Editorial from Irish Political Review, July 2006
Haughey: The Hyenas Howl
Charles Haughey's funeral "raises a big question about State funerals. The stark truth is that to give such an honour to a thief, a bully and a tax-evader is the behaviour of a banana republic". that's former Irish historian and present ideologist of the British State, Ruth Dudley Edwards writing in the Sunday Independent (18 June).
In the British view Ireland, ever since its escape, has been a banana republic, with unwarranted pretensions. Surely then Edwards should approve of it when it appears to act in accordance with her estimate of it.
She asks: "had he been proved in court to have been criminally on the take like Ray Burke", would that have deprived him of the right to a State funeral? She doubts that it would, because from her vantage point in the British ruling class (to the extent that there still is such a thing) she sees the Irish as being thorough banana republicans to the core. The factual detail that Haughey was not proved to have been criminally on the take therefore fades into insignificance. (And the Burke investigation is still ongoing.)
Fintan O'Toole declared on RTE some years ago that it could no longer be doubted that Haughey had been on the take, and that the only question was whether he gave anything in return. In normal parlance being on the take means taking bribes—accepting money in return for favours. But O'Toole's usage bears out Edwards's description of the State as a banana republic. Something essential is missing from it.
Whatever about the State, there is something missing from Dublin 4. And O'Toole, in his Savanarola act, is unquestionably bananas.
He tells us that in the decadence of late Imperial Vienna [where so much of the world's music was created] a high-priced prostitute was a courtesan and a politician whose bribe was a country estate was a statesman, and in this sense Haughey was a statesman. He was a prostitute who "kept an expensive mistress", but was himself "a kept man". He was consumed by greed and dishonesty, but mastered the…
"…art of hiding in plain sight. Instead of seeking to conceal the scandalous truth… he made it so obvious that it became simply an accepted aspect of Irish reality". "His one genuinely heroic quality was his brazenness in 1986, when the first divorce referendum was called, he returned from a weekend in Paris with his mistress Terry Keane to broadcast… his unshakeable belief in the importance of the family".
He engaged in a "naked display of unexplained wealth". He was notorious even amongst computers, whose spell-checkers proposed that his name should be "haughty". He was "a product of the Catholic lower middle classes who spent millions of pounds of other peoples' money in affecting the style of an Ascendancy gent". On the other hand he shopped at "Charvet and Le Coq" in Paris with the money of "the plain people of Ireland", and kept up a "seigneural lifestyle at Abbeville".
Which was it? Protestant Ascendancy or French? They aren't compatible. And, as far as we know, Haughey's example had some effect in shifting the vision of Earthly Paradise of the nouveau riche from London to Paris, and that was not the least of the things held against him by Whitehall. Whether his French orientation was a matter of policy or an expression of taste, we don't know. We never had the consuming interest in his lifestyle that the envious petty bourgeoisie of Dublin 4 had.
We suppose that the money spent at Le Coq Hardi did in a sense come from "the plain people of Ireland"—assuming that, in the socio-economic transformation he brought about, there is still a plain people of Ireland—but there is no doubt that money come to him through the medium of multi-millionaires, who got nothing in return but an occasional chat. It seems that they looked to him as a man of quality amongst the general rabble of the money-grubbing rich.
Ireland today has the highest per capita rate of capitalist entrepreneurship in the world. The purpose of entrepreneurship is to become a multi-millionaire. O'Toole's complaints sound like an echo from the days of de Valera's vision of plain living, which has been much ridiculed by Dublin 4. Which is it to be? The plain people or Haughey's entrepreneurship?
O'Toole makes passing reference to "the byzantine conspiracy that led to the Arms Trial", ignoring the verdict returned by the plain people in the jury in the face of uncontroverted evidence that arms imports were authorised by the Government, and that that the conspiracy which led to the Trial was not Haughey's but that of Lynch, O'Malley etc.
