Charles Haughey has died at his home in Dublin at the age of 80. The Irish Times today calls him “the dominant and most divisive figure of the past 40 years” in Ireland. If you’ve never heard of Charlie, think of him as something like a triple cross between Charles DeGaulle, Richard Nixon and Huey Long. The Times’ obituary gives an overview of his life. Essays by Dick Walsh, Geraldine Kennedy and Fintan O’Toole span his career from its brilliant beginnings to its scandal-ridden end. Wikipedia also has a good article.

Haughey was the leading figure of a generation of Irish politicians born in the years after the foundation of the state in 1922. They were in the ascendancy in the 1960s and by the end of the 1970s they were running the country. Haughey’s generation wanted a slice of the postwar economic boom, and they partly got it. The economy grew rapidly in the 1960s. Haughey’s career prospered and he became minister for justice, instigating a series of important reforms of the Irish legal code, and then minister for agriculture. He also became a wealthy man very fast—far wealthier, in fact, than anyone on a modest political salary could reasonably be expected to become. He bought a Georgian mansion and an offshore island. His extravagant lifestyle became a topic of conversation, and eventually his political opponents tried to make an issue of it. He brushed them off. His career nearly came to an end in 1970 with the Arms Crisis, but after a decade in the political wilderness he became the leader of Fianna Fáil and, soon after, Taoiseach.

The view of him taken by his supporters is key to understanding Haughey’s position in Irish politics. In a brilliant article written in the early 1980s, my former advisor at UCC, Paddy O’Carroll, made an argument about the importance of local culture to Irish political style. An important figure in the Irish mythos is the cute hoor—the person who can magically bend the rules or circumvent them altogether in order to get what they want. Cute hoors are admired by “sneaking regarders”, those too timid to get involved themselves, but who admire the strokes he pulls to get what he wants. Haughey played that role in Irish politics on a grand scale, to the point where he was subject to a cult of personality. A pliant press helped. By the 1980s, Haughey’s long-term extramarital affair and his ill-gotten personal wealth were open secrets, along with much else about the country that could not be said in public. Joe Joyce and Peter Murtagh’s book, The Boss, a superb account of Haughey’s GUBU government of 1982 is one of the few contemporary pieces of really hard-hitting investigative journalism on Haughey.

A series of legal tribunals in the 1990s took the lid of the whole thing, detailing the bribery and corruption that greased the wheels of Irish politics in the 1980s. Haughey was at the center of it all, of course. Called as a witness in one of these investigations Haughey tried to play the fool, claiming he didn’t remember anything. His own effort to pass himself off as a clueless gobshite, after a lifetime spent burnishing an image of shrewdness and authority, probably did as much to tarnish his legacy as anything the evidence showed.