No Southern Strategy: The Political Ramifications of an Alternate 1964 Election
- Thread starter Nofix
- Start date
Update 60: Ireland, part 3
This general malaise with the Fine Gael government continued over the course of the next two years, with Haughey’s OnP seemingly building up a lead in the opinion polls. Most people would write this off as a result of being fed up with the government or a desire to show that the electorate desire for some change in government. No one besides hardline OnP supporters could believe the suggestion that the OnP could win a general election. Indeed it was with this sort of mindset that Currie called an early general election, out of a sense of confidence that the government could hang on when faced by a party led by Charlie Haughey of all people. Underestimation was something that Haughey thrived on and used to his advantage during the 1989 general election.
Prior to the general election Haughey had hired the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising firm for the purpose of giving him a new image. The image they came up with saw him campaign as the everyman candidate who was a call back to the ‘Old Ireland’ for which many potential OnP voters looked up with nostalgia. Haughey fought a particularly presidential style campaign, making much of his image as a populist crusader who would bring Ireland back to ‘the good old days’ - what days those were was anyone’s guess. One reporter writing in the Kilkenny People during the campaign noted that “Touring with Charlie is not only exhausting – it can be hazardous, with all those high-powered cars burning up country roads as entourage and security men dash at breakneck speed from one town or village to the next. It is not for one with a musical ear either. After a couple of dozen pays, Charlie’s Song [the campaign’s official song] loses whatever appeal it may have had initially – except perhaps for the tone deaf.” Haughey himself could be all things to all people. He was very much of North Dublin, yet he had been born in Castlebar and was the son of two veterans of the revolutionary war, from Londonderry. Unlike other party leaders who were evidently media coached and were seen to be as clean as can be, Haughey campaigned as someone who is ‘just like you’. His campaign could be at one stop mobbed by people trying to shake his hand, while at another stop he could be attacked by someone with a bucket of paint or an egg. As one of his aides wrote of his campaign style: “The formula was always the same - shake hands, how are you, shake hands, kiss a woman, how are you. A tall dark-haired young man carrying a Polaroid camera followed Charlie everywhere. Again and again he took pictures of Charlie shaking hands with or kissing a punter. There’s a nice picture of you with the Taoiseach. And on election day you can go out and vote for the man whose picture is on your mantelpiece.”
Haughey was aided by the fact that Currie took little heed of what the opinion polls stated, and was thus oblivious to the fact that the OnP retained its lead (to his credit, opinion polling in Ireland at this time was notoriously ineffective and was likely to not show regional trends that well.) Fine Gael would seemingly make some ground up during the campaign with some of its operatives making the most of claims that Haughey was heavily indebted, sleazy, corrupt, and had a mistress who he met in a black unmarked car near Phoenix Park. Yet the strongly populist OnP manifesto with a pledge of tax cuts, no rates, and general vague pledges to increase public spending across the board, were exceedingly attractive to the Irish electorate. The other parties also had varying levels of success in terms of their campaigns. Fianna Fail had seemingly stemmed the bleeding that had been occurring over the last two decades, with Hillery finally seeming confident and able in his role as party leader. Dick Spring, while reasonably popular with the electorate suffered from the fact that he was the junior partner in a coalition government, and a long serving one at that. Spring had set himself a personal target of retaining the 11 seats they held in 1984, and if possible building upon that. Spring vowed to stand down in the event of not achieving this goal. The party had lost two seats in by-elections during the parliament, leading to most commentators suggesting that Spring should have pledged to hold onto their existing seats, a far more achievable goal in the grand scheme of things. Loftus maintained his lead over the newly christened ‘Independent Alliance’, which was becoming more and more like a party with each election it faced; it produced its own ‘manifesto’ of vague policies that all of the TDs agreed with. The Workers’ Party had been restructured under an official leadership in the form of Dublin North-West TD Proinsias De Rossa, who set about trying to rebrand the party as a left-wing alternative to the Labour Party, and not as the apparent political wing of republican paramilitaries. Jim Kemmy’s DLP had been folded up and reintegrated back into the Labour Party, somewhat ironic considering the fact that he was now the official Labour Party candidate in the seat of former leader Stevie Coughlan.
As the nation went to the polls on the 15th June 1989, there was little suggestion of the political earthquake that was to come. The only news from the day besides the odd gangland kneecapping in parts of Dublin was that Haughey had apparently been quoted as having said of Des O’Malley that if he ever got hold of the former Fianna Fail leader he would “roast his fucking nuts.” This did not go unnoticed by O’Malley.