We are told that Haughey "secretly sniggered at the people's credulity". He does not go on to say 'while preserving the framework of public life that sustained it'. But that can be taken as read.
We don't know whether, or to what extent, Haughey was a sceptic, and we cannot see its relevance to public affairs. In matters to do with the existence of the world there is no solid ground of opinion on which to distinguish between credulity and scepticism. And if he was a private sceptic who chose not to affront the bishops of the society, then he acted in the way recommended by Edmund Burke.
We recall an argument between him and C.C. O'Brien in the early 1970s in which he said that O'Brien was propagating an empty liberalism which sought to destroy in which people lived while having nothing to put in their place.
In this, as in other aspects of life, he lived in the Continental manner, where to have an affair while preserving the structure of the family was neither abhorrent nor paradoxical. But the Irish newspaper world in that generation, led by Whitehall's Irish Times and the born again Independent, were becoming Puritan in the prurient English manner.
What the Tribunals have established at vast expense is what was plainly evident without them—that Ben Dunne gave Haughey a million pounds for nothing—or for something so intangible as to be beyond the grasp of the grubbing petty-bourgeoisie of Dublin 4. Other businessmen likewise gave money they could well-afford without receiving any specific business advantage.
Haughey gave the State European status for a while. The EU had become accustomed to treating it as Britain's banana republic. Haughey made it something else for a few years. He made EU leaders at Dublin Castle feel they were in an independent European capital, rather than a second-hand England. They later rewarded the experience with a gift of 8 billions (Punts) which could be well used because Haughey had laid the groundwork.
Haughey took the main functions of government into his own hands, using his Ministers as messenger boys, to bring about economic transformation. And he made a presentation to the European heads which opened the way for serious funding.
Brian Farrell, back in the 1970s, published a book on the office of Taoiseach (which means chief) discussing whether its incumbent was Chairman Or Chief. It wasn't much of a question. Everyone knew he was a Chairman. But, for that brief period under Haughey he was effectively the chief.
Perhaps now that he is dead the petty-bourgeois resentments of the big bourgeois with style will wither away, and the real history of the emergence of entrepreneurial Ireland will be written.
In the same issue of the Sunday Independent Eoghan Harris (Death Of A Chieftain: The Enigma Was Empty)—revealing himself to have been what everybody knew he was, a "political apprentice" of IRA Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding—resurrects the old Sticky story that Haughey fostered the emergence of the Provisional IRA for the purpose of warding off social revolution in the South, which Goulding, Harris etc. were on the brink of achieving:
"Back in 1969, Cathal Goulding, leader of the left-leaning Republican Movement, was trying to wean the IRA away from the gun, prosecute a peaceful civil rights campaign in the North and shift Sinn Fein towards socialist politics in the South. As one of his political apprentices, I saw first hand how Haughey helped smash that strategy. In the autumn of 1969 Goulding was offered a Faustian deal. Haughey's cronies were ready to arm any reactionary rump of the IRA on condition that it stayed away from socialist politics in the South and abandoned civil rights in the North, and created a crisis in Northern Ireland. Goulding believed this would lead to civil war. He rejected the deal and refused to make arms available to sectarian citizen committees in Belfast and Derry. By putting up with the jeers and jibes of the Provo graffitti which proclaimed “IRA I Ran Away”, he kept the heat down long enough for Lynch to be able to handle Haughey… By pushing away Haughey's poisoned chalice they [Goulding etc.] saved us from civil strife.
