Seán Doherty's justifications for his actions are valid when you see things from where he saw them, writes John Waters.
If two men had been shot dead in the street by gardaí when Seán Doherty was minister for justice, is it likely that this would have been forgotten after 23 years? But when this happens under the rule of a different minister it disappears from the news agenda in a couple of days.
It all depends on where you stand. God alone knows what it looks like if you don't stand anywhere in particular. It must be surreal for someone under 30 watching or listening to the news since the announcement of the death of Seán Doherty. I'm relieved my daughter is not old enough at nine to be interested because I'd be in dread these past few days of her asking, "What's it all about, Daddy?" Who was this man and what is all the fuss about? Telephone tapping? That sounds dodgy. Dowra? Where's Dowra? Why did these events matter as much as they seem to have? The answer is: Charles Haughey. It was all about Haughey, about the determination of those who had decided he was the political Antichrist to banish him from the political stage, and the resolve of his defenders to prevent this if possible.
We were, at the time Doherty came to prominence in the early 1980s, in the midst of a culture war that had been going on for more than a decade. Though centred on the personality of Charles Haughey, it drew its energy from the struggle to change Ireland from what it had been to what it "should" be.
This struggle was bound up with the "national question". However, it more fundamentally related to the tension between practitioners of the old-style, pejoratively termed clientelist model of politics and a modernising tendency. It demanded that we abandon the parish-pump and embrace the new, technocratic model that required politicians to be legislators first and public representatives second.
But the culture war was not merely about personality, tribal chauvinism or political style: at issue was the very nature of Ireland and the drafting of a commonly agreed version of the society we should become.
All of Seán Doherty's alleged political "sins" derive their gravity from the sense they convey of someone in power operating on his own initiative rather than through the "correct" channels. It's not easy nowadays to suggest why such characterisations might be less than the full truth, but they are.
It's interesting, for example, that many of those who attack Doherty for one episode of telephone tapping have nothing to say about others initiated by different ministers. This is because the objectives of one set of taps is condemned, while that of others is approved of.
The tendency now is to talk of such events in purely legalistic, literal terms, but they are fundamentally about culture, which is all about perspective. The key moral questions related not so much to right and wrong as "which side are you on?" All this tension and drama was perhaps inevitable in a society that had lately moved from domination and dependency to its first baby steps of political and economic independence. The struggle that occurred in Seán Doherty's time was really between those who through fate and circumstances had gleaned the resources to escape the implications of the past and those who had been left behind to make their own way.
The former demanded a new, shiny, exemplary modernity, while the latter perceived themselves as still wrapped in a history they could not so easily brush aside.
It was all a matter of perspective. A lot of the indignation about Doherty, and the demonisation arising from it, was simply a conflating of events into a particular set of meanings, which are, above all, convenient. This happens all the time in politics: events become important less because of moral content than political opportunity. I don't argue that the tapping of the phones of Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy was legally correct or justified. I observe that for some people, including Seán Doherty, it was possible to justify it from where they saw things.
The reason it is difficult to argue with those who continue to excoriate Doherty and Haughey, for both outlook and deed, is not entirely because their moral perspective is irrefutable. It is also because they have won the war and so succeeded in imposing their version of events and morality on the public realm and consciousness. Seán Doherty's claim that he ordered the tapping of the telephones of Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy because cabinet confidentiality was being breached and he wanted to discover who was breaching it is easily dismissed in the culture created for and by the winners as self-serving. And it is literally impossible to argue with this because Doherty ended up on the losing side.
To even try to explain Doherty's actions of personality in the language and logic of the recreated culture is inevitably to attract accusations of defending what is indefensible. But the justifications for his actions offered by Doherty are arguably valid when you see things from where he, and his followers and supporters, saw them. To that extent, the cloud that hung over him was in the eye of the beholder.
There was more to him than all this. The parish pump model of politics that Doherty excelled at is similarly difficult to defend in a culture that has banished its logic and dismissed its positive aspects. But Doherty lived his political life in a consistent philosophical fashion, representing his people from the grass-roots upwards and promoting their interests in government and otherwise.
I would be prepared to listen more attentively to those who have derided him if they had themselves shown the slightest interest over the years in the circumstances of the kind of people he represented so well. The truth is that those who won the culture wars won them for themselves and have yet to prove the model of politics they have imposed works as well for those on the outside or on the fringes of the new society as it does for the winners.
Doherty was someone who brought the full gamut of the human condition to politics. He was warm, intelligent, passionate, compassionate, funny, scary, fearful and a lot of other things as well. There are few left on the political stage who resemble him in any significant way, and this may well be secretly rejoiced in by those who fought on the other side. I'm not so sure the purging of humanity from politics is such a welcome development and so digest the news of Seán's untimely passing with a sadness as grounded in a view of politics as in the loss of his occasional and exuberant friendship.