Haughey's Forty Years of Controversy by T. Ryle Dwyer Read Free Book Online Page B

of new land at Kinsealy, because that would seemed to have been an equally propitious purchase, seeing that he sold just 17.5 acres of that land to Cement Roadstone for a quarry in December 1973 for £140,000, which was under £5,000 less than he had paid for the house and the 240 acres four years earlier.
    Matt Gallagher, who had made a small fortune in wartime Britain, returned to Ireland and began building houses in the public and private sector in the 1950s. There was a great deal of housing deprivation in urban Ireland, especially in Dublin, where several families often lived in the one tenement. Gallagher was one of the builders most involved in Taca , and some of those people were prepared to help Haughey in their own interest.
    â€˜Haughey was financed in order to create the environment which the Anglo-Irish had enjoyed and that we as a people could never aspire to,’ according to Patrick Gallagher, who believed that his father saw the construction of a modern Ireland as a great patriotic enterprise.
    The controversy over the sale of Charlie’s property became a national issue, however, when Gerard Sweetman of Fine Gael charged that Charlie might have acted improperly by not explaining to the Dáil that he stood to benefit personally from legislation that he had introduced himself. It was suggested that he might have been liable for income tax on the sale of his land, if part of the 1965 Finance Act had not been repealed recently.
    Suddenly Charlie’s private business dealings became an election issue. ‘Because he has impugned my reputation,’ Charlie explained, ‘I have felt obliged to refer the matter to the revenue commissioners, under whose care and management are placed all taxes and duties imposed by the Finance Act, 1965.’
    The revenue commissioners promptly reported ‘that no liability to income tax or surtax would have arisen’ under any provision of the 1965 act. Although this should have killed the issue, one of his opponents in his Dublin North Central constituency – the Labour party candidate, Conor Cruise O’Brien – raked up the issue repeatedly during the campaign in an effort to expose what he described as ‘the Fianna Fáil speculator-orientated oligarchy’. Despite everything, Charlie increased his vote to top the poll, while Cruise O’Brien was a distant second. Although Fianna Fáil’s vote dropped by 2% nationally, the party actually gained two seats through the vagaries of proportional representation. Lynch was re-elected as Taoiseach and Charlie was re-appointed as Minister for Finance.
    In his three full years in that portfolio, the budget deficit quadrupled. He intended to tell the Dáil in his next budget address that the deficit would be ‘substantially higher’ in 1970.
    â€˜There was a hushed silence as Mr Haughey rose from his usual seat and walked across to the Taoiseach’s place on the front bench to open his briefcase,’ the Evening Herald reported. ‘The minister, who began his budget speech earlier than usual because of the small number of queries during question time, started off with a review of the economy in general.’
    Over the years Charlie had complained more than once about the unreliability of the media in general and the Evening Herald in particular, and this must have been one of the most glaring pieces of irresponsible journalism. Far from starting his budget address early, Charlie was not even in the Dáil. He was in hospital.
    Lynch told a stunned gathering that the Minister for Finance had been hospitalised that morning following an accident. As a result the Taoiseach read the budget address himself.
    Charlie’s injuries resulted from a fall from a horse, but contrary rumours began circulating almost immediately. The garda commissioner informed Peter Berry, the secretary of the Department of Justice, that ‘a strange rumour was circulating in North