"Many media republicans have neither forgiven nor forgotten those of us who took a hard stand against Haughey… Thus the town is full of trainee hacks who think I was anti-Provo because I was a member of the Workers' Party, when the reverse was true—I was in the Workers' Party because I was anti-Provo. Hence my effective blacking from RTE by a new breed of producers who don't even know why I am on a green list…
"What did we and Haughey find out about ourselves at the Arms Trial? We found out that we were not as hard-boiled as we thought. Haughey found it out first. Faced by the Special Branch, he folded. He found out that a United Ireland meant so little to him that he preferred to perjure himself rather than risk his political career… Thank God for that. Because if Haughey had imported arms, proclaimed that he had done it for Ireland, and indeed would do it again, he would have been swept to power on a tidal wave of naked nationalism—and ruined the Republic. If acquitted, he would have been a Fianna Fail hero. But if found guilty and given a nominal jail sentence he would have become a national hero. In this Mussolini role he would have set the North aflame… and… reduced us to the ruinous condition of a Columbia or a Bosnia. By the grace of God, Charles Haughey funked it. When his bluff was called, he lost his nerve and he lied… At the Arms Trial, Charles Haughey realised that he not only lacked the courage of his convictions, but that he lacked any convictions at all. We were lucky that he lacked them. Lucky he settled down to a life of Charvet shirts instead of civil war. Lucky above all that, like the rest of us in the Republic at the time, he settled for the safe role of sneaking regarder. The phrase of course comes from Conor Cruise O'Brien, the only public figure of my generation who genuinely deserves a State funeral… We had no right to deplore a State funeral for Haughey because until very recently we went along with his ambivalence towards armed republicanism. Some of the media still do. RTE is the last refuge of the Haughey hush puppies…" etc. (Sunday Independent, 18.7.06).
This outpouring of bile is accompanied by a large cartoon by Tom Halliday of Haughey as a rotten egg which has been broken into a frying pan, with a chef holding his nose against the smell. In style, it is of a kind with a multitude of articles that appeared in both the Independent (which is a kind of Harris family magazine owned by a billionaire who lets them indulge themselves) and the Irish Times. The difference is that Harris, though now reduced to gutter journalism, played some part in the affairs he described, which Miriam Lord, for example, gloating over Haughey's corpse in the Irish Times, did not. She is a member of the chorus, while he was in some degree a perpetrator.
Harris's problem lies in an inability to see a situation while it exists and to act in it in a way that he can stand over later. It is the problem of his media generation in the Republic. And his way of coping with it is their way. They invent a different past from the past that actually existed, use their media positions to give it currency, and place invented versions of themselves in that invented past.
But this is an ongoing process, because the past was not re-invented in one fell swoop at some point in the 1970s: It is subject to continuous re-invention. and Harris has re-invented history, and himself as part of it, four or five times.
Some ancient Greek observed that one can never cross the same river twice, because the water in it is always different. And one might say that one could never meet the same Harris twice—or the same Rabbitte—or, for that matter, the same C.C. O'Brien.
If one takes the present Harris version in earnest, what does it say when when the bile is discounted? That Haughey saved the state in 1970, and that he did so as an agent of divine Providence. It is not what he meant to say. He can never say what he means to because his mind is too volatile to formulate meaning and hold it, being essentially ephemeral. But that is what he says. And what he says is true after a fashion.
What actually happened in the Spring of 1970s that led to Haughey, a senior Cabinet Minister, being subjected to criminal prosecution by Lynch, is something that we do not know and that Harris does not know and that C.C. O'Brien does not know. But we have isolated the certainty that something happened between Lynch and Haughey, and we have set that unknown happening in the context of a network of definite facts. Harris, and the media of which he is a fair sample, give up any concern with ascertainable fact and they spin fantasies.
A certain fact is that Haughey did not organise an illegal import of arms with the object of distributing them to nationalists in the North. It was the Government that organised covert arms imports for Northern nationalists. It was not illegal since the Government did it—unless one holds that the Republic was still subject to British authority in the matter—which, if it was the case, has never been publicly acknowledged.
It seems to be a virtual certainty that Whitehall demanded that Lynch should stop this covert activity, and that it enlisted the services of the Fine Gael leader when Lynch held out against the direct British approach. A possible explanation of what happened then is that Haughey objected to compliance with a Whitehall ultimatum regarding a matter within the sovereign authority of the Republic, and that Lynch then had the bright idea of foisting the Government policy of the preceding six months onto Haughey and prosecuting it as an illegal conspiracy.