As the first results began to trickle into the RTE election centre, it became apparent that the OnP was doing far better than anyone bar Haughey had expected. The OnP was seeing increases of around 5% in some areas, while the government was falling down with swings in the region of 7%. The RTE election computer forecast that the OnP was to win a healthy plurality. People began to take notice of this after the first few Fine Gael heads began to roll. By the end of the evening it was looking like even the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste were in trouble. Currie, despite these rumours, was returned abley in his Dublin seat, albeit on the second last round. Spring had to wait until the early hours of the morning to find out that he had indeed won… by eight votes over his Fine Gael opponent.
The final result of the evening was that the OnP had scored an upset victory garnering 34% of the vote and 72 seats, greater than what Flanagan had won in the 1984 general election. Fine Gael had slumped to its worst showing in decades, taking 29% of the vote and 45 seats. Fianna Fail won 25% of the vote and gained two notional seats to take their total to 26 seats. Labour saw its vote shrivel down to 5% of the national vote, and nine seats - Spring while holding on as a TD, was out as leader. Loftus’ Independent Alliance picked up a seat in Dublin Central where nineteen year old pro-life campaigner Niamh Nic Mhathuna won a stunning victory in a formerly Labour seat. The Workers’ Party and De Rossa’s apparent rebranding campaign were seemingly effective, with the party gaining 4% of the national vote and winning five seats.
It was apparent that it was in effect impossible for Fine Gael to gain a majority, let alone with the aid of the Labour Party and ‘Loftus’ Gang’. The great burden of responsibility thus fell upon Hillery. Supporting Fine Gael was an anathema to the staunch Fianna Fail man,yet he was also rather cagey on the matter of doing a deal with Haughey, despite the fact that the majority of his party were supportive of such a move. Both parties had roughly similar platforms, and their only major disagreement - that of support for Irish republicans in Northern Ireland had largely fallen by the wayside as a political issue in the intervening period. The main sticking point was the "Betrayal of ‘71" as many Fianna Fail TDs saw it - none more so than the Lynch-cum-Colley-cum-O’Malley faction of the party who had felt the brunt of the OnP onslaught. It was under these conditions that a coalition agreement between the two parties was agreed to, albeit by a narrow margin in Fianna Fail. Haughey did little to alleviate the fears of the O’Malleyites in Fianna Fail with his refusal to appoint their proposed candidate for Minister for Finance - Ray MacSharry to the post. Instead Haughey picked one of his allies in the Fianna Fail parliamentary party, that of Michael O’Kennedy.
Relations between the various entities of the government only deteriorated further as 1989 came to a close. Haughey made no secret of his hatred of the O’Malley faction of Fianna Fail, who he was more than happy to alienate. In one episode he would tell O’Malley that “I’m not the sort of enemy that you’d like to make.” In one notorious incident Haughey remarked during a cabinet sitting that O’Malleyite Mary Harney should “shut up” or risk “getting [her] tits in a godawful wringer.” O’Malley was incensed by the treatment of his colleague, leading to him demanding that Hillery put his foot down and tell Haughey that he could no longer act as such. Hillery stated that he would do as such, but was laughed off by Haughey who thought it a bit of harmless bantering. This was the final straw for O’Malley who several weeks later, along with Harney and three other rebel Fianna Fail TDs, announced they would be splitting and forming their own party - the Progressive Democrats. The PDs were described as being at the thin edge of a wedge of populism by Labour Senator Michael D. Higgins; they realised that there was a niche in the market of representing market interests in the Dail and at the ballot box. Haughey was privately delighted that O'Malley had bolted, indeed his press secretary P.J. Mara would go even further. Mara, when answering questions from the press turned around and blurted out "there'll be no more nibbling at my leader's bum." He then proceeded to proclaim "uno duce, una voce" ('one leader, one voice' - a quote infamously linked to Mussolini.) Mara then proceeded to put his finger across his upper lip, like a moustache, and goose-stepped up and down the political correspondents' room. The room burst into laughter - yet this would find itself into a column in the Sunday Times by the end of the week. A war or words broke out between the government at the newspaper. When Mara was called into Haughey's office, he assured his boss that it was a joke and that the newspaper had no sense of humour. Haughey proceeded to state to him, "yea, yea, yea. But for fuck sake, Mara, be careful in future, you must resist your base instinct. Put a button on your lips!" When Haughey stood down from office, Mara would be approached by an Italian hotelier who proceeded to state that he would miss "[his] Mussolini."
