Back in the 1970s and 1980s everybody knew that there was a story to be told about Charles Haughey's apparent wealth. Most probably presumed that if it were ever told, it would be a story of smart manoeuvres, shrewdly executed deals and elegant financial mechanisms. Few - other than those who knew the truth, of course - would have expected the sad and sorry tale that has emerged through the McCracken and Moriarty tribunals.
That we expected something more was a measure of the mystique Haughey had created around himself. Sharp, funny, charismatic, he liked to tell people when he was in the political wilderness in the 1970s that he wanted power for what he could do with it. His listeners - supporters and opponents alike - assumed he meant what he could do for the country with it. Perhaps he meant that too. But it also turned out to mean what he could do for himself with it.
He set out to live up to his own bizarre self-image, part ancient Celtic chieftain, part Edwardian aristocrat and part French president with the destiny of a de Gaulle and the pomp of a Mitterrand. He lived out that life for more than 20 years, during which he polarised Irish politics around himself. The basic political question for more than two decades was whether you were for or against Haughey.
Behind the self-image, as we now know, there was a different reality: the endless requirement for more cash, the search for new providers, the threats and the fears of exposure, the tax evasions and illegal offshore accounts. The highlights are already well-known from the tribunals' hearings, but the accumulation of detail set out in Haughey's Millions is devastating, from the small but telling points to the larger picture in which Colm Keena shows how money ebbed and flowed with the currents of Haughey's political career.
Haughey was always seen as a man who was going places. He set up his accountancy firm with Harry Boland in Dublin's Dame Street in 1950 at the age of 25. The following year, they took on their first articled clerk, one Des Traynor, who eventually turned into what Keena describes as a walking bank - indeed a walking offshore bank - as he took in and handed out cash on his perambulations around Dublin.
Haughey's first financial controversy involved Grangemore, his home plus 45 acres at Raheny, which the property developer, Matt Gallagher, suggested he buy in 1959 for £10,000. He sold it to Gallagher - with planning permission for 386 houses - for £204,000 10 years later. He then bought Abbeville and 250 acres at Kinsealy for £145, 977.
The Grangemore deal, highlighted during the 1969 general election, was presumed by many people to be the template for Haughey's financial dealings - buying agricultural land and selling it after rezoning - as well as the financial base from which he subsequently built up his fortune. But those kind of deals did not seem to move fast enough for Haughey.
His financial requirements were pretty awesome, if his spending was anything to go by. The upkeep of Abbeville was clearly expensive - farm and domestic staff were costing him £30,000 a year - and his lifestyle was clearly draining of money if not energy. At the time, his Dβil salary was about £3,500 a year and he appeared to make no profit at all from his 250 acres.
Everything worsened after his dismissal from cabinet due to the 1970 arms crisis. His finances spiralled out of control as his political career appeared to go down the tubes. While he fought back politically, he simply went on spending money, running up a bigger and bigger overdraft with AIB.
That was the start of 10 years of threat and counter-threat between him and the bank. Reading the details of all the meetings, the promises, the evasions and the lies, one assumes that Haughey must have been under ferocious pressure. Yet one suspects that he may even have enjoyed some of the jousting with AIB.
His treatment of the bank was an exercise in basic power. The bank was afraid of him because of his political following and potential political power. He knew it and exploited it to the full. It was the kind of exploitation of power that Haughey always relished, similar to his less than admirable trait of verbally abusing and putting down colleagues and supporters.
No doubt he took pleasure in the changed balance of the relationship once he got back into government in 1977. He no longer went to AIB's Dame Street branch for lectures on being good: the manager there had to try and get an appointment to see him. It got even better when he became Taoiseach at the end of 1979 when the manager (who months earlier had been recommending that AIB bounce his cheques) wrote sycophantically: "I have every faith in your ability to succeed in restoring confidence in this great little nation."
Haughey knew, however, that public disclosure of his £1 million debt to AIB would be politically damaging, to say the least. A man who could not live on a Taoiseach's salary and 250 acres could hardly be the financial wizard that the voters believed they were getting. But he need not have worried.
The story did get out in the early 1980s. Haughey's internal critics within Fianna Fβil suspected it, journalists heard about it - and AIB absolutely and categorically denied there was any truth in it, both on and off the record.
That, in some respects, is one of the most shocking episodes in the whole Haughey saga - that a chancer (to borrow Terry Keane's description of him) will have his lies backed up by supposed pillars of society out of their own fear and greed. If Haughey's ambitions had been politically more sinister than self-aggrandisement, would the likes of AIB also have covered up for him?
And AIB was not alone: over the following decade numerous others helped out Haughey in ways they never wanted publicised, as distinct from those who genuinely and openly supported him politically. Many more pillars of society knew of, colluded in and used Des Traynor's illegal offshore tax evasion schemes.
Interestingly, as Keena points out, the tribunals have failed to uncover all the sources of Haughey's finances. In spite of their extensive legal powers, not to mention their considerable investigative abilities and brain power, there are still significant gaps in the story. Which suggests that there are people around who could, as the phrase goes, assist them with their inquiries.
Anyone who wants to know how a society can be corrupted will find the answers in the details of all the self-serving that make up this book. To blame Haughey for corrupting Irish society is convenient, like putting all the blame on the banks for bogus offshore accounts. He exploited and arguably encouraged a deep level of corruption in Irish society, but he did not create it. He was not responsible either for the thousands of tax evaders who used bogus offshore accounts.
Keena concentrates on the secret that Haughey tried to keep all his political life and does not attempt to reach any overall conclusions about the effects of his money-grabbing on the political and economic development of the country in the last 30 years. He tells his story well and, for the most part, dispassionately, but leaves it to future historians to knit together the goings-on in Haughey's netherworld with the public policies he pursued.
As it recedes into the past, the Haughey era looks more rather than less extraordinary. It already seems a very long time ago and it becomes more difficult to credit the manner in which, literally, the political system revolved around one man's ego. Even to the extent that other parties factored into their decisions how they thought Haughey would react: some decisions were taken on the basis of that criterion alone.
As for his own political decisions, Haughey effectively held the country back by a decade or more; by playing the green card in relation to the North, by treating the public finances during his first government with the same disdain as he used AIB's money, and by standing as a bulwark against social advances throughout the 1980s. However, Haughey and his friends were not solely responsible for the economic disaster that most of the 20th century was in Ireland. One has to look to broader and more deeply entrenched vested interests, like the professions and the public sector, to explain that.
In the end, he showed that he could have done the right thing all along. He finally resolved the economic problems he had done so much to create after others had been unable to do so. He may have taken the first tentative steps to set the Northern peace process on its course. But he also became more deeply mired in his secret world, to the point where he was pocketing the surplus cash he raised for Brian Lenihan's liver transplant.
That was undoubtedly the revelation about Haughey's finances that did him most public damage. The other fatal revelation for him, for his self-image and his political mystique, came at the McCracken tribunal when solicitor Noel Smyth itemised all Haughey's attempts behind the scenes to avoid disclosure of Ben Dunne's contributions.
It shattered the defence that had always served him well in the past, the pretence that he knew nothing about mere details, that he was implicitly above all that and if there was anything amiss it was the fault of minions.
It was the defence he used in the arms trial in 1970, during the phone-tapping controversies of the 1980s, and in scores of lesser crises. It had always worked in the past and its failure on this occasion exposed him as the hands-on politician he had always been and proved conclusively that he was a liar.
His worst nightmare had come true. Ironically, he is now, with his property deal to sell Abbeville for £30 million, a wealthy man.
Joe Joyce was co-author with Peter Murtagh of The Boss: Charles J. Haughey in Government