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# Flashback
Check out this short video of Charlie Haughey telling us 'we're living way beyond our means'
“I wish to talk to you this evening about the state of the nation’s affairs and the picture I have to paint is not, unfortunately, a very cheerful one.”
YOU MAY REMEMBER or be familiar with the above video which is the opening 90 seconds of a famous address by Charlie Haughey to the Irish people in January 1980.
Having come to power just a month earlier, Haughey was inheriting a country sinking into a deep economic crisis.
The message he had to deliver was “not, unfortunately, a very cheerful one” as he outlined the stark reality facing government and a country spending more than it was taking in through taxation (Sound familiar?).
In fact, while he identified the problem Haughey’s government ended up increasing public spending in the following year before calling an election in 1981, a decision which saw him go into opposition for a brief period.
The Fianna Fáil leader would be in and out of the Department of the Taoiseach again throughout the 1980s before stepping down for good in 1992 under a storm of well-documented controversy. He died in 2006.
Read: Was Charlie Haughey really beaten with an iron bar on the morning of the Budget?
Read: Haughey family behind website to provide ‘factual information’ about Charlie’s career
