Ireland: Liffeygate

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Scandal rocks Fianna Fail

A country's onetime Chief Executive is mired in a widening scandal that has already claimed several top aides and threatens to force his own resignation. It is a tale of taps on journalists' phones, of a secret tape recording of a political discussion, apparent conspiracies and controversy involving high-ranking public figures. And then there is dogged investigative reporting and at least one "Deep Throat." Sound familiar? Well, yes, but this is Dublin 1983, not Washington 1973. The central character is former Prime Minister Charles Haughey; the scandal is Liffeygate, after the River Liffey that bisects Ireland's capital city.

Just as Watergate sprang from a bungled burglary in Washington, Liffeygate grew from something insignificant; an after-hours drinking session in a bar in Boyle, a country town 90 miles from Dublin. Last February, police raided the pub and took the names of the people they found drinking there after the legal closing hour of 11 p.m. Normally, summonses would have been issued and small fines imposed.

In March, however, police headquarters dropped the charges without explanation. The original arresting officer, Sergeant Thomas Tully, was bemused—not least because the government had just changed and the local member of parliament, Sean Doherty, had become Minister of Justice. In May, Tully raided the bar again and shortly thereafter was ordered transferred to another district.

None of these events was made public at the time. But last October, Peter Murtagh, a reporter for the Irish Times, talked to Tully, who had successfully appealed his transfer, and published details of the attempted coverup. That produced an anonymous tip that the police, on the orders of Haughey's Fianna Fail government, were tapping the telephones of journalists. Murtagh followed up the story and found that Doherty, in an effort to stem embarrassing reports about internal party squabbles, had placed bugs on the phones of two of Dublin's top political reporters. It was also discovered that Haughey's Deputy Prime Minister, Ray MacSharry, had borrowed a police recorder to tape a private conversation with a Fianna Fail dissident. His aim, it turned out, was not to carry out government business but to uncover an anti-Haughey conspiracy within the party.

These findings appeared in the Irish Times after the Haughey government had lost the general election to Garret FitzGerald's Fine Gael/Labor coalition. Both Doherty and MacSharry quit the Fianna Fail shadow cabinet, two senior police officers resigned, and the government started an investigation of its own. Though Haughey insisted he knows nothing of the shady doings, his political future suddenly seemed endangered.