Ironically it took this week's sale of his prized status symbol to make Charlie Haughey a truly wealthy man, writes Peter Murtagh.
Abbeville House defined Charles Haughey. It projected him to the world as he wanted to be seen: a successful and powerful man, a wealthy man, a man of taste and style.
The house and land in north Co Dublin, which he is selling to a developer for a reported €45 million is so much part and parcel of Haughey's identity that disposing of it now implies an admission of defeat.
The Gandon mansion that dates from the late 18th century is intimately bound up with what Haughey made of his life (to understand the man, contemplate the fact he had a horse named Gatsby). But if Abbeville reflects Haughey as he wanted us to see him, it is also a monument to that which unmade him in the end.
This week, some of his friends - in public and private - have been saying that Haughey has a practical streak, that he is unsentimental and that selling is simply the sensible thing to do in the circumstances. But examining the role Abbeville has played in his life for almost 35 years, it is hard not to believe that it grieves him greatly to be where he is now.
Other people have homes in which they live, raise families and grow old. Their children move out into homes of their own, and they - the parents - either live out their lives in their somewhat quieter family home, or move to a smaller, more manageable property.
For the Haugheys, however, the Abbeville estate was more then merely a family home, albeit a fairly grand one. It was the centre of their universe - a large but nonetheless intimate house set in several hundred acres of fields and woods. There was land enough for the children to leave the big house but still remain, building homes of their own elsewhere on the estate.
That is what Charles and Maureen Haughey's three sons, Conor, Ciaran and Sean, did. Thus Mr and Mrs Haughey had the great joy of grandchildren being raised just across the fields or behind the woods or down the avenue. The hustle and bustle that surrounded the raising of their own children extended seamlessly into the clamour of a new generation, all essentially within the confines of the one property.
Eimear, the Haugheys' first child and only daughter, married the horse trainer, John Mulhern, and moved to Co Kildare. But she too returns regularly to her parents' home and had plans eventually to build a home for herself in the grounds "one day when I'm old and have retired", as she has said.
"We are a very close family and we like to see a lot of one another," Sean Haughey once revealed. "We call in and out of Abbeville all the time."
And so Kinsealy, the townland in which Abbeville is situated and by which name the house is also sometimes known, was a very special place indeed. A place with its own history, a place where the larger-than-life Charles Haughey saw his children grow into adulthood and, very important to Haughey, a place suitable for entertaining in a certain style. Abbeville was sure to impress most visitors.
"I live here because it is a beautiful house," Haughey told Mary Rose Doorly when he co-operated with her as she wrote Abbeville, her 1996 book about the house, its history and the people who had lived there. "It's a pleasure to be in it, it's ideally situated and I like to think about its history. I think it's great that, all over Ireland, Irish people are back into their own, inhabiting their own country, enjoying their own country and the good things in it."
Thus Abbeville embodied for Haughey, in a strange and slightly twisted way, a validation of Irish independence. For by being there, by living in this modest Gandon mansion and adopting at least some of the ways of the Ascendancy, by being the very thing he affected to despise, Haughey was showing that we had indeed defeated the ancient enemy.
When Haughey bought Abbeville in 1969, in much the same way as the rest of us trade up from a two- to a three-bed semi, he was already a man of substance. The home he left was a 40-acre farm in Raheny, which he sold for development to the Gallagher Group for £204,000 (€259,000). He paid £120,000 (€152,000) for Abbeville and soon afterwards sold a slice of land to Roadstone for £100,000 (€127,000).
At the time, he was minister for finance and the brightest light of the rising generation of young Fianna Fáil turks, the generation that was to inherit the Ireland created by de Valera and moulded into economic modernity by Seán Lemass. All that was before the Arms Crisis, the seminal event of Haughey's mid-career, which cast him into the political wilderness until Jack Lynch restored him to the front bench in 1975 and made him minister for health in 1977.
During this period, Abbeville was the centre of planning for Haughey's political fightback. Friends came to him there and helped him devise the campaign of visiting Fianna Fáil cumann up and down the country, building the base of support that would eventually propel him to the leadership of the party in 1979.
At the time, few people questioned the source of his material wealth. Indeed, many people bought into the idea that if Haughey could apparently make so much money for himself, then he would do the same for the country.
But as we now know, Haughey was at this time tottering on the brink of bankruptcy with Allied Irish Bank snapping at his heels to settle his debts, though it denied there was any problem.
While Abbeville and the lifestyle that went with it was the cause of his financial problems, it was also part of what Haughey needed to project - success - in order to have people believe in him and fear his power.
While he was taoiseach, visiting heads of government would come to Abbeville and be entertained. They included the French president, François Mitterrand, a man Haughey admired greatly. Civil servants and other State officials would also occasionally be summoned to the house and, on at least one occasion, the cabinet met there too.
