THIS IS
CHARLIE BIRD
CHARLIE BIRD
WITH KEVIN RAFTER
Gill & Macmillan
To Orla and Neasa
Contents
Cover
Title page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1: Bermuda and Macroom
Chapter 2: Starting Out
Chapter 3: A News Reporter
Chapter 4: Leinster House: Plinth Life
Chapter 5: The Dancing Presidents
Chapter 6: Foreign Travels
Chapter 7: The Political Class
Chapter 8: Meeting with the IRA
Chapter 9: The Colombia Three
Chapter 10: Tragedy: Man-made and Mother Nature
Chapter 11: The National Irish Bank Robbery
Chapter 12: Beverley and the Libel Case
Chapter 13: Where a Little Information Leads
Chapter 14: Hide and Seek
Chapter 15: An Orange Bastard and Abdul the Driver
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Author
About Gill & Macmillan
PROLOGUE
I had a single folded sheet of paper in the inside pocket of my jacket. It was a statement from RTÉ, dated 28 April 2004. I had read it only a few minutes earlier but the consequences sent a cold shudder throughout my entire body. The words written on the page made for depressing reading.
Following the decision in the Supreme Court this morning on the appeal taken by Beverley Cooper Flynn TD, RTÉ stressed that the judgment did not in any way affect the integrity of the stories that led to the case. The organisation expressed disappointment that the Jury’s verdict in this case could not stand because of the trial judge’s failure to address the Jury on the issue of majority voting in accordance with law.
Only one statement had been prepared. Everybody in RTÉ believed Beverley Cooper Flynn was going to win her Supreme Court appeal. The accepted view was that we were going to lose on a legal technicality. As I walked into the entrance hall of the Four Courts in Dublin, I felt as low as I had ever felt in almost a quarter of a century as a news reporter.
It seemed a lifetime ago since a source from the trade union world had given me explosive information showing that one of the country’s leading financial institutions had been actively encouraging its customers to evade their taxes. The name of the Fianna Fáil TD from Mayo was never mentioned nor was she referred to when the initial television reports were broadcast in early 1998. But it did not take long to find out about Cooper Flynn’s promotion of the tax scam during her previous career as a financial advisor with National Irish Bank. She denied the substance of our reports and ultimately took a libel action to the High Court.
The case had been a traumatic time for everybody involved. I hated every day of the trial. I heard terrible things said about me which were totally untrue, things that if said outside the court would in themselves have led to a defamation action. It turned out to be the longest libel case in the history of the state. I lived through the strain of every minute.
I had worked on the NIB investigation with George Lee, RTÉ’s Economics Editor. We were a good team and we had smiled broadly when the jury in the High Court case found in our favour although the celebrations were modest enough. On the evening of the judgment, George and I went for a Chinese meal and talked through the twists and turns of the news investigation and the subsequent trial. The state was millions richer thanks to our having exposed the NIB tax evasion scheme, while customers of the bank had been reimbursed the monies illegally taken from their accounts in false charges and fees. It was all down to good journalism which, I like to think, was what swayed the jury in our direction.
The High Court case was not, however, the end. Despite the jury’s having found against her, Cooper Flynn appealed to the Supreme Court. It had taken six years to get to April 2004 but now a final decision was about to be made by five of the leading judges in the land. Senior management at RTÉ had taken a view on the proceedings in the appeal case. A mistake had been made by the judge in the High Court case; it had nothing to do with the substance of the libel trial but a chink had been opened for Cooper Flynn’s lawyers to exploit. We were going to lose. The station’s statement had been prepared, and the only copy was in my pocket.
RTÉ reiterated its commitment to stand firmly behind the stories and the journalists involved and to defend, in a new trial, its position that none of the broadcasts in the summer of 1998 damaged the reputation of Beverley Cooper Flynn TD.
The prospect of a new trial and the stresses that would bring was just unthinkable. We were back to the beginning of my nightmare. I was going to read part of the statement out on the steps of the Four Courts as Cooper Flynn enjoyed her victory. ‘My colleague George Lee and I stand over the stories on the NIB off-shore scheme which we broke…’
The fact that the Revenue Commissioners had already received €50 million from their investigations into the NIB scheme would matter little. The fact that a jury in the High Court had supported RTÉ’s view that tax evasion was promoted by Beverley Cooper Flynn would also matter little. Despite talk of a technicality deciding the Supreme Court appeal, I knew that a loss was a loss. The political pressure was going to be enormous. There were people in Fianna Fáil, and I suspected in the other parties, who were only waiting to give RTÉ a good kicking. Beverley Cooper Flynn was going to be able to talk about the Supreme Court finding in her favour. And, despite fighting talk, I was unconvinced about the appetite in RTÉ for a re-run of the libel case.
The fallout inside the station had the potential to bring down the shutters on investigative journalism. I feared that I would find myself being pushed sideways. I suspected that the positions of those who fought for the NIB investigation to be broadcast, and who were closely associated with the court battles, could have become very difficult. The investigation was not about only those reporters who were seen in front of the camera. Many other people in RTÉ—especially the station’s Director-General, Director of News and Director of Legal Affairs—had been highly supportive of the investigation. A negative outcome could also have had serious consequences for the careers of these individuals.