Haughey entered an evasive defence pleading in the Arms Trials, apparently relying on the prosecutions to collapse before the effective defence mounted by Capt. Kelly—which happened.
As far as we know, defence pleadings are privileged under English law (which is the substance of Irish law) and do not come within the law of perjury. They are arguments made by a barrister, and it is nothing unusual for them to contain two mutually exclusive lines of defence, one of which must be untrue. And, in any case, Jesuitry is an inherent and necessary part of the conduct of law within the adversarial English system. Life without it would now be too primitive to contemplate.
If Haughey's over-riding concern was to save his political career, why did he not go along with Lynch's decision to pretend that there had been an illegal conspiracy to import arms and help to pin it on Army officers? And, since he did not do that, why did he not enter the cast-iron defence that the covert arms imports were done under Government authority? (State papers now in the public domain put it beyond all question that this was the case.)
A possible explanation is that he did not see it as being in accordance with the dignity of the state to slither away from Government policy under Whitehall pressure, inventing a conspiracy for the purpose; and that, when a prosecution was rigged against him, he was not prepared to blow the Government (and the Fianna Fail party) apart by giving evidence that the covert arms imports were authorised.
There may be a possible explanation of a different kind, but we have not seen it. There has been a great expansion of literary activity in Ireland since 1970, but none of it has engaged with this intriguing incident. It is a very poor thing compared with the American literature which it mimics.
In the matter of Charvet shirts: we recall that in the propaganda of Harris's republicanism in the late 1960s Haughey was singled out as the political figure who was selling out Fianna Fail to the bourgeoisie and had lost all sense of the destiny of the nation. We cannot recall if it was Charvet shirts then—which we had never heard of until now. And there were endless stories of how he rode horses with the gentry and frequented Madame X's brothel. He was hated with one of those utterly irrational hatreds which have often disabled the Left.
Brian Faulkner, in the North, was hated in the same way. Faulkner and Haughey were depicted as a bourgeois pair whose rise to prominence was making the Border an irrelevance.
During the autumn and Winter off 1969-70, the (Official) Republican story was that Haughey and Fianna Fail were selling out the nation to "Federalism", under which Ireland would be reconnected with Britain through a Faulkner-Haughey collaboration.
And now Harris has it that Haughey sold out again in the interest of Charvet suits, in the Summer of 1970. That leaves about two months for him to have been something else. But there is an entire absence of evidence that he ever did become something else. He was of a piece throughout. And our attitude was that, as bourgeois things go, Faulkner and Haughey were of the better kind.
As to Goulding's political movement in which Harris was an apprentice: it was given money by the Dublin Government in the Autumn of 1969 in the hope that it would do something it was entirely incapable of doing—displace nationalist antagonism with some kind of socialism. What became the SDLP was also funded by the Dublin Government with the hope of fostering a constitutional nationalism, and this was seen as part of the sell-out by the Officials.
In August 1969, at the only time when it was possible to "have set the North aflame", the leaders of Harris's movement (MacGiolla etc.) addressed mass rallies in Dublin demanding that the arsenals of the state be thrown open for an incursion into the North, and we were the only active public voice on the other side.
The leaders of what became the SDLP were also demanding arms then, and later.
A new Republican movement was generated in the North out of the experience of the pogrom of August 1969. It owed nothing to Dublin patronage.
Harris is right when he says he is above all else an "anti-Provo". But one of the first acts of the Officials against the upstart Provisionals was to launch a rival war to the war declared by the Provisionals in 1970. They called it a "national-liberation war" as far as we recall. It was launched from outside the North and was conducted on ideological premises that floated beyond the social realities of the North. Its high points were the killing of cleaning women in an Aldershot canteen and the killing of a British soldier home on leave in Derry. And, as far as we could discover at the time, it fired the only short not fired by the British Army in Derry on Bloody Sunday.
