Mansergh and Haughey

Sir, – I greatly respect Diarmaid Ferriter. While I do not always agree with his analyses, I admire how he brings his well-informed historical opinions to the public forum rather than merely seeking acclaim among his academic peers.

A case in point was how he recently braved opprobrium with his partial defence in your newspaper of de Valera’s position during the Treaty negotiations, bringing a proverbial ton of bricks down on his head.

But I must disagree with his description in his otherwise very fair assessment of Dr Martin Mansergh (“Mansergh was much more than a mandarin”, Opinion, October 3rd) of the latter’s “loyalty to Charles Haughey” having been “blind” and of his extensive running commentaries (not merely an “introduction”!) to his 1,200-page 1986 collection of Haughey’s speeches, The Spirit of the Nation, as “fawning”.

While Haughey’s numerous Dáil contributions can now be easily accessed thanks to the excellent online Oireachtas record, other significant speeches he made outside that forum, which Dr Mansergh assembled and published in that book, if even just to 1986, and providing their contemporary context, would otherwise be largely lost.

Given the towering figure Haughey was in Irish politics in the latter half of the 20th century – however one may view him – this of itself is an invaluable service.

In dismissing Dr Mansergh’s collection of Haughey’s speeches, Dr Ferriter also claims that Dr Mansergh wrote many of these himself. This is not true. The collection covers Haughey’s career only to 1986, the eve of him becoming taoiseach for that most significant period in Ireland’s fortunes, 1987-92.

I spoke with/interviewed Dr Mansergh at length about six years ago for a PhD thesis I was writing at DCU on that period. He stressed to me that of all the politicians he worked with, Haughey was highly unusual in many ways, not least in that he crafted most of his own speeches, seeking input from officials and advisers only on matters of facts and figures or their views on what he was proposing to say.

The political content of his speeches was entirely his own. Dr Mansergh also only came to his advisory role in 1980 and, as he readily admitted, it was some years before he fully grasped the intricacies of Haughey’s policies in areas other than Anglo-Irish matters. So he was not even in a position to have written “many” of those pre-1987 speeches.

No successor volume to Dr Mansergh’s 1986 collection ever appeared, alas. The post-1992 public atmosphere simply ruled that out. I would, however, direct interested people to an outstanding and measured assessment of Haughey by Dr Mansergh in response to some outrageous comments by Dick Walsh in The Irish Times.

This long letter, titled “Mr Haughey and Thatcherism”, appeared in the March 12th, 1999 edition of your newspaper. – Yours, etc,

PHILIP O’CONNOR,

Howth,

Dublin. (Irish Times, 17.10.25)

Letter 2

Europe’s Downhill Slide!

I always find “coincidences” curious, to say the least. The 2008-12 GFC [Great Financial Crash] and “Euro crisis” began as a US property credit bubble that then ‘infected’ the OECD states and destroyed the credit wealth of numerous states vulnerable in a globalised finance/credit market.  

The US acted decisively to save its banks with Obama’s Federal bailouts, while the Eurozone went into crisis and a protracted economic contraction that continues to today. 

The results?  The US’ financialised economy took off like a rocket while Europe began its long-term decline. 

Just before the GFC, EU GDP had been edging ahead of the US.  Today it is less than half of it, and falling!  The Euro had been catching up on the dollar as a global Reserve Currency, today it’s something less than a quarter of it in scale . . . 

Score? US 1, EU 0 !!! 

The Ukraine proxy war is now finishing off the vassal and disabusing it of any idea of itself as a geopolitical challenger.  The recent humiliation of the EU piglets—sitting meekly on their school stools in front of the Emperor behind his golden Oval Office throne, and having to listen meekly to his meandering harangue said it all .  .  .

Philip O’Connor

Letter 3

Money And Political Control

It’s incredible, and George Orwell would have sighed in recognition, that people now in the UK protesting for peace in the Middle East are labelled “Hamas supporters” and “Hezbollah supporters”, as well, of course, as anybody supporting Palestine Action being labelled as a “terrorist” and being arrested under anti-terrorism laws. As this nonsense is being played out in the public consciousness, we’re being moved closer and closer to an exclusive digital nightmare and total digital slavery. At what stage in the intellectual development of our nation did it become a terrorist offence to sit on the ground in a public space holding a sign claiming support for a pro-Palestinian organisation? When all money is digitalised and programmable, we will literally be told where we can buy, what we can buy, and in what quantities we can buy. That’s the world we are being edged towards and it’s a form of terrorism, but which will never be labelled such. In a present day context, it would be like everybody being shadowed by thugs who could order us not to buy this and not to buy that and the same thugs barring us from shopping in certain places and the same thugs limiting how much of something we could buy. In many cases, the same thugs might casually decide we can’t buy, sell, or work – period. This is a scenario many of us have encountered when having our bank accounts frozen, but luckily still having the ability to utilise physical cash. However, what happens when physical cash doesn’t exist? Hard cash is very hard to control and this is the reason why it’s being phased out by a network of powerful people working on a global level who want total control over us.

Louis Shawcross, Co. Down