It was all too depressing to think about. When the doors opened to the Supreme Court, the time for thinking was over. As I walked into the courtroom, I felt the tiredness in my bones. I was weary of my NIB reports and everything that had emerged from what had been an award-winning news investigation. Most news stories are over and done with when they are broadcast. Television news is very much defined by deadlines. Meet the deadline and then move on to the next story. However, the NIB story was different. It had become a central part of my life for six years. I had lived with the cloud of these legal proceedings hanging over me.
Not only was I tired of NIB, but on that particular morning in the Supreme Court I was also exhausted from travelling. Two days previously, I had been in Bogotá in Colombia. Half a day earlier, I had been in New York. The blue shirt and blue and white tie I was wearing had been purchased in Bloomingdale’s, in a quick run through the New York department store. My transatlantic flight had touched down in Dublin only at breakfast time. There had not been even enough time to drive home to my house in Ashford in County Wicklow. So I had showered and changed in my daughter Neasa’s apartment in central Dublin. I was a bundle of nerves.
I was glad to have both of my daughters alongside me as I walked into the Supreme Court in April 2004. Neasa, a barrister, and Orla, a public relations executive, had grown up with my career in journalism. They were born in the 1970s as I was making my way as a researcher in the current affairs department in RTÉ. During their school years, I was a television news reporter, working long hours and often away for weeks at a time. But they always understood the nature of my job and they have always been interested in what I do for a living. I am lucky as a father in having a good relationship with my two daughters, and I have been fortunate in seeing them both succeed through university and into their respective careers.
I have been lucky in my job. Sometimes I have even stopped and wondered how I got so far. I have reported from all corners of the world, on famines, on earthquakes and on wars. I have interviewed presidents and prime ministers. I have worked on so many big stories and have had my fair share of exclusive reports. But now, five judges in the Supreme Court were about to make a decision that would cast a shadow over everything I had ever done as a news reporter. In a sense, what people thought and said about my career in journalism was going to be defined by the outcome in the Supreme Court in April 2004.
The small courtroom was packed with reporters and lawyers. I knew many of the faces. There were nods of encouragement from several colleagues. My boss, Ed Mulhall, was seated upstairs in the same place he had positioned himself during the entire court case. I hoped it was a lucky seat but the RTÉ statement in my pocket said otherwise.
One of the court officials came over and smiled at me. ‘I’ve reserved seats for you,’ he said. George Lee was at my shoulder. The seats were at the top of the courtroom just across from the legal teams. George walked ahead as I nervously turned to another person in the courtroom whom I knew. ‘How’s this going to go?’ I asked. His response hit me like a bolt of lightning. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he whispered.
I stopped walking and looked straight at this man. ‘What are you saying?’ I asked, now speaking in a hushed voice also.
‘You’ll be all right,’ he again said quietly.
‘With everything?’ I wanted to know.
‘Yes,’ came the reply.
I had taken the RTÉ statement from my inside pocket as I came into the courtroom. I was holding it tightly in my right hand. ‘I won’t need this,’ I thought to myself as I sat in beside a very serious-looking George Lee.
One of the court officials was now putting out various documents on the benches where five judges of the Supreme Court would presently sit. I had a sneak preview of what the judgments were going to conclude. I was finding it difficult to contain my excitement. I had a scoop, and, like a good reporter, I wanted to broadcast the news. I reached over to my colleague and whispered quickly, ‘George, I’ve just been told we’re going to win.’
He looked at me as if I had just arrived from an alien planet. ‘What?’ he asked.
I tipped RTÉ’s solicitor Eamon Kennedy on the shoulder. ‘We’re going to win,’ I said, the smile on my face getting ever wider.
Before another word could be exchanged, the five judges trooped in—Keane, Denham, McGuinness, Geoghegan and Fennelly. Everyone in the courtroom stood up. It’s a cliché, but it was true—there was a hushed silence as Ronan Keane, the Chief Justice, started to talk. The outcome was not clear from his opening words. For those listening in the courtroom, the judgment could still have gone either way—Beverley Cooper Flynn or Charlie Bird? But I was ahead of the crowd on this one. RTÉ was going to have to prepare a new statement.
‘I would dismiss the appeal and affirm the order of the High Court,’ were the final words spoken by the Chief Justice. The other four judges backed this conclusion. We had won and, for the second time in my life—the previous occasion was at the end of the High Court case—I found myself with my arms wrapped around George Lee. We had won. It was over.
Chapter 1
BERMUDA AND MACROOM
Ihave two birth certificates. One records the date of my birth as 4 September 1949, while the other says I was born five days later, on 9 September 1949. I have no idea why I have two birth certificates, or how it’s possible for a person to have two birth certificates. Nevertheless, that’s how it is with me and so I have a choice of birthdays. For what it’s worth, I always celebrate on the ninth.
