Charles Haughey

The granddaughter of Éamon de Valera Charles Haughey was highly critical of Jack Lynch's policy regards the North. Haughey returned to the Cabinet after an absence of seven years as Minister for Health and Social Welfare. During the campaign the controversy over the phone calls made to the Áras an Uachtaráin in 1982 urging the then President not to dissolve the Dáil resurfaced.

Haughey is generally regarded as the dominant Irish politician of his generation as well as the most controversial. He died of prostate cancer in 2006 at the age of eighty.