leadership cronies in the 1980s to describe O’Malley himself.
Mr O’Malley was expelled from Fianna Fáil for a minor voting infraction after years of futile guerrilla warfare against Haughey’s corrupt regime. Haughey’s people claimed he was being thrown out for ‘conduct unbecoming’, a hilarity considering the party was led by a political thug who had amassed vast riches through bribery and corruption.
O’Malley’s memoir is as much about Charlie Haughey as it is about the Limerick TD himself. The dark shadow of the old hooded-eye monster from Donnycarney lurks over these pages as O’Malley seeks to persuade us of just how evil he was. And he almost admonishes us, the readers and the Irish public, for supporting the man. For let it never be forgotten that Haughey’s Fianna Fáil regularly polled 42% and 43% in general elections, and had they managed their vote better would have easily gained the overall majority that the Boss so craved.
Yes, Haughey was an embarrassment, and a gangster. Yet even in this book, as it is in all good versus evil sagas, it is the devil that gets all the best lines. Some might criticise the writing in O’Malley’s memoir, but I found parts of it gripping, laughing out loud at the outrageousness of Haughey’s conduct, almost feeling guilty as I did so.
In a wonderful couple of pages, where the narrative handles itself, it reminds of a James Ellroy novel, where one marvels at the scurrilous conduct of those inhabiting a murky underworld.
In October 1982 a motion of no confidence by Charlie McCreevy had caught O’Malley and other anti-Haugheyites on the hop. Even McCreevy gets a finger-wagging from the schoolmasterly O’Malley for not telling him first. Then-cabinet minister O’Malley told Haughey he would not vote for him in the internal vote and the Taoiseach said he and Martin O’Donoghue would have to resign.
O’Malley writes: ‘We handed him our resignations. “Well f *** you anyway,” he responded. “I didn’t think you’d have the guts to do it.”’
In what O’Malley described as a ‘sinister undertone’, a few days later a driver turned up at O’Donoghue’s house with a gift-wrapped box. ‘A delivery from the Taoiseach,’ the driver announced. Inside were two dead ducks and a card that read ‘Shot over Kinsealy’.
Then we roll directly into the no confi- dence motion where the whole rollicking, heaving, sweating and often inebriated mass of the Fianna Fáil party squeeze into a room at the top of Leinster House for a 15-hour marathon. Disgraceful scenes occur after Haughey’s victory when Jim Gibbons is kicked and punched in the car park by the leader’s goons.
But as O’Malley is recounting this carry-on, deadpan, he adds the following: ‘About the same period an excessively pious but harmless woman was bundled out of the public gallery and barred for life because she asked the Ceann Comhairle to say the Angelus at 12 o’clock.’
As Oscar Wilde said of the death scene of Little Nell by Dickens, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
What Dessie O’Malley and his supporters never fully understand is that, though Haughey was an aberration, he was a product of the system that Fianna Fáil itself had constructed to maintain the party’s establishment in their prestigious and lucrative positions. Eamon de Valera handpicked Seán Lemass for the inheritance. Lemass selected his successor Jack Lynch and Lynch was all set to pass the leadership over to Dessie O’Malley or some similar golden boy of the establishment when the usurper Haughey stole the crown. Haughey saw a crumbling edifice and the arch opportunist took the morals of the alleyway to the Dáil.
O’Malley does see that the system is at fault, but sadly, for all his handwringing, he and his colleagues failed to change it. He set up the Progressive Democrats and what was the first thing they did? Go into coalition with Haughey and Fianna Fáil. Are we supposed to take him seriously after that?
The PDs are gone and Fianna Fáil’s parliamentary party meetings can now be held in a phone box.
Sadly, this is not a well constructed memoir. O’Malley comes across as extremely self-confident and a little self-regarding, so like many men of achievement he appears to think that writing skill and self-editing ability have also been conferred on him.
Consequently, there is little depth and expansion on interesting anecdotes that a good editor should spot. There is an element of ‘needless to say I had the last laugh’ about many reminiscences and little depth or reflection. His publishers, Gill & MacMillan, released Mary O’Rourke’s memoir a number of years ago and it was a runaway success because she shared intimate details of her life.
There aren’t more than a few paragraphs here about his marriage to Pat McAleer from Omagh. And surely there could have
O’Malleywrites:‘Wehandedhimourresignations. “Wellf*** you anyway, ”Haughey responded.
“I didn’t think you’d have the guts to do it.”’
been more about the unexpected arrival of Richard Burton at their wedding reception in Wicklow in 1965?
The book is not satisfying at all in the personal sense, and even a reflection on the premature death of his uncle, Donogh O’Malley, ends with a dig at Haughey.
A skilled diarist or memoir writer such as, say, the British Conservative MP Alan Clarke, knows how to zero in on a exotic anecdote and capitalise on it. O’Malley has certainly spied one when he relays what should be a hilarious story about how as a minister he was playing golf on a parched desert in Iraq – but construction has let him down. The average man, myself included, doesn’t know much about golf in Saddam Hussein-led Iraq in the 1970s.
Nor do we learn much about O’Malley the man, or what he stood for. He praises Jack Lynch, he excoriates Haughey, but we knew his stance on these men decades ago. At the end of the book we still don’t know what the PDs stood for besides cutting taxes.
There is no insight on his relationship with Mary Harney, bar saying she was an ‘outstanding national politician’. Personal revelations about Michael McDowell, in my experience a fun chap behind all the bluff and bluster, are sadly missing also.
There is a huge opportunity to counter his own stereotype here. I dealt with O’Malley when writing a number of stories on the IRA during the latter end of his career and found lurking behind the stony exterior a more human side, of which we catch only glimpses here.
Unfortunately for O’Malley’s readers, writing an attractive memoir requires different skills than constructing legislation.