Bird is an English name. My father’s family was originally from the south of England and settled in Bermuda. As a child, I was told that we were related to a Bird who had been a royal governor somewhere in the Caribbean. Although the story was untrue, it furnished the Birds with a fictitious but distinguished family history. In fairness, it was probably more a case of exaggeration than outright lies. I have in my possession, for example, a small silver dress sword which my grandfather brought with him from Bermuda. His father, my great grandfather, and two brothers left Portsmouth sometime in the 1850s and took up residence in the north west of Bermuda at a place coincidentally called Ireland Island. The name came not from this country, but from an individual whose surname was Ireland. At any rate, the Royal Navy connection with Portsmouth almost certainly accounted for my family’s presence in Bermuda, where there had been an important Royal Navy base since the eighteenth century. One of my great uncles is listed as an Inspector of Machinery in census data from 1881.
My grandfather, Timothy Bird, was born in Bermuda in 1870 and lived there until sometime in the 1880s, after which, for reasons unknown to me, he decided to move to England where he worked as an electrical engineer in Portsmouth, thus completing for the moment the circle which his father and uncles had begun in the previous generation. With the introduction of electric street lighting at the turn of the twentieth century, his services were in considerable demand. It was this that brought him across the Irish Sea to work on a project in Macroom, County Cork. At that time, Macroom was a small country town but it was one of the first places in Ireland to have electric street lighting. My grandfather oversaw the installation of the lights and he never left Macroom. He married a woman from a well-to-do local Catholic family in the mineral-water business. My grandfather ‘took the soup’, in reverse, in order to marry, converting to Catholicism and breaking with the family’s traditional Protestant heritage.
My grandparents ran a hotel in the town, near the railway station at the location known locally as ‘Bird’s corner’. They weren’t wealthy, but by the standards of the early twentieth century they were comfortable and were firmly part of Macroom social life. There’s a stained-glass window in the local church dedicated to my grandfather’s memory. The Birds of Macroom were not an overtly political family. I think they would have been Michael Collins people in terms of their attitude to the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. The historian, John A. Murphy, who hails from Macroom, told me that he remembers my grandmother selling poppies to commemorate the dead of the First World War. He even recalls my grandmother calling to his own family home, and his mother telling my grandmother, ‘I won’t be buying those poppies but you’ve great courage selling them around here.’
My mother’s family—the Murrays—were cattle dealers in County Cork. One of her brothers, Tommie Murray, was a member of the British Army. He was travelling home from Rosslare to Fishguard on the St Patrick in June 1941 when his ship was attacked by German aircraft. She broke in two and sank. My uncle, along with nine other passengers and ten crew members, was killed. He’s buried in Macroom in a grave that is exactly the same as thousands of Second World War graves in the north of France and elsewhere. His headstone recalls that he was a private in the Essex Regiment and that he was 40 years old when he died.
My grandparents had four sons and a daughter. The girl, my aunt, went to live in the United States. The sons, including my father, were boarders at Clongowes Wood College near Dublin. One of them qualified as a doctor and practised in England; another was an engineer with the ESB; the third worked as a bank manager. My father did least well of that generation, spending much of his working life either at sea or in jobs in Dublin which didn’t allow him to fulfil his potential.
There were few jobs and even fewer prospects in Ireland in the late 1930s. Like many of their generation, my parents—Jack Bird and Delia Murray—went to England after they married. They lived in Romford outside London during the Second World War. My mother sometimes told stories about when the aircraft sirens sounded. They used to gather a few precious possessions and run for the local bomb shelter. It must have been very frightening. Their house was bombed twice by the Germans but my parents were unhurt and returned to Ireland before the war was over.
My father had worked as a ship’s engineer before getting a job with the ESB in Dublin. He held that job for many years, but a mixture of economic necessity and his love of life at sea prompted him to take a job as a third engineer with Irish Shipping. The wanderlust kept drawing him back to life at sea, and his absence was just taken for granted in our house when I was growing up. The ships in the fleet were called after different species of Irish trees and at various times my father sailed on the Irish Oak, the Irish Ash and the Irish Pine. There was always great excitement when he came home, bringing with him exotic gifts from far-flung places. I still have a handmade wicker hat which he brought back from China. I also remember getting postcards from all sorts of strange-sounding places, like Port Said and Cape Town.
My parents rented a house in Sandymount where they started to bring up their children. I was the youngest of four boys. There was an eight-year gap between myself and my eldest brother, so I was very much the baby of the family. I was golden brown at birth as my mother had a thyroid problem during the pregnancy which had been treated with iodine. My father thought it appropriate that I be christened Charles Brown Bird although I have always been known as Charlie. For many years, I suspected that my parents’ decision to go with Charles may have had something to do with the fact that the name was fashionable at that time due to the birth of Prince Charles in Britain. However, I have since discovered that the name Charles actually goes back several generations in the Bird family.