Hillery watched as the once great party of government crumbled down around him. Several weeks after O’Malley’s stunt, he announced that he would be standing down as party leader. The race garnered very little actual interest, with the race boiling down between O’Kennedy and a variety of no-name backbenchers. O’Kennedy stated that he would support greater cooperation with the OnP and Haughey, and for the remaining demoralised Fianna Fail TDs who were staring down into the electoral abyss, this seemed like a promising offer. O’Kennedy easily won the race and set about discussions over a ‘greater togetherness’. He was a little surprised when Haughey proposed a merger between the two parties into the OnP. On the face of it, the offer of Fianna Fail being merged into the newer party, under the leadership of Haughey, seemed like a rather one sided offer. The possibility of the Tanaiste position in addition to being Minister for Finance and the ability to moderate the OnP into becoming Fianna Fail-lite seems to have tilted O’Kennedy in favour of the merger. All that was left for him to do was to sell the merger to the party faithful. Considering the conditions they face and the fact that they could see at least 5% of their vote from 1989 sapped to the Progressive Democrats, would have suggested that the party would have been quite happy to turn the OnP into a much larger, if not a slightly greener version of itself. Yet there was a spirited debate at the party’s special Ard Fheis held on the matter. In the end O’Kennedy would sway just over 55% of the party’s delegates to support the merger move. Haughey now had his majority.
It was under these conditions that Haughey did away with ‘Barrynomics’ instead replacing it with ‘Charlienomics’. Charlienomics was characterised by one word. Spend. Increases in spending, borrowing, and in high earning taxation went up. Taxes on lower income individuals went marginally down. While Charlienomics was characterised as such, it was in effect rather similar to Barrynomics - a little bit of tinkering here and there, marginal increases in departmental budgets here and there (so as to say that the OnP had kept its manifesto promises), negligible cuts in taxes here and there (again, manifesto promises to keep), yet very little difference to the dreaded Barrynomics. Haughey’s chief advisor P. J. Mara described as being “sensible populism.” The general public, none the wiser considered Haughey’s manifesto pledges to have been kept, and thus support remained high for the OnP government. Things did look good for the OnP government, the Progressive Democrat threat seemed to have been held down at around 5%, not enough to transfer into that many seats for a non-established party. Austin Currie stubbornly remained on as Fine Gael leader, with only a marginal increase in the party’s polling from the general election. The real threat now seemed to be Labour. In late March the party’s new leader had been elected - that new leader was Conor Cruise O’Brien. O’Brien had a virtuosic, almost animalistic hatred of Haughey, who he felt to have a kleptomaniacal dictatorial flare about him, and who he felt could do great damage to Ireland if he were to maintain an overall majority at the next general election. Only Conor Cruise O’Brien could deny him this. Overnight Labour jumped up to 10% in the opinion polls.
Haughey was understandably irked and concerned about the effect a resurgent Labour Party could have on the showing of the OnP come the next general election. He could have opted to call an early general election, yet he blinked and resisted the urge to do so until 1993.
It is debatable as to whether this was a good course of action for Haughey and the OnP. The party in the 1993 general election saw its vote climb to nearly 41% of the nation vote and came within a slither of winning an overall majority - this still meant that the party had failed to hold onto many Fianna Fail seats, and were now simply back at square one in relation to governance. Currie and Fine Gael performed nominally well, gaining a single seat (though this was down two on their total in 1989) and winning 31% of the vote - Currie seemed to finally get the message and announced he would finally step down as leader. O’Brien’s strategy of ‘sticking it to Charlie’ seemed to pay off - the party gained 18% of the national vote, and won 22 seats, something it had failed to do on multiple occasions on the years prior. O’Malley’s Progressive Democrats won eight seats, a respectable showing - though they only managed to win 5% of the national vote. De Rossa’s further ‘detoxification’ of the Workers’ Party, by now in full force with the removal of the ‘odious’ elements from the party, saw the party win seven seats on over 4% of the national vote. Loftus’ Independent Alliance fell back, winning only four seats at the ballot box (the baby of the Dail, Niamh Nic Mhathuna won a seat in Louth after the standing down of the prior IA TD.)
Haughey now had to do as Flanagan had done nearly a decade prior and to try and wrangle to form his own coalition. He did so in the most unlikely fashion. In a deal compared to one with the Devil, Haughey formed a coalition with O’Malley’s Progressive Democrats and Loftus’ Independent Alliance. This ‘Coalition from Hell’ was achieved in two ways. Firstly due to O’Malley’s sense of duty to nation to have a stable and effective government; secondly due to O’Malley’s successful insistence of having MacSharry appointed Minister for Finance and the initiation of market reforms in the nation. Haughey, desperate to achieve an effective majority acquiesced and agreed to O’Malley’s demands. That being said it was not the coalition of the willing, and cracks began to show almost immediately.
