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Charles Haughey, who has died aged 80, was the most important politician in Ireland in the past 50 years. In his personal corruption, in his close association with the founding of the Provisional IRA in 1970, and in his devising of low-taxation economic policies as Irish prime minister, he was the architect of much of modern Ireland.
He was throughout a careful, charismatic, shrewd planner, as his choice of wife showed: he married the daughter of Sean Lemass, at the time Fianna Fail's most powerful man. His reward was to be made minister for justice when just 36.
However, he was intellectually quite brilliant, and the master of whatever brief he was given. His career seemed to end in 1970 when he was tried - and wrongly acquitted - of arming the IRA. But he fought back from the wilderness, and became Irish prime minister in 1979.
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Charles Haughey, who died today aged 80, made modern Ireland in his image, says kevin myers
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By then, he had created a corrupt relationship with Ireland's business community, who subsidised his extraordinarily lavish lifestyle. Graft became endemic in Irish life as government expenditure ran unchecked - until the International Monetary Fund threatened to move in. This obliged him to implement policies which transformed the Irish economy into Europe's most vibrant.
Sexually promiscuous himself, he nonetheless preached public piety, allying with the Catholic Church on social issues in the 1980s. Finally overthrown when his own ministers turned against him in 1991, his retirement was marred by a series of spectacular revelations about the criminal corruption of his regime. This notwithstanding, Ireland is to give him a state funeral. 
FIRST POSTED JUNE 13, 2006
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