We lived in Sandymount until I was around six or seven years old. Ronnie Delany had been a neighbour. For years, I was reminded by my mother that a young Charlie Bird had been pushed around Lee Crescent in Sandymount in his pram by the man who went on to win Olympic gold in the 1,500 metres in Melbourne in 1956. My lasting childhood memories, however, are more associated with Goatstown where my family moved to in the mid-1950s. Goatstown in south County Dublin was still a country village. The housing boom was only just starting. Eden Park, where we lived, was surrounded by countryside. It was a wonderful environment for a growing boy to explore. The old railway line from Bray to Harcourt Street in Dublin city centre ran through nearby Dundrum. This area became my world. I worked my way through the area, field after field. I remember playing soccer on the local streets.
As with all childhoods, there were some intriguing adults to be discovered. Jack O’Donnell, a cobbler, left a lasting impression on me. He worked from a small shop in Drummartin. He spoke Irish, loved children and played the tin whistle and the uileann pipes. I suppose with my father away so much, I looked to Jack as a father figure. He was originally from Bray in County Wicklow and was mad into the GAA. He brought many local children, myself included, to Croke Park to see the famous Kilkenny hurling teams of the time in action. I delivered shoes for Jack all over the Goatstown area. I know I was on an errand for him on the day John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas in November 1963. I also delivered prescriptions for a local chemist shop. I had a variety of part-time jobs from about the age of seven. I think I started out delivering daily newspapers for a Mrs Ryan, an elderly woman who ran a small shop opposite The Goat public house. Right through my teens, I worked after school during the week and also on Saturdays.
The money I earned was always handed over to my mother. She then used to give me something back. It was the same even after I left school and started to earn regular wages. Each week, I gave over my pay packet to my mother. My parents, and in particular my mother, were very strict. That was not unusual in that era as for most people corporal punishment in school and at home was just part of everyday life. I never caused huge problems. I was never in trouble with the gardaí. I never came home drunk or anything like that.
When my father finished at sea, he worked as a welder in Bridgefoot Street. He was a proud man and I’m sure the job hurt his pride and self-esteem. He had come from a family of some means. His brothers had all developed good professional careers. But now, in his sixties, he was coming home in the evenings with blackened hands. Then, total disaster in the form of cancer. He fought a losing battle against the disease in his final years and was only 65 when he died in February 1971. He passed away on decimal day when the country switched to the currency which survived until the introduction of the euro. I wasn’t close to my father—he was away at sea for much of my childhood. To me he was a man who sent postcards from faraway places and, when he did arrive home, brought with him what seemed at the time like quite exotic gifts. I do recall fondly the days when he came back from his travels as I was allowed to miss school but, to be truthful, I didn’t know him very well. I was a child in a different era. My relationship with my own children is totally different and it is only now as they have reached adulthood that I realise what my father and I missed out on.
With my father away so much, my mother was the dominant parental presence in my life. Even as I grew into my teens, my mother remained the traditional strong disciplinarian. I used to go dancing in the Stella House dance hall in Mount Merrion. A very young Van Morrison and his band, Them, were regulars at the Stella House. I was 16 or 17 at the time. If I arrived home late, my mother would lock me out. I was left in the garage to sleep on an old curtain. The severity of this response contributed, along with other things, to the very mixed views I held for many years about my mother, with whom I suppose I did not have a particularly close relationship.
I moved out of home only when I got married in early 1974. After that, my mother lived alone in the house in Goatstown. She never acknowledged the progress I was making in my career, something I grew to resent. There was never any word of praise or encouragement. We never got to confront these issues as she was killed in a road accident in 1983. She was struck while crossing the road outside the Cornelscourt shopping centre. She was in her mid-seventies. The accident happened on a Thursday and she died the following Sunday in Loughlinstown hospital. I remember visiting her in intensive care over that weekend. The hospital was sealed off with armed gardaí on the main entrances. The IRA had attempted to kidnap millionaire businessman Galen Weston. But gardaí were alert to the plan and a gun battle ensued. Several of the kidnappers were injured. Some of them were being treated in the same emergency ward as my mother, who was dying from the injuries she had sustained in the car accident. The hospital was off-limits to all but the relations of critically ill patients. I can still see the look on the faces of the gardaí as I walked along the corridor leading to the emergency room—their expressions said, ‘What’s he doing here?’
My mother was buried in the cemetery in Deansgrange. It brought the family together for probably the last time. My brothers and I were brought up in different times. I know my parents meant well by us and they did their best to give us a start in life. As with my father, I would like to have had a different relationship with my mother. There were things I would like to have discussed with her but sadly we never had the opportunity to have those conversations. I am grateful that I have succeeded in avoiding a similar situation with my own children.
If my school years were anything to go by, I was destined to achieve very little in life. I went to a number of national and secondary schools. I struggled in them all. My parents decided to enrol me in Sandymount High School. It was located near Lansdowne Road and was fee paying. My three brothers were by that stage all working, and, while the fees were just about manageable, it was a big sacrifice for my parents. For that I will always be grateful to them: they struggled to give me the gift of a good education.