President Blaney opted to stand down after a single term owing to his cancer diagnosis - which he would succumb to in 1995. The 1994 Irish Presidential election would prove to be one of the strangest elections in Irish history. Fine Gael nominated former Minister and leading frontbench spokesman Alan Dukes as their candidate, he was a popular Minister who had been talked of as a potential future leader. It was hypothesised that newly elected Fine Gael leader, Liam T. Cosgrave (son of the former Taoiseach), wished to sideline a potential rival in the event that the next general election went pear shaped. The Progressive Democrats nominated former TD Jim Gibbons who was a noted critic of Haughey and who had been on the receiving end of some of Haughey’s supporters, who had ‘roughed him up’ outside the Dail after the Progressive Democrats split in 1990. The Labour Party and the Workers’ Party each lended their support to the Independent candidate Adi Roche. Roche was a charity worker and human rights campaigner who had been involved in aiding children in orphanages in Romania after the end of communist rule in the country. Her campaign was almost immediately hampered by accusations of bullying made by former staff and associates of the Romanian Children’s Project against her. Accusations that she denied strongly. For a party of government, the OnP had a hard time selecting a candidate for the presidency, with most of those announcing being councillors or no-name Senators who would lose the party the presidency. The party would ultimately come upon a peculiar choice of candidate. Dana Rosemary Scallon, a singer who had won the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest, and who later became a family values campaigner, had been approached to run via a letter campaign to run as an Independent for the presidency. The OnP smelt an opportunity and approached her to run as their candidate. She initially refused to entertain the thought until the media caught wind of the proposal. She would ultimately agree to run as an candidate under the OnP banner, though only if she could take a eurosceptic line on Europe and emphasis on family values in relation to abortion, contraception, and divorce. The OnP, having no major disagreements on these matters, agreed wholeheartedly.
Her quixotic campaign would probably have fallen by the wayside if it weren’t for the weaknesses of the other candidates - Roche’s bullying allegations, Gibbon’s ill health & being ‘yesterday’s man’, and the fact that Dukes looked like he wasn’t interested in the job. The fact he wished to run for the leadership of Fine Gael was one of the biggest open secrets in Irish politics, and it seemed to harm him for his run for President.
Nonetheless he led in terms of first preference votes, taking nearly 40% of the vote, to Scallon’s 34%, Gibbon’s 14% and Roche’s 13%. Yet his perceived lack of interest in the job, versus the celebrity aura surrounding the campaign of Scallon would apparently lead to his loss to the singer in the final count by 20,000 votes (or 0.8% of the votes cast.) This was a bright spot in a generally quite stormy period of the government.
By 1996 Haughey was being dogged by claims of corruption and financial improprieties stemming back to the 1970s when Allied Irish Banks had forgave Haughey of much of his £800,000 debt. No explanation or reasoning was given for this move - though it was hypothesised that he had threatened the bank into cutting down his debt when he became Taoiseach. Over the course of the spring of 1996 it was revealed in the press that Haughey had received substantial monetary gifts from businessmen, and that he had held secret offshore bank accounts in the Ansbacher Bank in the Cayman Islands. Further allegations that he had embezzled money set aside for the OnP party coffers; he had apparently used taxpayers’ money to be earmarked aside for operations and funds of the OnP and that he had spent lavishly while preaching financial restraint in the early 1990s. These actions carried potential criminal action, especially after it was alleged that he had used his position to obstruct investigations into these issues. He attempted to weather the storm, but was informed that the Progressive Democrats, all but one of the Independent Alliance TDs, and several OnP backbenchers would support a vote of no confidence in him. As a result he stood down in early June 1996. He would ultimately avoid criminal charges due to judge assigned to the case assessing that he would not be able to get a fair trial due to the comments by various TDs and columnists which were perceived to have been prejudiced against him.
Not many people wished to run for the party leadership after the Haughey scandal. Therefore on the 19th June 1996 Finance Minister Pádraig Flynn would become Taoiseach virtually unopposed. He was seen by many to be a Taoiseach with a price on his head, he was seen as a Haughey crony who had his snout firmly within the trough during the Haughey years. Nonetheless it can be said that he was a successful leader, owing to the fact that he was able to take advantage of the inherent conservatism of voters in Ireland, and, in taking a page from the 'red baiting' campaign of 1969 (when Lynch's campaign made light of how a Fine Gael government would be propped up by a 'socialist' Labour government) - focussing on the 'liberalism' of the National Coalition and O'Brien's strong support for Unionism in Northern Ireland. At the 1996 general election, nearly a year after his appointment by President Scallon, Flynn would lead the OnP to 71 seats (down a mere 2 seats notional), and 38% of the national vote. Cosgrave’s Fine Gael would fall down notionally to their total in 1993 (43 seats), and would attract only 32% of the national vote. O’Brien’s Labour Party swelled to 34 TDs and just over 20% of the national vote. The Workers’ Party, now completely detoxified from their former image and renamed as the Democratic Left, won 9 seats on 5% of the vote, while the Progressive Democrats tumbled down to 5 seats on 4% of the national vote. The Independent Alliance lost another seat, though Loftus and Niamh Nic Mhathuna would hold on in the respective seats.
