He inspires loyalty and anger; fascination and exasperation. A new four-part documentary series on Charles Haughey proves that he's a man we still love to talk about, especially when he evades all offers to talk about himself, writes Kathy Sheridan.
"There will never be a time like it again. Never such excitement, never such achievement, never such heartache, never such happiness, as the time they'll talk of as the Haughey era"
- Máire Geoghegan-Quinn at the 1991 Fianna Fáil Ardfheis
To many under the age of 35, that Haughey eulogy, delivered in wonderfully theatrical tones, will sound a lot like overkill. But give it time. Pour a drink (whiskey seems appropriate), douse the lights and settle back for a thriller, one played out to a backtrack of celestial choirs, grinding axes, conflicted loyalties, brooding menace and severely tested love.
Consider the contemptuous, hunted, brooding Haughey eyes. Watch them as he dismisses upstart reporters' questions from 35 years ago, about the source of his wealth.
"I resent very much my private, personal affairs being the subject of a political campaign," he declaims in grand, measured tones - before springing like a snake on one of his interrogators: "What are you laughing at, Michael? Hmm?"
The camera stays locked on that face, on the menacing half-smile and the hooded eyes that in the silence dart between basilisk glare, threat and wariness, before finally being lowered to the floor.
It is a sequence in the upcoming four-part RTÉ documentary series, Haughey, that has the viewer longing for the subject himself to pop up - an old man in his final days, with nothing to lose - and interpret the younger man. But he doesn't, and may never do so now, despite the path beaten to his door for 10 years by such broadcasting luminaries as Vincent Browne, Cathal O'Shannon, Larry Masterson, Noel Pearson - and latterly the team behind this series, co-executive producers Steve Carson and Miriam O'Callaghan, and producer/director Niamh Sammon.
"He never said no," says Carson, who had several meetings with him in Kinsealy. So no explanation is forthcoming. It may be that it was made clear to him that this would be no vehicle for his "Spirit of the Nation" persona and that the Arms Trial would be pivotal - a subject of which Haughey has never spoken, not even to his children, according to his daughter, Eimear.
Or it may be that he feared the wrath of the tribunals if his remaining strength was used to appear on television. (Suffering from prostate cancer, he had to abandon a recent French holiday to return home for a blood transfusion.) Or maybe he simply has too much to hide.
Whatever his motives for remaining off-stage for this production, he clearly did not oppose it. His three children appear, as do his brother and his uncle, as well as a clutch of McWilliams cousins. The dramatis personae also include: Dr TK Whitaker, Harry Boland, Patrick Gallagher, Frank Dunlop, Fr Alec Reid, Joe Ainsworth, Dermot Desmond; Bertie Ahern; Garret FitzGerald; Des Hanafin; Des O'Malley, Albert Reynolds, Pádraig Flynn, Seamus Brennan, Martin O'Donoghue, Charlie McCreevy, Ben Briscoe, PJ Mara, Geraldine Kennedy, Prof Declan Kiberd, Prof Tom Garvin, and Matt Cooper.
Two notable absentees are Vincent Browne and Terry Keane, who were invited to appear.
Boland is a key witness, one who consistently declines to polish the Haughey legacy. He remarks on the extravagant lifestyle that was evident even when their joint accountancy firm was a fledgling. "We both took the same money out of Haughey Boland - which was little enough at that stage. Very little. I don't know how he did it. But he did it."
Boland, again, on Haughey's personal attitude to income tax: "He came into me, 'you won't believe it', he said, threw this chit across to me and said 'they took so much off my salary. Get it back.' So that was the kind of attitude that I think he had. He was busy saving the country and 'you'll look after that'."
And then there is Boland robustly defending Taca (the FF fundraising vehicle of which he was treasurer), to which businessmen paid £100 a year for access to ministers at private functions. "Here were successful business people who could meet with ministers and who could let them know what the . . . what they were doing wrong."
Patrick Gallagher's family property development business was intimately linked with Haughey ever since Matt Gallagher, Patrick's father, offered Haughey a tip-off in 1959. Patrick Gallagher now says of that tip, to buy a house and 40 acres in Raheny (which was sold back, re-zoned, to the Gallagher Group in 1969), that it was the "same kind of advice as one would give to a friend in a pub".