The school was multi-denominational and co-educational, which was very unusual in Ireland at that time. This experience left a big impression as many years later I would help with the establishment of the Bray School Project—the country’s second multi-denominational national school. Both my daughters went there, and my wife, Mary, was chairperson of the school’s board of management for many years.
I had never been in a class with girls before and, having no sisters, I was somewhat intimidated at the outset. But I quickly settled in. We often went on ‘mass-mitches’—a whole gang of us used to take off to nearby Herbert Park for an afternoon. The boys used to support the girls at their hockey matches and they used to cheer us on at rugby matches. I played rugby for the school team but not very well. We trained on the back pitches of Lansdowne Road. I only ever scored one try and that was during a match played on pitches where the RTÉ Radio Centre was later built. Actually I think I slipped on the ball as it went over the try line but the score was given!
The school also had an active debating society. I was elected Auditor in my final year and was one of the organisers of the first inter-schools debating society in Dublin. But for all my extra-curricular exploits I was not what might be described as academically skilled. I liked English and history but had a real problem with maths. I was also easily distracted and a bit lazy when it came to school work. I had my part-time jobs and was delivering papers or working in The Goat Bar when I should have been doing my homework. By the time the Leaving Cert had come around for me, I had as good as opted out of school. I remember one teacher saying, ‘Charlie, I think you should give up maths altogether. Is there any chance you could help me get the path outside my house fixed with the contacts you have?’
My lack of academic success was a huge personal disappointment. However, I was not a complete failure in school. I loved the debates in class and I was never shy about contributing to discussions. But I was not cut out for studying and I never performed well in formal examinations, particularly in maths.
I never really considered going to university. I failed my Leaving Cert because I didn’t pass my maths exam. I was hugely disappointed when the results came out. It was an awful day. It wasn’t as if I was the only person in my class not going to university, but most of the people I knew were. It was hard not to look at them and then at myself, and wonder if I had messed up completely. It was not the last time in my life that having missed college affected me like that.
For years, I resented my own poor academic record. I have always regretted not having had the opportunity to go to university. Yet, somehow, this apparent failure has been a great personal motivator. Despite failing my Leaving Cert, I have got to the top of my profession. It has been a long climb and I have worked hard but I have not let missing diplomas or degrees get in my way. If anything, my achievements have probably been built on the back of my earlier failures. I was going to prove that teacher wrong—I may have given up maths but I was never going to give up on making something of myself.
I would love to have studied history or politics if I had gone to university. These were the subjects that I was passionately interested in. Actually my first political act occurred while still a schoolboy in 1966. Ireland was caught up in the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. There was a lot of talk about the men of 1916 and how they had taken the fight to the British in the name of Irish freedom. The leader of the rebellion, Pádraig Pearse, was presented as an Irish hero. I was nearing the end of my second-level education, and I remember being captivated by a classroom discussion about Irish history and what had happened at Easter time, half a century previously. There was great excitement about a military parade planned for O’Connell Street in central Dublin. Flags and bunting were on prominent display across the capital, including Goatstown.
We were not what might be called a political family. Nevertheless, I was obviously attracted by the pomp of the Rising anniversary and found a way to make my own small contribution to the national celebrations. There was a big palm tree in the field behind the garden of our semi-detached house. The tree was probably 60 feet high. I climbed it as far as my 16-year-old legs would safely take me, and I tied a flag on a branch before making my way back down to the garden below. The green, white and orange flag fluttered in the wind. I was chuffed at my achievement. I’m not sure why I did it. I was only a teenager and knew nothing of the world.
Something about the atmosphere generated by the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising definitely rubbed off on me because, in early March 1966, I found myself responding to the destruction of Nelson’s Pillar in O’Connell Street. The 134ft monument—the foundation stone of which was laid in 1808—had been erected in Dublin city centre to commemorate the Battle of Trafalgar. The pillar offered great views over the city skyline and I was one of the tens of thousands who had walked the steps to its viewing gallery. An explosion in the early hours of 8 March 1966 destroyed the upper half of the granite pillar, throwing the statue of Admiral Nelson onto the street. I don’t think the noise was heard out in Goatstown but word quickly spread. When I heard the news, I suggested to one of my schoolfriends, Cathal O’Shea, that we go into town. We gave school a miss that morning and took the bus into the centre of Dublin. It wasn’t clear who was responsible for toppling the pillar although a group of IRA men later admitted to planting the explosives. They saw the pillar as a symbol of Britishness and, in an odd sort of way, believed that destroying it was an appropriate way to celebrate the Easter Rising. I didn’t give too much thought to the reasons why Nelson’s Pillar had been destroyed. Like any young boy of my age I was attracted by the excitement of a massive explosion in central Dublin.