The new Taoiseach would be Conor Cruise O’Brien, despite the fact that Fine Gael gained more seats and votes than the Labour Party. The reasoning for this ‘big stitch up’ was pre-election polling and focus groups which showed that the National Coalition Mk. II (as it was jokingly labelled) would perform better with O’Brien as the Taoiseach Designate candidate, as opposed to Cosgrave. A deal was drawn up with O’Brien agreeing to serve, if victorious for the first few years of the government, then Cosgrave would take over with a working government majority. This working government majority appeared to be elusive, with the National Coalition gaining 77 seats in total. They would ultimately gain their majority due to support from the Independent Alliance and from De Rossa and the majority of the Democratic Left party (2 DL TDs would refuse and defected to the Republican Clubs ‘party’.) As a result the new government had a working majority of 9. Whether this could survive the Dail term was the $64,000 question. Though many, pointing to the success (or lack thereof of failure) of the last National Coalition government with a slender majority, were confident that the majority could hold.
Flynn would ultimately be forced out as leader of the OnP after it was alleged that he would be implicated in further probes into financial irregularities during the Haughey, in turn ensuring that a new generation would take over in the party. In the ensuing leadership race three candidates would emerge. The late President Neil Blaney’s brother and fellow government minister Harry Blaney; Sile de Valera the candidate of the republican wing of the party; and Mary Coughlan, a ten year veteran of the Dail who had served as Minister for Education in the government before the election. The selection of the least radical candidate, the ‘pseudo-Coughlanaganite’ Mary Coughlan was the expected, and ultimately the actual, outcome of the remarkably civil leadership election. She would appoint her two opponent to her ‘shadow cabinet’ in preparation of the general election ahead.
Prior to the general election Haughey had hired the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising firm for the purpose of giving him a new image. The image they came up with saw him campaign as the everyman candidate who was a call back to the ‘Old Ireland’ for which many potential OnP voters looked up with nostalgia. Haughey fought a particularly presidential style campaign, making much of his image as a populist crusader who would bring Ireland back to ‘the good old days’ - what days those were was anyone’s guess. One reporter writing in the Kilkenny People during the campaign noted that “Touring with Charlie is not only exhausting – it can be hazardous, with all those high-powered cars burning up country roads as entourage and security men dash at breakneck speed from one town or village to the next. It is not for one with a musical ear either. After a couple of dozen pays, Charlie’s Song [the campaign’s official song] loses whatever appeal it may have had initially – except perhaps for the tone deaf.” Haughey himself could be all things to all people. He was very much of North Dublin, yet he had been born in Castlebar and was the son of two veterans of the revolutionary war, from Londonderry. Unlike other party leaders who were evidently media coached and were seen to be as clean as can be, Haughey campaigned as someone who is ‘just like you’. His campaign could be at one stop mobbed by people trying to shake his hand, while at another stop he could be attacked by someone with a bucket of paint or an egg. As one of his aides wrote of his campaign style: “The formula was always the same - shake hands, how are you, shake hands, kiss a woman, how are you. A tall dark-haired young man carrying a Polaroid camera followed Charlie everywhere. Again and again he took pictures of Charlie shaking hands with or kissing a punter. There’s a nice picture of you with the Taoiseach. And on election day you can go out and vote for the man whose picture is on your mantelpiece.”
Haughey was aided by the fact that Currie took little heed of what the opinion polls stated, and was thus oblivious to the fact that the OnP retained its lead (to his credit, opinion polling in Ireland at this time was notoriously ineffective and was likely to not show regional trends that well.) Fine Gael would seemingly make some ground up during the campaign with some of its operatives making the most of claims that Haughey was heavily indebted, sleazy, corrupt, and had a mistress who he met in a black unmarked car near Phoenix Park. Yet the strongly populist OnP manifesto with a pledge of tax cuts, no rates, and general vague pledges to increase public spending across the board, were exceedingly attractive to the Irish electorate. The other parties also had varying levels of success in terms of their campaigns. Fianna Fail had seemingly stemmed the bleeding that had been occurring over the last two decades, with Hillery finally seeming confident and able in his role as party leader. Dick Spring, while reasonably popular with the electorate suffered from the fact that he was the junior partner in a coalition government, and a long serving one at that. Spring had set himself a personal target of retaining the 11 seats they held in 1984, and if possible building upon that. Spring vowed to stand down in the event of not achieving this goal. The party had lost two seats in by-elections during the parliament, leading to most commentators suggesting that Spring should have pledged to hold onto their existing seats, a far more achievable goal in the grand scheme of things. Loftus maintained his lead over the newly christened ‘Independent Alliance’, which was becoming more and more like a party with each election it faced; it produced its own ‘manifesto’ of vague policies that all of the TDs agreed with. The Workers’ Party had been restructured under an official leadership in the form of Dublin North-West TD Proinsias De Rossa, who set about trying to rebrand the party as a left-wing alternative to the Labour Party, and not as the apparent political wing of republican paramilitaries. Jim Kemmy’s DLP had been folded up and reintegrated back into the Labour Party, somewhat ironic considering the fact that he was now the official Labour Party candidate in the seat of former leader Stevie Coughlan.
