One of the references pulled was from an article by Eamon Delaney about his sculptor father Edward. He had penned a paragraph praising Haughey’s commitment to the arts and was angry at its removal.
Now Haughey has passed away the paeans are, in true Irish fashion, rolling in. But it is in keeping with his divisive reputation that, while alive, even his party felt unable to accord him recognition for perhaps the one area where it was unquestionably due.
Haughey’s most important contribution to the cultural development of modern Ireland was the tax exemption for artists that he introduced as finance minister in 1969.
Although the scheme is frequently derided as a refuge for ultra-rich rock stars, even today four out of five beneficiaries of it earn less than €50,000 a year. As Haughey once explained to Frederick Forsyth, English tax immigrant and bestselling novelist, he wanted “not so much to bring you bastards in, but to stop the outflow of Irish talent”.
His next significant measure was the establishment of Aosdana, first mooted in 1972 at the funeral of poet Padraic Colum. Born in a Longford workhouse, Colum became a leading figure of the Celtic revival and helped to found the Abbey theatre.
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At his funeral, Haughey, then in the political wilderness, met the writer Anthony Cronin and asked for help with a lecture on public arts policy he was due to deliver at Harvard University.
Recalling the poverty he had seen the likes of Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan endure in the 1950s, Cronin suggested an organisation that funded individual artists instead of institutions and events. Aosdana became a reality in 1981.
In 1988, Haughey established the National Heritage Council and shortly thereafter, the archeological Discovery Programme. In 1991 he opened the Irish Museum of Modern Art at the refurbished Royal Hospital at Kilmainham.
Ireland, until that point, did not have a national venue for the permanent display of contemporary art.
On one level, Haughey’s patronage of the arts sits perfectly with the image he craved and was often accorded: that of a latter-day Medici prince.
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However, if viewed in isolation from his transgressions in other areas, his legacy of cultural development can be seen as genuinely useful and surprisingly un-Napoleonic in its eschewing of grand designs.
There are no public buildings named after him, no libraries, foundations nor wings of universities, just a set of modest institutions that, many years on, quietly continue with the worthwhile tasks they were originally set up to do.