A big crowd had gathered at the top of O’Connell Street. The gardaí were trying to keep order. The stump of the pillar was still in place. There was rubble all over the street and the head of Nelson was lying forlornly on the ground. My initial thought was to take the Admiral’s head. It was a crazy idea. The head was too big and we would have needed a truck to get away with it, not to mind the attention we’d have attracted. So instead I wrapped my arms around Nelson’s head. There was a great deal of humour among the crowd. We filled up our school bags with lumps of rubble. Souvenirs! With little more to do, we decided to return to school. Showing up late was better than not showing up at all. I suspect the class teacher had never been given such an excuse from a pair of mitching pupils. Having surveyed our bags of rubble, however, he decided to excuse the absence.
With my school days coming to an end, I thought about joining the British Navy and got the application forms. I suppose the Bird sea-faring tradition had an influence especially with my father’s career, but my parents ultimately talked me out of it. I also thought about a career in television where my brother Colin was an actor in the first soap series, Tolka Row. Jim Bartley, who in later years became well known as Bella in Fair City, played opposite Colin in Tolka Row. Colin, who was the eldest in the family, later worked as a scriptwriter for RTÉ before becoming press officer for the Industrial Development Authority. He subsequently became a press officer for Justin Keating when he was a government minister in the 1973–77 Fine Gael/Labour coalition.
My brother Frank was the nearest to me in age. Of the four boys in the family, we were also the most alike in appearance. Some of his friends knew him as Cheeko. Another of my brothers was christened Richard Bird although he has always been known as Dickie Bird. A famous family story relates that when Dickie was a teenager, a garda stopped him cycling through Clonskeagh for not having a light on his bike. ‘What’s your name?’ the garda enquired.
‘Dickie Bird,’ my brother responded.
‘Don’t be so cheeky,’ the garda replied as he marched Dickie off to the station in Dundrum where the soon-to-be embarrassed garda eventually realised his error.
Dickie later went to work in the oil business in the Middle East where he stayed for many years.
I was never that close to any of my three brothers. There was a big age difference. They were out working while I was still a kid in school. I do regret that we were not on better terms, but we were never a close-knit family. There was some connection with our relations in Macroom, though, and I remember visiting some cousins in County Cork. Interestingly, the Macroom connection was useful to me later in my career in journalism. In the early 1990s, there was considerable controversy over the sale of state-owned land in Ballsbridge in Dublin. A government-appointed inspector examined the deal. The so-called Telecom affair implicated some of the biggest names in Irish business including the stockbroker, Dermot Desmond.
Desmond was providing a media briefing on the Glackin report on the background to the land deal. The RTÉ news desk asked would I help out Vincent Wall, who was then RTÉ’s business correspondent. I had never met Desmond not to mind talking with him before 1992, but it was obvious that he was intrigued by my presence. By then, I was beginning to get a reputation as someone who turned up when there was trouble. He was more used to dealing with the business and finance reporters who dominated the audience at the briefing. At one stage, Desmond turned and directed a question at me: ‘What the fuck are you doing here? You’re not a business journalist.’ It was said half in jest and half as a question. When the briefing was concluded, Desmond came over to me.
I knew he had a family connected with Macroom so I mentioned my own link. He smiled at me. ‘You’ve got trusting eyes,’ he said. ‘And now I know why—it’s because you’re from Macroom.’ As he left, he gave me his phone number, a precious commodity for a journalist. I rarely covered business stories so I had few enough reasons to call him, but on the few occasions that I have dialled the number over the years, it’s been mainly to discuss Charlie Haughey, who had a close relationship with Desmond from whom he received several sizeable donations. In the late 1980s, Haughey, as leader of Fianna Fáil, championed the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin, an idea pushed by the stockbroker from Macroom.
Several years after my encounter with Desmond over the Glackin Report, I passed him on the street in central Dublin. ‘You must come and have coffee,’ he said, although in fact lunch was eventually arranged. I turned up at Desmond’s offices in the IFSC. His private chef cooked lunch for the two of us. Two very good bottles of wine were consumed. Despite his reputation for coyness, I found Desmond very affable. The conversation was relaxed. The topic of Charles Haughey dominated our conversation. Desmond strongly defended the former Taoiseach. ‘I have never regretted anything I did for him,’ he said. It was late afternoon by the time I bade him farewell. As I left, he said to me, ‘I wouldn’t like this to get into the paper.’ And it never did, until now!
Ben Dunne also had a family connection with Macroom. I approached the former supermarket businessman one time when he was leaving the McCracken Tribunal at Dublin Castle where he had been answering questions about his financial relationship with Charlie Haughey. Making small talk, I mentioned that we both had family connections with the County Cork town. ‘We could be related,’ Dunne ventured, before turning to me with a mischievous smile and adding, ‘I suppose I’ll have to leave you some money in my will.’
Money was not very high up my list when I left school in 1968. Few things were. I had no real sense of what I was going to do to earn a living, not to mind what I was going to do with my life. I laugh now when I say my first job was making perfume. It’s not totally true. Just after I left school, I got a job in the Pond’s factory in Rathgar. I worked alongside one of the qualified chemists.