As the nation went to the polls on the 15th June 1989, there was little suggestion of the political earthquake that was to come. The only news from the day besides the odd gangland kneecapping in parts of Dublin was that Haughey had apparently been quoted as having said of Des O’Malley that if he ever got hold of the former Fianna Fail leader he would “roast his fucking nuts.” This did not go unnoticed by O’Malley.
As the first results began to trickle into the RTE election centre, it became apparent that the OnP was doing far better than anyone bar Haughey had expected. The OnP was seeing increases of around 5% in some areas, while the government was falling down with swings in the region of 7%. The RTE election computer forecast that the OnP was to win a healthy plurality. People began to take notice of this after the first few Fine Gael heads began to roll. By the end of the evening it was looking like even the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste were in trouble. Currie, despite these rumours, was returned abley in his Dublin seat, albeit on the second last round. Spring had to wait until the early hours of the morning to find out that he had indeed won… by eight votes over his Fine Gael opponent.
It was apparent that it was in effect impossible for Fine Gael to gain a majority, let alone with the aid of the Labour Party and ‘Loftus’ Gang’. The great burden of responsibility thus fell upon Hillery. Supporting Fine Gael was an anathema to the staunch Fianna Fail man,yet he was also rather cagey on the matter of doing a deal with Haughey, despite the fact that the majority of his party were supportive of such a move. Both parties had roughly similar platforms, and their only major disagreement - that of support for Irish republicans in Northern Ireland had largely fallen by the wayside as a political issue in the intervening period. The main sticking point was the "Betrayal of ‘71" as many Fianna Fail TDs saw it - none more so than the Lynch-cum-Colley-cum-O’Malley faction of the party who had felt the brunt of the OnP onslaught. It was under these conditions that a coalition agreement between the two parties was agreed to, albeit by a narrow margin in Fianna Fail. Haughey did little to alleviate the fears of the O’Malleyites in Fianna Fail with his refusal to appoint their proposed candidate for Minister for Finance - Ray MacSharry to the post. Instead Haughey picked one of his allies in the Fianna Fail parliamentary party, that of Michael O’Kennedy.
Relations between the various entities of the government only deteriorated further as 1989 came to a close. Haughey made no secret of his hatred of the O’Malley faction of Fianna Fail, who he was more than happy to alienate. In one episode he would tell O’Malley that “I’m not the sort of enemy that you’d like to make.” In one notorious incident Haughey remarked during a cabinet sitting that O’Malleyite Mary Harney should “shut up” or risk “getting [her] tits in a godawful wringer.” O’Malley was incensed by the treatment of his colleague, leading to him demanding that Hillery put his foot down and tell Haughey that he could no longer act as such. Hillery stated that he would do as such, but was laughed off by Haughey who thought it a bit of harmless bantering. This was the final straw for O’Malley who several weeks later, along with Harney and three other rebel Fianna Fail TDs, announced they would be splitting and forming their own party - the Progressive Democrats. The PDs were described as being at the thin edge of a wedge of populism by Labour Senator Michael D. Higgins; they realised that there was a niche in the market of representing market interests in the Dail and at the ballot box. Haughey was privately delighted that O'Malley had bolted, indeed his press secretary P.J. Mara would go even further. Mara, when answering questions from the press turned around and blurted out "there'll be no more nibbling at my leader's bum." He then proceeded to proclaim "uno duce, una voce" ('one leader, one voice' - a quote infamously linked to Mussolini.) Mara then proceeded to put his finger across his upper lip, like a moustache, and goose-stepped up and down the political correspondents' room. The room burst into laughter - yet this would find itself into a column in the Sunday Times by the end of the week. A war or words broke out between the government at the newspaper. When Mara was called into Haughey's office, he assured his boss that it was a joke and that the newspaper had no sense of humour. Haughey proceeded to state to him, "yea, yea, yea. But for fuck sake, Mara, be careful in future, you must resist your base instinct. Put a button on your lips!" When Haughey stood down from office, Mara would be approached by an Italian hotelier who proceeded to state that he would miss "[his] Mussolini."
