FIVE years after he retired as Irish prime minister, or Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, the most controversial politician in Ireland over the past half-century, is now disgraced, a figure of contempt and a symbol of unutterable sleaze. His entire career has been dedicated to the acquisition of power, money, and a place in the history books. All that beckons now is poverty and maybe even a prison cell as he faces prosecution for receiving $2-million backhanders from a supermarket tycoon and for perjury before the Irish equivalent of a grand jury. It is all, in fact, GUBU.
Conor Cruise O’Brien invented the term GUBU in 1983, after Haughey had called the discovery of a young serial killer hiding in the flat of the government attorney general he had appointed “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented.” The term GUBU stuck, and stayed, and finally outlasted Haughey’s career itself. It will be the epitaph of a man who saw himself as both a Tammany ward-boss and the Soul of the Nation.
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