My job was to load up the chemical mixers. It was a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five existence. I wasn’t very happy there but I got paid at the end of every week so I had some money in my pocket. I stayed at the job for well over a year. In early 1970, I left Pond’s and went to work as a clerical assistant in a company called Stewart Industrial in Dublin city centre. It was a Northern Ireland company which sold drill bits all over the country. I was processing shipping documents.
These jobs left me with some money to spend. I enjoyed my pints of Guinness; I bought a tweed jacket and started to smoke a pipe. For a time, I even changed my name to its Irish-language version. My spare time was increasingly taken up with political involvement. There was an upsurge in left-wing activism in Dublin. It was the same all over Western Europe. I got involved in the Labour Party and with the Young Socialists. These were exciting times. I had just turned 20 years of age and was without a concern in the world. I joined protest marches against the apartheid regime in South Africa and against the Vietnam War. I went to meetings organised by the Dublin Housing Action Committee and marched on protests for better public housing and an end to homelessness.
In January 1970, the all-white South African rugby team arrived in Dublin. The Springboks were touring Britain and Ireland and the opening match of the tour was scheduled for Lansdowne Road. I was one of those on the picket outside the Royal Starlight Hotel in Bray where the Springboks were staying. There was a huge crowd outside the stadium on the afternoon of the match: 10,000 protesters marched from the city centre to Lansdowne Road. I helped to carry a Labour Party banner. Despite the size of the crowd, the demonstration passed off without any serious incidents.
All this activity was for me the equivalent of student politics. I loved every minute of it. Dublin was alive. O’Dwyer’s Pub on Merrion Row was a regular meeting place. On Saturday afternoons, I could be found outside the GPO on O’Connell Street. In a good week, over a hundred people used to gather to listen to various individuals speaking from the back of a milk lorry. I climbed up onto the platform a few times, taking the microphone in my hand and talking for a few minutes.
It was all exciting stuff but I was restless and wanted more from my life. So, early in 1970, I decided it was time to ‘find myself’. I left my job, packed a few belongings into a bag and bought a bus ticket to County Galway. My ultimate destination was Inis Oírr, the smallest of the three Aran Islands, and home at that time to 345 people. I had visited the Aran Islands the previous summer and had fallen in love with Inis Oírr, and, to be honest, I had also found my first love on the island.
Áine O’Connor was a researcher in RTÉ. She would later marry an RTÉ colleague, Larry Masterson, before making her name as a talented television producer. She enjoyed great success with the movie, In the Name of the Father, and was a partner of Gabriel Byrne and later David Duffy of Fair City fame. Tragically, Áine died at 50 years of age, in 1998. She was simply stunning, beautiful and full of life. We knew each other slightly in Dublin from mixing in the same wider circle of friends. But we hit it off on Inis Oírr. And over the next six months or so, we went out together. I was the true romantic—I remember taking her on a date to a Young Socialist meeting! Áine wasn’t overly impressed. It was lovely, but I was way out of my depth!
Some months later, I returned to Inis Oírr. Bizarre, as it may now seem, I had an idea that I would settle down there. The sense of isolation on the island was attractive. The steamer out of Galway, the Naomh Éanna, could not land at Inis Oírr as the harbour was too small, so locals used to come out in currachs to collect goods and people. I had arranged to stay with Orla Knudsen, or Orla the Dane as he was known to all on the island.
A Danish national who had arrived on the island in 1954, Orla was a self-taught weaver who worked from a loom built from driftwood. He was a quiet man who supported his bachelor lifestyle by the sale of ties and colourful cloth. Poetry and painting filled his leisure hours.
Orla lived in a small cottage with two downstairs rooms. I brought a blue tent and pitched it in the attic. What I was at, I am not really sure. I suppose I loved the romantic image of this rural world and had aspirations to follow in the footsteps of Orla the Dane. I wore an Aran sweater, smoked my pipe and talked with Orla about the ways of the world. These were the actions of a young man without any responsibilities.
It was a flight of fantasy—an adventure which lasted for a few months. I eventually bade farewell to Orla and returned home to Dublin. He actually passed away at the end of 1970. I got a job on a construction site in Ringsend. The Glass Bottle factory was being built and I was told, ‘There’s good money on the buildings.’ I spent a couple of months there, and at one stage was responsible for the fact that the gardaí were almost called.
I usually worked with a pneumatic drill, breaking rocks up into smaller pieces. It was a bit like a prison sentence. I was always looking for an excuse to do other work on the site. One morning, I saw my opportunity when the foreman was looking for someone to drive the dumper around the site. ‘I’ll do it,’ I volunteered. What I didn’t tell him was that I had never sat behind the wheel of any vehicle in my entire life. He gave me the keys and I got into the dumper. But as soon as I switched on the ignition, I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t control the damned thing: it just took off on me. I didn’t know how to stop it. So I jumped off the dumper as it sped forward, and watched it turn upside down as it landed in the newly laid foundations of the factory. It was now an ex-dumper, and it was time for Charlie to get another job!