Haughey's influential business friends would not let him down in his wilderness years. Who were they? "The likes of Mr Paschal Vincent Doyle, my father, and . . . and others unknown to me".
The Gallagher story that most sticks in the mind concerns the day when Haughey was first elected taoiseach and summoned young Patrick Gallagher to his house to ask for "private support". It was "panic stations", he recalls. Haughey owed £1 million and had 48 hours "to tidy up his affairs".
Thus we have the image of the Republic's taoiseach, on the day he takes office amid the solemn rituals of State, being called to account by a 29-year-old property developer, in a role reversal of chilling proportions: "Tell me the truth. How much do you f--king owe?," demanded young Gallagher. They were able to "solve the problem", he adds. Gallagher agreed to pay off a third of the debt, which was later represented as a property deal.
Other images also stay with the viewer. Albert Reynolds recounting how he went to Haughey after the 1983 leadership challenge and told him that while he had supported him this time, he would not support him again. Then Reynolds's voice starts to break. "I wouldn't be where I was . . . but for him," he says, as tears fill his eyes and he puts his hands to his face, asking the interviewer to "leave it for now".
There are the grown children, reared in stately Abbeville with ample room for a pony or two, attempting to rationalise and source the extravagance of their father.
Conor: "There is something in his make-up that said that he didn't want to experience poverty again . . . His father died of multiple sclerosis at the age of 48 and things couldn't have been easy. I would certainly think that his desire to have a good life is based on the poverty of his childhood."
Seán: "All of us thought it was as a result of very shrewd investment in property and shares . . . I don't think money cost him a thought."
Eimear: "He chose to go into politics. The salary at the time was pretty small. I think that people saw that he was doing the job for the country that needed to be done and they were happy to support him, to give him the extra luxuries and things on the basis that he was doing what needed to be done to get the economy right. So the people gave it with a whole heart. I don't think there is anything wrong with that."
And then there was the night when Terry Keane chose to expose their father's lengthy betrayal of them and their mother in a Late Late Show special, a night when he took his wife out to dinner and left no warning for his children. Seán for example, found out when his wife called him in from the kitchen: "Seán, you'd better come and look at this . . . "
For all that, the programme-makers have worked hard to provide balance. The editing (by Ray Roantree) is inspired, and participants are often startlingly honest. Tales from Haughey's early life - a father who idolised Michael Collins and whose health was wrecked after years of being hunted by the Black and Tans; a mother forced to carry her bedridden-husband downstairs on her shoulders, while raising seven offspring on an Army pension; the image of young Charlie running up and down to school in his "bedraggled trousers" compared to the always impeccably turned-out George Colley - will all feed the musings of amateur psychologists.
Doesit explain what Geraldine Kennedy, now editor of The Irish Times, describes as "that great flaw" - his insecurity?
"What he wanted most of all was to be seen to be respectable and he thought he could buy that - and he couldn't, in that Ireland," she says.
Dr TK Whitaker comments on the spectacular change in Haughey, "psychologically, for a young man who grew up in ordinary surroundings and probably liked a packet of Woodbines or a pint, to an ascendancy figure who liked horses and champagne and so on. There is a big, psychological question as to how this transition occurred."
Does his background explain how or why he bred such desperate fear and insecurity in others? Those inclined to defend the phone tapping scandals from a cultural viewpoint, will get a salutary reminder from this series about the terrifying, thuggish menace that surrounded that culture.
Former cabinet minister Martin O'Donoghue: "People who posed any threat had to be dealt with - whatever it took."
Another former minister, Pádraig Flynn (beaming from ear to ear): "Let's say - we persuaded some. If you can't stand the heat . . . This is not for beginners, national politics . . . "
Even now, after a relatively uncritical interview for the programme, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has suggested to one source that he wasn't allowed to be as positive as he would have wished, although there is no suggestion that his contribution was curtailed.
What this series does is allow you, the viewer, to make up your own mind.
The four-part documentary series, Haughey, begins on Monday, RTÉ 1, 9.30pm