It looks like it’s taken the former presenter of the terrible ‘Going for Gold’ to actually say what everybody else in the country has been thinking. Choice quotes:
“Mr Haughey was accorded a state funeral. A state funeral. This is the honour you accord to heads of state, who have been truly loved, or men or women who have led you through war, or by their dignity have exemplified all that is best in their nation,” he told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.
“Charles Haughey exemplified all that was, thanks to him, worst in the Irish nation: trickery; smoothness; conceit; cronyism and downright abuse of power.”
“His rules were his own. His vanity breathtaking, his dismissal of enemies, either real or imagined, vicious.”
“To have accorded this man a state funeral is nothing short of a disgrace and one that makes me feel ashamed,” he wrote.
Haughey’s legacy would one day “hopefully” evaporate but the myths about him were spectacular.
“This is what makes the honour of a state funeral so repellent. From here on, such an honour is permanently devalued,” Kelly wrote.
All this has made me think about what really annoys me about Fianna Fail and their supporters. They call conveniently forget that Fine Gael and Labour spent at good chunk of the ’80s trying to fix Haughey and Fianna Fail’s mess, and then Dukes basically sacrificed the party with the Tallagh Strategy so as FF would continue with the previous coalition’s economic policies.
But admitting that would require a degree of humility alien to FF.