CHARLES J. Haughey is on the ropes. The last thing he expected was that his wealth and the possible sources of it, would become a matter of unseemly public discourse while he was still in the land of the living.
Indeed, he had every right to hope that no light would be thrown on it even after his death, for the details were known only to him and a tight inner circle of trusted men who looked after his affairs. And by far the most important of them - his financial adviser, Des Traynor died in 1994 without telling any tales.
In or out of office, Mr Haughey regarded probing by journalists into his financial affairs as the height of impertinence. His only comment on the record, when queried about his wealth after taking over as Taoiseach in 1979, was the brusque: "Ask my bank manager."
His bank manager, at least in the 1980s, was Des Traynor, onetime partner in the accountancy firm of Haughey Boland and Company and, like Mr Haughey and his personal lawyer, Pat O'Connor, a former pupil at St Joseph's CBS in Marino.
For years, Mr Haughey had his account with Allied Irish Banks in the former headquarters of the Munster and Leinster Bank in Dame Street - next door, coincidentally, to the gates of Dublin Castle where the Dunnes payments tribunal has been meeting.
By 1982, he had run up an overdraft of £1 million and with the heaves against Mr Haughey's leadership of Fianna Fail, the bank calculated - wrongly, as things turned out - that Charlie's goose was cooked and decided to "call in" the debt.
Mr Haughey was bailed out by Des Traynor, then managing director of Guinness & Mahon, Mr Haughey: "Ask my bank manager" (Ireland) Ltd.
He agreed to take on the account, using his bank's money to reimburse AIB. On the basis of evidence to the Dunnes payments tribunal, it was still substantially "in the red" long after Mr Haughey returned as Taoiseach in March, 1987.
Pressure to pay off the overdraft became intense only after the Dublin bank was acquired by the Bank of Yokohama in 1988. (Guinness & Mahon's offshore trust in the Cayman Islands, which Traynor personally controlled, was sold off separately the previous year.)
THE Guinness & Mahon Cayman Trust also featured in the affairs of one of Dublin's wealthiest developers, Mr John Byrne, another close friend of Mr Haughey. There have been persistent allegations over the years that Mr Haughey is a "sleeping partner" in the Byrne property empire, which includes O'Connell Bridge House, let to the State before it was completed as long ago as 1965.
Des Traynor, his financial adviser, was a director of Mr Byrne's principal vehicles, Carlisle Trust and Dublin City Estates, both of which were also controlled through the Guinness & Mahon Cayman Trust.
When John Byrne found himself embroiled in public controversy over his plans in the early 1980s to build over 2,000 houses in the green belt between Baldoyle and Portmarnock, there was intense speculation that Mr Haughey was involved. Mr Byrne's vehicle in this case was Endcamp Ltd and his solicitors, Gore and Grimes, took the unprecedented step of issuing a statement denying that Mr Haughey had "any direct or indirect interest, beneficial or otherwise" in the project.
Local objectors picketed a public inquiry into the scheme, with one child carrying a placard which read: "Go and build your houses in the Cayman Islands!"
Unusually, the Endcamp scheme had its own sewage treatment plant, with a capacity so large that it could have opened up the entire north fringe of the city for development. If planning permission for Endcamp had been forthcoming, which it wasn't, as things turned out, Mr Haughey might have been able to sell his 210 acre Kinsealy estate for housing.
It is not that this has never crossed his mind. According to one wellplaced source, he actually agreed to sell Abbeville to the property tycoon, Patrick Gallagher, for several million pounds, but the deal fell through when the Gallagher group collapsed like a house of cards in April, 1982.
Mr Haughey was later listed as a debtor to the Gallagher "bank", Merchant Banking Ltd, when it went into liquidation leaving investors, including many pensioners, high and dry. The sum involved was small, £30,000, and Mr Haughey described it as a loan from his friend, Patrick Gallagher, who later served a prison sentence in Northern Ireland for fraud.
IT IS possible that the Endcamp scheme might have received more favourable consideration from An Bord Pleanala, had the board not been "reconstituted" before the decision was made in spring, 1984. Dick Spring brought this about while he was Minister for the Environment in the Fine Gael Labour coalition, following the actions of his Fianna Fail predecessor, Mr Ray Burke, in appointing five new members to the appeals board.
Three were appointed on his last day in office in June, 1981, and two more on his last day in office following Fianna Fail's defeat in the November, 1982, election.
Their only "sin", as Padraig Flynn later put it in the Dail, was that they had "stroked for Fianna Fail on ballot papers over a number of years".
When the Bill to reconstitute An Bord Pleanala came before the Dail in 1983, there was an outcry from Fianna Fail. Mr Haughey characterised it as a "loathsome piece of politically motivated legislation to try to assert some mean vindictive party political policy". He even led Fianna Fail deputies out of the Dail in protest after "the most unruly scenes seen in the chamber for many years", according to Denis Coghlan's report in this newspaper.
The Bill went through and, by the time a decision came to be made on Endcamp, the reconstituted appeals board was in place and planning permission was refused.
What exactly was at stake in this dispute? Why did Mr Haughey, in particular, get so upset? Perhaps Fianna Fail, which has been desperately trying to distance itself from the unwelcome limelight shining on its former leader, might tell us.