I then spent a few months back working with a subsidiary of Stewart International. But it was a stopgap position as I looked for a job in the media. It seemed a logical step given my huge interest in current affairs and the impression being made on me by the number of people I was meeting from the world of journalism. In fact, through my involvement in politics and various protest groups, I got to meet and mix with a huge number of interesting people. In particular, I remember the Earleys from Clonskeagh. They helped me get the ill-fated building-site job. Mrs Earley was a member of the Labour Party but her husband had aligned himself with the Communist Party. They were friendly with Peadar O’Donnell, the Donegal writer who had fought in the Civil War and was involved in various left-wing struggles in Europe. I joined the Earleys when they went to visit O’Donnell at his house in Drumcondra. He was an old man but I felt I was meeting an iconic figure from Irish history.
I was a member of the Labour Party by the time the 1969 general election was called. My brother Colin had actually been an unsuccessful Labour candidate at the local elections in 1967. It was his only electoral involvement as he then went on to concentrate on his acting career. In what was still largely one-channel land, his presence on TV at the time was a big deal. By 1969, Labour had adopted a radical policy agenda and campaigned under the slogan, ‘The Seventies will be Socialist’. A number of high-profile candidates like Conor Cruise O’Brien, Justin Keating and David Thornley were selected for Labour. I was an active member of the Clonskeagh branch of the party and was given responsibility for the canvass in the area where I lived.
The party did well in Dublin in the 1969 general election but failed to make a significant electoral breakthrough. The following couple of years were dominated by internal debates about the question of a future pre-election coalition with Fine Gael. The issue dominated the party’s national conference in Galway in 1970. I spoke from the podium, introducing myself as ‘Bird, Clonskeagh branch’. The coalition debate was filmed by RTÉ. It was one of the station’s first live colour transmissions. The footage of that very party member with his long hair and youthful enthusiasm is still in the RTÉ archives library.
I was very much aligned with the anti-coalition wing of the party. After the debate in Galway, many delegates adjourned for a drink to a local hotel. A very drunk Frank Cluskey—who at that stage was a Dáil deputy—was involved in the debate about coalition which had continued in the bar area. To a senior party figure like Cluskey, I was simply a nuisance—one of the Young Turks who were causing the Labour leadership such trouble. Cluskey took exception to some remark I made and he took a swing at me.
Noël Browne took a different view. Browne had near iconic status with many on the left because of his time as Health Minister in the 1948–51 inter-party government. Now a member of the Labour Party, Browne was opposed to the idea of a coalition arrangement with Fine Gael. He had spearheaded opposition to the leadership position. Some time later, Browne invited me to lunch with him in Leinster House. I wasn’t particularly close to him but I suppose it was his way of saying thanks for the support I had given him. It was my first time ever in the parliament building. We ate in the members’ restaurant. It’s all changed now but back in the early 1970s, the service in the restaurant was very formal. The waiters were dressed in black and wore white gloves. There were special plates with silver knives and forks.
I suppose I was somewhat in awe of the environment but Browne was not long knocking me back into reality. ‘This place is useful for only one thing, Charlie,’ he said. ‘And that’s swinging out of the chandeliers.’ What exactly he had in mind I don’t know, and I didn’t ask!
I backed Browne at the 1971 Labour Party conference in Cork where the coalition debate was resolved. I again spoke from the platform at a fringe meeting. My photograph was in the newspapers the next day, a fresh-faced Young Turk. Bernadette Devlin, the Westminster MP for Mid-Ulster, was another speaker that day. Eventually the opponents of the leadership strategy led a walk-out from the main conference, and I joined them. The Young Socialists were among the groups leading the opposition within Labour to the idea of coalition with Fine Gael. Peter Graham was the driving force behind the Young Socialists which he had helped establish in 1968 and which was loosely aligned to Labour. With the zeal of an enthusiastic recruit, I made it my business to attend Young Socialist meetings every Wednesday and Saturday. I used to take the bus into town and head for the group’s basement offices off Mountjoy Square to discuss political ideology and plan demonstrations and protests. We were going to change the world.
There were all sorts of groups which joined together at various protests and marches. I remember John Feeney who was involved in a left-wing Catholic organisation. John went on to become a journalist with the Evening Herald newspaper. His brother Kevin was later a senior counsel involved in RTÉ’s legal cases concerning National Irish Bank, and, in early 2006, he became a High Court judge. Another brother, Peter, has held a number of senior positions in RTÉ including the post of editor of the current affairs programme Frontline which I worked on for a time in the late 1970s.
To be honest, this left-wing world had an air of unreality about it. There were all sorts of labels—Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites and Maoists were among those I can now recall. I remember one distinct difference was that we drank in different pubs. The Young Socialists were regarded as Trotskyites. They congregated in O’Dwyer’s pub on Merrion Row, while the so-called Stalinists from the Connolly Youth Movement made themselves at home across the street in O’Donoghue’s. Looking back, I know I could barely have spelt the word Trotsky at that time, not to mind appreciating what the term Trotskyism actually meant.