After its war was called off the Officials concentrated on the media and political activity in the South financed by bank robbery, forgery and foreign gold, and the Official IRA remained (and perhaps remains) in being for housekeeping. And its lunatic war of 1970-72 was removed from public awareness.
A media-vacuum arose in the Republic under Lunch and C.C. O'Brien. Traditional culture was banned from the air waves with nothing definite to replace it. Long after the Arms Trial, Lynch continued to condemn the 'two-nations' view, and to hold Partition responsible for the escalating trouble in the North. He was therefore disabled ideologically against the new vigorous Republicanism in the North, and could only try to curb its appeal in the South by administrative harassment. O'Brien too rejected the proposal that the Ulster Protestants should be treated as a nationality, and in the Spring of 1974 he refused to take on the sovereignty claim on the North as a means of consolidating the only real possibility of a power-sharing arrangement there has ever been. But he set up a strict political censorship of culture in RTE that lasted for a generation. The effect of this was to make a gift to the Provos of the traditional culture of the independence movement. It was the madness of political bankrupts.
The Officials, having given up their war, and being motivated exclusively by hatred of the Provos, slotted themselves into the media vacuum, and were the dominant element in RTE for a while. Harris's complaint about being blackballed is in substance a complaint about loss of dominance.
Professor Girvin of Aberdeen University wrote about Haughey in the Irish Independent (16.6.06). Though now a British Professor, Girvin hails from Cork, and he has admitted to being driven by rebellion against a socialist Republican father. He was briefly associated with us long, long ago, but he parted company with us because we were not democratic enough in outlook for him. He did not explain where our conception of democracy was inadequate. In the course of becoming an academic he adopted the methodology of Althusser's variant of Marxism, which discounts experience, and appeared to us to be about as far from democracy as it is possible to get. But that was before Margaret Thatcher's counter-revolution. A few years ago he explained in introductory remarks to a book that he now holds the outlook of liberal universalism (or words to that effect). Liberal universalism, insofar as it is not merely contemplative, has the functional form of Thatcherism.
Professor Girvin is more restrained than Harris in his condemnation of Haughey:
"It is Haughey's nationalism that is the key to understanding his place in Irish history. His most creative use of it was his decision to endorse a social partnership when Fianna Fail was returned as a minority government in 1987. Fianna Fail quickly adopted the policy of the previous government, something acknowledged by Alan Dukes… Where Fianna Fail departed from Fine Gael and Labour in 1987 was to establish a national social partnership with the trade unions and business community to negotiate the modernisation of the Irish economy. Haughey played a key role in building the consensus… He provided the political commitment and muscle to persuade economic interest groups that the State would deliver on its promises if they co-operated.. A wide-ranging consensus was quickly achieved, one that has been maintained to the present and secured the rapid expansion of the Irish economy. This need not have been the case. An Irish version of Thatcherism could have been successfully applied but the cost to national cohesion would have been greater."
In Professor Girvin's liberal internationalist vocabulary, nationalism is a bad thing—one of the baddest. But his condemnation of Haughey's nationalism here is so restrained that readers of the Independent may not have understood that it was a condemnation at all.
The description of worker/employer Agreements, sponsored by a Government for purposes of economic development, as an expression of nationalism is not something that would come naturally to a run-of-the-mill academic nowadays, especially when the Celtic Tiger is its offspring. And an intellectual to whom it does come naturally must have it in mind that it is a form of fascism. It is one of the basic institutions of the corporate state, and it served as a hallmark of fascism for a couple of generations of liberal universalists.
Thirty years ago attempts were made by Ted Heath and Harold Wilson to set up arrangements of that kind for the British economy. Mrs. Thatcher raised the banner of revolt and saved free-market capitalism. And, by making an issue of the corporate state aspect of it, she was supported by elements of the Labour Left and the Communist Party who knew that corporate institutions which included both employers and workers were fascist.
