Doing some (dis)service to the State

I am not sure it was entirely appropiate for Bertie Ahern to give the graveside oration the the funeral of C. J. Haughey. While CJ was most certainly entitled to a State Funeral as a former Taoiseach, it might have been better to allow a former colleague to give the oration.

Since Haughey died last week, there have been two main strads in the debate. One was that he was a wonderful man, who did many good things, and was never actually caught doing anything wrong as Taoiseach, apart from living on political donations on which he neglected to pay tax. The other theme was that, since he was a crook, he shoud not get a state funeral.

Now former Taoisaigh are, as of right, entitled to a state funeral. Since he held the office because a sizable proportion of us voted for him, even though we ‘all knew’ he was crooked, it is hardly fair to deny them man his due in death. Carping about the state funeral is petty.

The devil is in the details though, and, as far as I know, there is no requirement that the oration be given by the Taoiseach. Charlie did do a great deal of good in many of the ministerial offices he held. Many of the measures he introduced were imaginative and did add to the quality of life in this country. It is right that an objective assessment of him give fair credit for those measures. However, as Taoiseach, he did live off political donations on which tax was not paid at the time – he did defraud the tax man and it took some effort on the part of the state to uncover this and effect a settlement. Additionally, while he never took any visible political action which might be seen as a payback to his benefactors for the money he got, there were things which he could have done while in power which would have benefitted the state, and the poor, at the expense of the people who funded his lifestyle. A great many loopholes in the tax laws were not closed off, and abuses of the planning laws were not stopped. He was in a poisiotn to know about these, and could have acted on them, but did not. For those sins of omission, it would have better if the current Taoiseach had chosen to play a less prominent role in the funeral of his political mentor.