Hillery watched as the once great party of government crumbled down around him. Several weeks after O’Malley’s stunt, he announced that he would be standing down as party leader. The race garnered very little actual interest, with the race boiling down between O’Kennedy and a variety of no-name backbenchers. O’Kennedy stated that he would support greater cooperation with the OnP and Haughey, and for the remaining demoralised Fianna Fail TDs who were staring down into the electoral abyss, this seemed like a promising offer. O’Kennedy easily won the race and set about discussions over a ‘greater togetherness’. He was a little surprised when Haughey proposed a merger between the two parties into the OnP. On the face of it, the offer of Fianna Fail being merged into the newer party, under the leadership of Haughey, seemed like a rather one sided offer. The possibility of the Tanaiste position in addition to being Minister for Finance and the ability to moderate the OnP into becoming Fianna Fail-lite seems to have tilted O’Kennedy in favour of the merger. All that was left for him to do was to sell the merger to the party faithful. Considering the conditions they face and the fact that they could see at least 5% of their vote from 1989 sapped to the Progressive Democrats, would have suggested that the party would have been quite happy to turn the OnP into a much larger, if not a slightly greener version of itself. Yet there was a spirited debate at the party’s special Ard Fheis held on the matter. In the end O’Kennedy would sway just over 55% of the party’s delegates to support the merger move. Haughey now had his majority.
It was under these conditions that Haughey did away with ‘Barrynomics’ instead replacing it with ‘Charlienomics’. Charlienomics was characterised by one word. Spend. Increases in spending, borrowing, and in high earning taxation went up. Taxes on lower income individuals went marginally down. While Charlienomics was characterised as such, it was in effect rather similar to Barrynomics - a little bit of tinkering here and there, marginal increases in departmental budgets here and there (so as to say that the OnP had kept its manifesto promises), negligible cuts in taxes here and there (again, manifesto promises to keep), yet very little difference to the dreaded Barrynomics. Haughey’s chief advisor P. J. Mara described as being “sensible populism.” The general public, none the wiser considered Haughey’s manifesto pledges to have been kept, and thus support remained high for the OnP government. Things did look good for the OnP government, the Progressive Democrat threat seemed to have been held down at around 5%, not enough to transfer into that many seats for a non-established party. Austin Currie stubbornly remained on as Fine Gael leader, with only a marginal increase in the party’s polling from the general election. The real threat now seemed to be Labour. In late March the party’s new leader had been elected - that new leader was Conor Cruise O’Brien. O’Brien had a virtuosic, almost animalistic hatred of Haughey, who he felt to have a kleptomaniacal dictatorial flare about him, and who he felt could do great damage to Ireland if he were to maintain an overall majority at the next general election. Only Conor Cruise O’Brien could deny him this. Overnight Labour jumped up to 10% in the opinion polls.
Haughey was understandably irked and concerned about the effect a resurgent Labour Party could have on the showing of the OnP come the next general election. He could have opted to call an early general election, yet he blinked and resisted the urge to do so until 1993.
Haughey now had to do as Flanagan had done nearly a decade prior and to try and wrangle to form his own coalition. He did so in the most unlikely fashion. In a deal compared to one with the Devil, Haughey formed a coalition with O’Malley’s Progressive Democrats and Loftus’ Independent Alliance. This ‘Coalition from Hell’ was achieved in two ways. Firstly due to O’Malley’s sense of duty to nation to have a stable and effective government; secondly due to O’Malley’s successful insistence of having MacSharry appointed Minister for Finance and the initiation of market reforms in the nation. Haughey, desperate to achieve an effective majority acquiesced and agreed to O’Malley’s demands. That being said it was not the coalition of the willing, and cracks began to show almost immediately.
President Blaney opted to stand down after a single term owing to his cancer diagnosis - which he would succumb to in 1995. The 1994 Irish Presidential election would prove to be one of the strangest elections in Irish history. Fine Gael nominated former Minister and leading frontbench spokesman Alan Dukes as their candidate, he was a popular Minister who had been talked of as a potential future leader. It was hypothesised that newly elected Fine Gael leader, Liam T. Cosgrave (son of the former Taoiseach), wished to sideline a potential rival in the event that the next general election went pear shaped. The Progressive Democrats nominated former TD Jim Gibbons who was a noted critic of Haughey and who had been on the receiving end of some of Haughey’s supporters, who had ‘roughed him up’ outside the Dail after the Progressive Democrats split in 1990. The Labour Party and the Workers’ Party each lended their support to the Independent candidate Adi Roche. Roche was a charity worker and human rights campaigner who had been involved in aiding children in orphanages in Romania after the end of communist rule in the country. Her campaign was almost immediately hampered by accusations of bullying made by former staff and associates of the Romanian Children’s Project against her. Accusations that she denied strongly. For a party of government, the OnP had a hard time selecting a candidate for the presidency, with most of those announcing being councillors or no-name Senators who would lose the party the presidency. The party would ultimately come upon a peculiar choice of candidate. Dana Rosemary Scallon, a singer who had won the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest, and who later became a family values campaigner, had been approached to run via a letter campaign to run as an Independent for the presidency. The OnP smelt an opportunity and approached her to run as their candidate. She initially refused to entertain the thought until the media caught wind of the proposal. She would ultimately agree to run as an candidate under the OnP banner, though only if she could take a eurosceptic line on Europe and emphasis on family values in relation to abortion, contraception, and divorce. The OnP, having no major disagreements on these matters, agreed wholeheartedly.