Haughey did not merely "endorse" the social partnership. He established it in collaboration with Phil Flynn, an entrepreneurial Provo Trade Union leader.
Dublin 4 has been groping for ways of characterising Haughey as a fascist, but is disabled by its very limited understanding of the world. And Professor Girvin, who lives in a different dimension, refrains from using the word, though it can hardly have been absent from his mind. Could it be that he remains connected with the world of experience by a residual commonsense, and senses that a strict application of liberal universalist ideology in this matter just wouldn't play?
(A few years ago he described Ireland's entry into the European Union as an escape from stultifying Protectionism into liberating Free Trade. Jack Lane pointed out that for the basic Irish industry, agriculture, it was the other way about. Prior to the EU, Irish agriculture was a Third World supplier of raw produce to the British free trade area. On entering the EU it gained for the first time the benefits of a protected market, and began to diversity and flourish.)
Girvin commends Haughey for his hard work and intelligence in his early
ministerial career, but "there is considerably more ambiguity in respect
of the Arms Crisis and his tenure as leader of Fianna Fail… These
will remain tentative until historians can provide a nuanced assessment
of his role in these events".
It is probably the necessary ideology of an academic that rigorous and
dispassionate investigation by historians determine how political figures
are regarded. Experience leads to the contrary view—that academic
historians fall into line with the accomplished facts of politics. What
Girvin really means is that prudent historians should wait and see how
Haughey's reputation settles down before committing themselves. But he
tries a tentative assessment:
"Haughey might have liked to be compared to his father-in-law Sean Lemass. Yet Lemass was a more pragmatic figure than his son-in-law. This is surprising as Haughey served in the Fianna Fail Committee, chaired by Lemass in 1955, which produced a path-breaking reassessment of Northern Ireland policy. Predictably, de Valera vetoed this innovative move, but unfortunately Haughey did not pursue Lemass's strategy. Instead he adopted a most intransigent position in respect of Ulster Unionism and Northern Ireland. One of the consequences of this is that Fianna Fail became deeply divided over the issue, with more moderate elements being silenced or expelled during his leadership."
Girvin does not mention what the "Northern Ireland policy" was that Haughey rejected. It is evident that in the crisis of 1969 the Government had no policy. Or it found that what it thought was a policy had no bearing on political events because it was not grounded on an understanding of what Northern Ireland was as a Constitutional entity. Lemass's heritage was a set of illusions which he had concocted with Capt. O'Neill.
De Valera had a policy: to let Northern Ireland be, without giving up the ideal of unification, and to make the South independent. Lords Craigavon and Brookeborough in the North also had a policy: to minimise political activity in "the Northern Ireland state" because it was not a state and there was no possibility in it of evolutionary political life.
Lemass and O'Neill rejected these approaches, and by doing so caused the explosion from which everything else has followed. (Lemass did not reap this harvest: his policies having been continued under Lynch and his Cabinet, including Haughey, until the backlash blasted them out of the water.)
Lemass pressed the Nationalist Party to take on the role of Official Opposition at Stormont, and that was the beginning of the end. The Nationalists knew in their bones that it was nonsense, but evidently Lemass did not.
Girvin do not say what Haughey's "most intransigent position in respect of Ulster Unionism and Northern Ireland" after 1969 consisted of. In fact, he said very little when others were saying a lot. And the little he said was that Northern Ireland was not a viable political entity. We would have thought that was an indisputable statement of fact, amply borne out by events.
Lemass took it to be a viable political entity and obliged the Nationalist Party to participate in his illusion. "Pragmatism" is hardly the right name for that. The thing about pragmatism is supposed to be that it works. The thing about Northern Ireland is that it did not work, and if one applied a realistic idea of democracy to it the reason it did not work soon became evident. It was a semi-detached fragment of a democratic state excluded from the political life of its state, and its own semblance of political life was in essence only a referendum on which state it should belong to—but a referendum whose condition was that the Protestant two-thirds should rule the Catholic third in what was basically a police operation.
