Charles Haughey
Charles Haughey was Taoiseach three times, was tried for gun-running in 1970 and acquitted, lived on a Georgian estate with horses and an island on a minister's salary, told the country in 1980 that it was living beyond its means, and was found by three tribunals after he left office to have been paid some eight million pounds by businessmen over his career; he also began the recovery of 1987, brought in free travel and the arts exemption, and was, his enemies conceded, the ablest minister of his generation. He was born in Mayo in 1925 to a Free State army officer from Derry, grew up in Dublin, qualified as an accountant and a barrister, married Seán Lemass's daughter in 1951, and was in the Dáil from 1957. As minister for justice he wrote the Succession Act that gave widows a share, and as minister for finance from 1966 he was the money of the party. In May 1970 Jack Lynch dismissed him over the importation of arms for Northern nationalists. The jury acquitted him in October and he spent nine years on the back benches rebuilding his support constituency by constituency. He took the leadership from George Colley in December 1979 by six votes and the country by a broadcast on its finances he then did nothing about. The years that followed were the GUBU period, the phrase a minister used for a murderer found in the attorney general's flat. There were three elections in eighteen months, phone-tapping of journalists, and four heaves against him in his own party, each of which he survived. His third government from 1987 cut spending hard, signed the social partnership with the unions that the next twenty years were built on, set up the Financial Services Centre in the docks, and held the European presidency of 1990; it fell in 1992 when his old justice minister said in court that Haughey had known about the phone taps. The tribunals came after: the Ben Dunne money, the Ansbacher accounts, the leader's allowance spent on Charvet shirts and Paris dinners. He was charged with obstruction, the trial was stopped over prejudice, and he settled with the revenue for six million euros. He died at Kinsealy in June 2006 and was given a state funeral.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2006 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: taoiseach, politician