Her quixotic campaign would probably have fallen by the wayside if it weren’t for the weaknesses of the other candidates - Roche’s bullying allegations, Gibbon’s ill health & being ‘yesterday’s man’, and the fact that Dukes looked like he wasn’t interested in the job. The fact he wished to run for the leadership of Fine Gael was one of the biggest open secrets in Irish politics, and it seemed to harm him for his run for President.
By 1996 Haughey was being dogged by claims of corruption and financial improprieties stemming back to the 1970s when Allied Irish Banks had forgave Haughey of much of his £800,000 debt. No explanation or reasoning was given for this move - though it was hypothesised that he had threatened the bank into cutting down his debt when he became Taoiseach. Over the course of the spring of 1996 it was revealed in the press that Haughey had received substantial monetary gifts from businessmen, and that he had held secret offshore bank accounts in the Ansbacher Bank in the Cayman Islands. Further allegations that he had embezzled money set aside for the OnP party coffers; he had apparently used taxpayers’ money to be earmarked aside for operations and funds of the OnP and that he had spent lavishly while preaching financial restraint in the early 1990s. These actions carried potential criminal action, especially after it was alleged that he had used his position to obstruct investigations into these issues. He attempted to weather the storm, but was informed that the Progressive Democrats, all but one of the Independent Alliance TDs, and several OnP backbenchers would support a vote of no confidence in him. As a result he stood down in early June 1996. He would ultimately avoid criminal charges due to judge assigned to the case assessing that he would not be able to get a fair trial due to the comments by various TDs and columnists which were perceived to have been prejudiced against him.
Not many people wished to run for the party leadership after the Haughey scandal. Therefore on the 19th June 1996 Finance Minister Pádraig Flynn would become Taoiseach virtually unopposed. He was seen by many to be a Taoiseach with a price on his head, he was seen as a Haughey crony who had his snout firmly within the trough during the Haughey years. Nonetheless it can be said that he was a successful leader, owing to the fact that he was able to take advantage of the inherent conservatism of voters in Ireland, and, in taking a page from the 'red baiting' campaign of 1969 (when Lynch's campaign made light of how a Fine Gael government would be propped up by a 'socialist' Labour government) - focussing on the 'liberalism' of the National Coalition and O'Brien's strong support for Unionism in Northern Ireland. At the 1996 general election, nearly a year after his appointment by President Scallon, Flynn would lead the OnP to 71 seats (down a mere 2 seats notional), and 38% of the national vote. Cosgrave’s Fine Gael would fall down notionally to their total in 1993 (43 seats), and would attract only 32% of the national vote. O’Brien’s Labour Party swelled to 34 TDs and just over 20% of the national vote. The Workers’ Party, now completely detoxified from their former image and renamed as the Democratic Left, won 9 seats on 5% of the vote, while the Progressive Democrats tumbled down to 5 seats on 4% of the national vote. The Independent Alliance lost another seat, though Loftus and Niamh Nic Mhathuna would hold on in the respective seats.
Flynn would ultimately be forced out as leader of the OnP after it was alleged that he would be implicated in further probes into financial irregularities during the Haughey, in turn ensuring that a new generation would take over in the party. In the ensuing leadership race three candidates would emerge. The late President Neil Blaney’s brother and fellow government minister Harry Blaney; Sile de Valera the candidate of the republican wing of the party; and Mary Coughlan, a ten year veteran of the Dail who had served as Minister for Education in the government before the election. The selection of the least radical candidate, the ‘pseudo-Coughlanaganite’ Mary Coughlan was the expected, and ultimately the actual, outcome of the remarkably civil leadership election. She would appoint her two opponent to her ‘shadow cabinet’ in preparation of the general election ahead.
---
Some quotes applied form OTL newspaper clippings.
Last edited:
He was a remarkably healthy and active individual until a few months before his death, he was still writing, speaking and engaging in quite a thorough schedule into the early 2000s OTL.
Or is his mother from Delaware, father from Cuba, and was he born in Canada?
It does become harder to make unique and meaningful responses as time goes on, doesn't it?