There was no material for political development in the devolved administration. The matters which were the substance of political development elsewhere were "reserved" matters in Northern Ireland—they were dealt with by British democracy through party conflicts from which the Northern Ireland was excluded, and the outcomes were applied administratively in Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland election-referendums always decided to retain this bizarre mode of attachment to Britain. Then after the election there was really nothing more to be done but wait for the next election. But Lemass, the "pragmatist", couldn't see that pragmatic fact, and he forced the Nationalist Party to play a make-believe game of Government and Opposition at Stormont. And the pragmatic effect was to blow away the Constitutional fig-leaf which the preceding generation had kept in place by inaction.
We cannot say whether Haughey saw before 1969 what Northern Ireland was, but he described it soon after as a failed political entity. Naturally we agreed since it was the view we had come to. As far as we recall Haughey did not formulate a policy for the failed entity. We did. We advocated doing away with Northern Ireland and making the Six Counties part of the functional democracy of the British state. It is unlikely that Haughey agreed with us, but he did not go in for the kind of hysterical denunciation of our project that was directed at it by many others, prominent among them those who Girvin describes as moderates.
This journal, produced weekly, was in the thick of the conflict in the North during the 1970s and 1980s. Our view of the entire spectrum of Dublin politics was that it had no understanding of the North and no policies capable of doing any good there. Then we saw that Haughey at least was not making mischief. He knew that it was not a viable entity and therefore he did not stir things up in it.
But the 'moderates' all rejected as 'extremism' his view that it was not a viable entity, and they all did their best to interfere, and every interference was in effect a piece of mischief-making which accelerated the polarisation of the communities. And Dr. FitzGerald, the most active and unrelenting moderate, did most of the mischief, aided and abetted by Dr. O'Brien in 1974 and by Dick Spring in 1985. The communal polarisation brought about by his 1985 initiative was pretty well total—but it did not dent his obtusely self-righteous sense of moderation.
Professor Girvin does not seem to understand that moderation is not a policy but a mode, and that politics consists of policies. A policy might be implemented more effectively by vigour in one instance and by moderation in another. But, without an implementable policy in a crisis, there can be no such thing as moderation.
Referring back to Edwards's assertion that Ray Burke was criminally "on the take" and that Haughey might have been, it needs to be pointed out that Burke was not convicted of taking bribes, and was imprisoned only for being held in contempt of the new inquisitorial mode of law brought into Irish affairs by the Tribunals. This new law does not formulate charges to which one can plead guilt or innocence. It requires confessions to be made. Our criticism of Burke was that he did not bring the confessional system into contempt by holding out against it in prison. We remember that the major criticism of the Moscow Trials hinged on the fact that confession by the accused played a central part in them. This was set to be a throwback to mediaevalism. And if Communist Moscow why not in capitalist Ireland? Do the enlightened ones of the Irish Times not think that, in becoming capitalist, Ireland has replaced the private confessional with a public one?
CONTENTS
Haughey: The Hyenas Howl.
Flab Murphy.
Irish Commemoration Of The Somme.
Truth About The Countess.
Rabbitte, Haughey And Arms For The North.
'T ough Love' And Joint Stewardship Of N. Ireland.
Editorial Commentary.
Bilderberg.
Shorts From The Long Fellow.
What If A Patriot Priest Has Been Traduced
(Fr. Flanagan)?
Kazakhstan.
In Remembrance Of Two Fools.
Sean Kearney (Obituary).
Dismemberment Of An Oxford Professor.
Reflections On Tom Barry's Guerrilla
Days.
Barry's Column.
Imagine If We Were Still In The UK.
A Vanished Arcadia—Paraguay (Use Value, part
4).
Labour
Comment
J.K. Galbraith.
C. J. Haughey
Captain Kelly Petition.
Towards 2016
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