Cruiser had the read on Haughey before the rest

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

We are in the process of moving house. Up in the attic and scattered around the house are 20 years of possessions. Hard decisions have to be taken on what to chuck and what to keep.

The pace has been fitful except when it comes to going through the books – and then it slows right down. So much that it makes a two-toed sloth look like Usain Bolt. I end up poring through books I have not read for years.

Worse than that, browsing through books I have had for years and have not read, and probably am never going to read.

The reason for buying them was always worthy. They looked useful and informative, educational even. They would add to the McGee sum of knowledge, deepen my understanding of the world.

And there they have sat for many years, gathering dust and taking up space. And still I can’t part with them on the thin premise that I’ll read Roy Foster’s biography of Yeats, or Astonishing the Gods or that biography of William Cosgrave or A Brief History of Time sometime within my lifetime.

One of the books I came across was States of Ireland by Conor Cruise O’Brien which I picked up in an unknown second-hand book store an unknown number of years ago.

I was never a fan of Cruise O’Brien, who became increasingly strident, and virulently anti-republican, in his latter years.

O’Brien hated Charles J Haughey and used any opportunity to do him down. It was he, after all, who came up with the acronym GUBU to describe Haughey.

I ended up flicking through the book which was written in 1972. Cruise O’Brien was a very tasty writer and it is very readable. It is part autobiography, part his own take and commentary on the Ireland that developed in the 1950s and 1960s.

I was surprised to learn his antipathy of Haughey went back to the 1960s. This passage from the book shows his prescience and his detestation of Haughey, and also shows how pungently effective O’Brien’s prose could be. Remember this is 1972, a quarter of a century before the source of Haughey’s wealth was discovered.

“Haughey’s general style of living was remote from the traditional Republican and de Valera austerities.

“He had made a great deal of money and he obviously enjoyed spending it, in a dashing eighteenth century style, of which horses were conspicuous symbols.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.