And so Abbeville became a centre of power during Haughey's terms as taoiseach, when the line between public and private became blurred. Haughey was leader of the party and the party was Ireland. Thus Haughey the man was, in his own eyes, the embodiment of Ireland. An attack on Haughey was an attack on the country and people who attacked their country were traitors.
As Haughey moved between Government Buildings, or Leinster House, and Abbeville, the difference between what he owned and what was his on loan by virtue of the whim of the electorate was lost. What was there was there to be used by him as he saw fit, and in all places he ruled, with differences in style, for sure, but no one was in any doubt who was in charge.
Insofar as we outside it know what it was like, life at Abbeville comes across as an Irish version of the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod: an idyllic place for family and extended family, a place that exuded a style defined by history and the taste of the patriarch.
History and his place in it has always been important to Charles Haughey. With that mixture of arrogance and chutzpah that is so much a part of his character, he once remarked, when asked how history would remember him, that he would write his own history. Abbeville afforded him the opportunity to luxuriate in history, while adding his own layer to its rich fabric.
"It was important to his sense of self," according to one friend. "The house and what went with it validated his sense of being part of the landed gentry."
Haughey has a genuine love of the countryside, its plants and animals. Hundreds of trees were planted at Abbeville and the land was farmed organically. Bird life was encouraged - some of it to be shot in keeping with a Victorian/ Edwardian lifestyle - and Haughey waged war on the squirrels. "Bastards!" he would erupt on discovering they had stolen seed left out for the birds.
Inside, the house was restored and furnished, for the most part tastefully, save perhaps for the excess of photographs and paintings of family members.
"He did everything very well - except the sunroom on the side, which had PVC in it," said one person familiar with the interior.
Parts of the house are splendid; other parts, such as the kitchen, are warm, cosy and homely. Maureen told Mary Rose Doorly she found it hard to imagine living anywhere else.
"It's a lovely house . . . Abbeville has great character and there is great peace here," she said. "Also you are near everything, near the airport and Dublin. I'm always saying: 'I think I'd rather live in a smaller house.' But then we're planting all the trees. It would be so hard to leave. I can't see myself being comfortable in a townhouse."
There are details and places that reflect something of Charles Haughey's humour. He had a bathroom made, in which the tub was at the centre of the room and the walls were lined with bookshelves, punctuated by tall Gandon windows peering out over the grounds. He could lie there soaking, reading or watching horses gambolling around the fields.
It was clearly a happy home for the children, as they told Doorly.
"My memories of the house are very happy," Eimear is quoted as saying in Abbeville. "The house always seemed to be full with people gathering for various reasons. So much has gone on there, the political dramas and spontaneous parties."
"At the time I spoke to them," Doorly recalled this week, "they were all very happy in their lives. There was no whiff of nastiness, of corruption, about him. I remember him saying: 'Wouldn't this make a great house for the taoiseach?' I believe he would have been on for that at the time if the government had offered to buy the place."
So is Haughey devastated at having to sell up? Doorly thinks he is far from happy.
"Despite his image, he is definitely the kind of man who is very, very emotional," she says. "He just doesn't always show it. I would describe him as 'soppy stern'. He's very sentimental under it all." Others aren't so sure.
"The area out in north Dublin has changed a lot since 1969 when between the Sheaf of Wheat pub in Coolock and Malahide there were hardly any houses," says one. "It's lost that sense of being a rural beauty spot."
Haughey will be 78 next month and is in declining health. Close friends, such as Pat O'Connor, his solicitor and election agent, and Lar Foley, have passed away. For some people, Haughey is no longer a man to be seen with; fewer people call to the house.
"I think he will be very, very sad to leave," says Doorly. "But who knows? It might be a great relief to get rid of it. I do think that the only way to live in a place like that is when you are happy, when your mother is cooking and you are all sitting around the table together. But now Abbeville must be so full of horrible memories."
Others agree with some of that. To leave will be "hugely emotional", says one. "Like all chieftains, he'd have wanted to be borne out on high but he's not terribly sentimental about it."
It is ironic that it should all come to this. In his prime, Haughey was reputed to be a financial genius who, if he was only given half a chance, would make the whole country rich. In reality, something closer to the opposite was the truth. He was a corrupt man who begged and bullied banks and businessmen to fund a lifestyle of excess.
And some, notably the builder Patrick Gallagher (who in 1979 viewed Abbeville as "an attractive prospect" for development), believed it was their duty to fund Haughey - precisely so that he could continue to live in the manner to which he had become accustomed and be left to run the country without having to worry about paying the bills.
Life at Abbeville, and the lifestyle that went with it, epitomised what it was all about. And the irony? The irony is that all the time we thought he was loaded, he was actually broke and in hock. Now, a broken man, he has cashed everything in and he really is loaded.
Peter Murtagh is joint author with Joe Joyce of The Boss: Charles J. Haughey in Government, published by Poolbeg Press, 1983, and is Foreign Editor of The Irish Times