AFTER their first weekend away as lovers, Charles Haughey didn’t ring Terry Keane for two days. It was 1972, they had stayed at a flat in London and she presumed Haughey was off chasing another woman and would never ring again.
When he did she chided him. “I just thought you’d be so exhausted by our lovemaking that you’d have to rest for two days,” he said.
It was easily the sauciest line in Keane’s lengthy memoir about her affair with Haughey in The Sunday Times seven years ago. It was salacious, but hurtful, and long afterwards she expressed sympathy for the hurt her revelations must have caused to Maureen Haughey, his wife.
Earlier this year she regretted ever having kissed-and-told. “I made a big mistake,” she told Pat Kenny on The Late Late Show. “I regret it to this day.”
So how come she gives the whole affair another outing in a Sunday newspaper today? In 2003 Keane sold a memoir and pictures to be published after Haughey’s death. Two reporters were sent to France to help her compile a 10,000-word narrative. It sat for years awaiting publication. Keane may well have changed her mind about it since.
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What more she has to tell about the 27-year liaison is a mystery. She had already mined the seam exhaustively in this newspaper and on two television programmes. She has admitted Haughey ended their affair in a short phone call in May 1999 after her appearance on The Late Late Show.
Her reasons for “shopping” Haughey changed afterwards. Until then she claimed to have gone public because details of the affair were about to be published in a book by journalist Kevin O’Connor. But later she claimed to have told all because Haughey had, in 1999, tried to return photographs and memorabilia of their time together. She was heartbroken by this betrayal.
For Haughey’s family and supporters, the betrayal is all Keane’s. They will be furious at the former gossip columnist for once more telling stories of her time with “Sweetie”. For Haughey’s former henchmen, the reaction is more likely to be one of embarrassment because, according to Keane, Haughey was brutally frank about colleagues and successors in their private chats, using f-words and expletives about several of them.
After the tribunal revelations of the mid-1990s, Haughey told Keane he felt abandoned and shunned by Bertie Ahern. He apparently said the taoiseach had “no guts, no courage” and had “hung me out to dry”.
Haughey was particularly contemptuous when he saw a photograph of Celia Larkin commiserating with the wife of Hugh O’Flaherty, the Supreme Court judge, after his resignation. He told Keane: “He hasn’t the courage to go himself. He has to send his woman. That’s Bertie.”
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Ahern wasn’t Haughey’s first choice to succeed him — that was Ray MacSharry — but he did want his protégé to contest the 1992 leadership election in Fianna Fail. Ahern didn’t and Haughey saw this as more spinelessness, feeling that the Dublin Central deputy feared a negative public reaction over his relationship with Larkin. He should have gone for it, weathered the storm, Haughey told Keane. Of course, “going for it” was not an option Haughey took himself in affairs of the heart.
Ahern, who delivered the graveside oration last Friday, has been bedevilled by Haughey’s description of him as “the most cunning, the most devious”. He laughs it off. But Keane has said Haughey was definitely not expressing his admiration. How galling for Ahern if, after delivering several paeans to Haughey, he has to read more nasty comments that the former taoiseach made to Keane about him in private.
It is Keane’s description of how Haughey wooed and wined her, however, that most titillates the public and discomfits his family and friends.
Actually, the tales of romantic derring-do only serve to burnish The Boss’s image. When Keane thought she was pregnant with his child, Haughey acted honourably. There was no suggestion that she have an abortion.
“That was the only time I saw him cry. He said ‘Terry, I will do whatever you want’.” When it proved to be a false alarm, he bought her a celebratory gift from Tiffany’s, the upmarket jewellers.
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Many of her stories could as easily be told by Haughey’s admirers. After that first weekend in London, they went to the Mirabelle for lunch. He asked Keane if she liked Roederer Cristal. “Oh yes, my favourite,” she replied.
The champagne was so expensive it caused a kerfuffle in the restaurant. As the waiter brought it to their table, a customer stopped the sommelier and put his hand on the bottle, checking the vintage.
“Who’s that f***** and what is he doing with my champagne?” Haughey demanded. His facade of sophistication had been demolished at a stroke, but Keane thinks she fell in love with him at that moment.
On the night they met, in January 1972, they danced for about an hour. A man staggered to their table and said “Charlie, you’re great, let me pull up a chair.” Believing Keane to be out of earshot, Haughey replied: “Why don’t you just f*** off.” The man replied he’d got six first preferences for Haughey in the last election. Haughey, contemptuously but inimitably, told him what he could do with them.
Those who resent Keane could always console themselves with the thought that Haughey might not have been taoiseach so long were it not for her.
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In February 1982, when Des O’Malley challenged his leadership, Haughey allegedly rang Keane and said he’d had enough and offered to take the gossip columnist to the south of France “to live as man and wife”.
Keane told him that if he resigned as taoiseach, he’d travel to France alone. “If you throw in the towel you’re an ex-taoiseach and I don’t want to have anything to do with an ex-taoiseach. I can’t bear quitters,” she told him. So he stayed.
Later Haughey thanked her, telling Keane she’d done the right thing. She had done the state some service.
He always refused, with typical hauteur, to write his memoirs. “It diminishes a politician,” he told Keane.
So instead we have only hers. Whatever their motivation, they revealed another fascinating side to Haughey that nobody else was ever likely to give us.