During the presidential election of 1990, the campaign of Fianna Fáil candidate and front-runner Brian Lenihan was plunged into crisis. It had emerged there was a recording of him admitting to making phone calls to Áras an Uachtaráin in 1982 to try to persuade president Patrick Hillery not to dissolve the Dáil after the Fine Gael-Labour coalition had lost a budget vote. The idea was that his party leader Charles Haughey could form an alternative government without a general election.
Lenihan was now denying he had made the calls. As the heat intensified, Fianna Fáil (FF) went into battle mode. Following a television performance that exposed the conflicting accounts, Lenihan travelled to Cork and recalled: “It was almost as if the tape business had galvanised Fianna F
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