The report of the Tribunal into the corrupt activities of the now deceased former Taoiseach Charles Haughey made quite an impact when it was published in December. This is despite the fact that it is a good ten years since the first revelations emerged about the massive amounts of money that Haughey got from big businessmen.
What made a strong impression was that the report brought together in one publication all the information about the bribery and corruption involving Haughey that had been reported piecemeal over the past ten years and suspected for decades before that. This shows that he had received at least a figure that would approximate €45 million in today’s terms.
Fianna Fáil would like to write off the Report of the Moriarty Tribunal on the corruption of Charles Haughey as an historic curiosity. That is a convenient way of attempting to evade a chilling reality – society today continues to pay a very heavy price for Haughey’s corruption.
Two burning issues confronting this State are the exorbitant cost of a home and acute gridlock in Dublin and other major centres.
The carte blanche for developers and big builders to engage in obscene profiteering in land speculation and house building can be traced to the late 1950s and 1960s when Charles Haughey himself engaged in land speculation under the tutelage of the Gallaghers – big building contractors. This relationship developed into Taca, a fund-raising venture for Fianna Fáil by developers and builders in the 1960s, and that relationship continues to this day.
Proper planning for communities, which should have involved major infrastructure alongside the massive housing development, was fatally compromised. The catastrophic gridlock now a feature of daily life in Dublin and elsewhere directly results from the unrestrained right given to developers to profiteer from house building without being required to provide for efficient public transport systems.
Similarly first time house buyers are also paying a monstrous price for the speculation and profiteering which has been allowed to go on unhindered by the Fianna Fáil/ Progressive Democrat government.
The report published by the Permanent TSB bank and the ERSI last autumn on house prices show the extent of the crisis for young people. In 1996 the average house in Dublin cost €82,000. Ten years later in 2006, it was €384,000 – on average an increase of €30,000 each year for these ten years. Put another way, prices increased each year by a figure equal to what the average industrial wage before tax was in 2005.
The result of this is that young workers now buying a house are shackled for up to 40 years with punishing mortgages. As many are now in their thirties before they can buy, they will still be paying a mortgage into their 70s! Is it any wonder the ruling classes in Ireland and Europe are trying to increase the retirement age. How dare workers think about retiring at 55, 60 or even 65 when they still have to provide ongoing profits for the parasites who were allowed to speculate and profiteer obscenely from one of the most basic human necessities – the need for a home!
The current Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, with the support of the Progressive Democrats, continues to preside over the rip off in the property and housing markets, allowing the speculators the same freedom they had under Haughey and in fact even worse. If Bertie Ahern were capable of being embarrassed about any of this, which isn’t the case, he should have been very red faced when the Tribunal reported in December on the man who had been his patron in the 1970s and 80s.
Eulogising Haughey at his funeral he declared that he "was a patriot to his fingertips". That claim was certainly shattered in December when Judge Moriarty handed down a damming condemnation of Haughey’s greed – and this coming, not from a socialist, but a senior member of the capitalist establishment!
