On the night of Friday 16 June 1989 the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, went to bed in his north Dublin estate, Abbeville, depressed and downhearted. He had spent the day watching the results of the general election come in with increasing anxiety. When he called the snap election three weeks earlier, Fianna Fáil stood at close to 50 per cent in the polls and Haughey saw an opportunity to finally gain that overall majority which had eluded him since becoming the party’s leader in December 1979. Tiring of what he regarded as an artificial arrangement whereby Fine Gael under Alan Dukes…

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