Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (15 page)

Con Ahern came to Dublin in the 1930s and studied for the religious life for a brief time with the Vincentians, the administrators of All Hallows since 1891. He was assigned to work for a year on the college farm, where his skills from his younger days in Ballyfeard were noted, and in time he left behind his idea of the priesthood and began to work full-time on the farm, eventually becoming farm manager. It was a very large operation, and his responsibilities included the college lands and other lands further north in Co. Dublin. A rift within his family appears to have occurred at this time, with Con Ahern growing resentful that his younger brother David had got possession of the family farm while he had been attending the seminary.

In Bertie Ahern’s memoirs he describes childhood days working and playing on the All Hallows lands, climbing trees, herding cattle and talking to the seminarians, who came from around Ireland and abroad. He describes it as the best playground a boy could ask for. The affection appears genuine.

In 1937 Con Ahern married Julia Hourihane, a young children’s nurse born in 1911 into a struggling rural family from Castledonovan, Co. Cork. The couple had five children: Maurice, Kathleen, Noel, Eileen and Bertie, who was born in September 1951. The farm manager’s job with the college brought with it tenancy of the house in Church Avenue, which the family later purchased. Back when John Hand had bought Drumcondra House there were three large houses in the area: Drumcondra House, Drumcondra Castle and Belvedere House. All became significant Catholic institutions. The castle is now St Joseph’s Centre for the Visually Impaired, and Belvedere is the central residence of St Patrick’s teacher training college. All Hallows was, and is, only one of a range of significant Catholic institutions in the Drumcondra area. From Church Avenue you can look south across the Tolka Valley and see the huge Clonliffe College and the rooftop of the Archbishop’s Palace poking up through the surrounding trees. To the immediate north of All Hallows, up Grace Park Road, is the Hampton Carmelite convent. In his memoirs Bertie Ahern said his favourite day in the liturgical calendar as a boy was Holy Thursday, when the family followed the tradition of visiting seven churches. It was easy to do so in the Drumcondra area.

It is perhaps interesting to note that Ahern’s background involves strong links with republicanism and the Catholic Church, two institutions that predate the state and that are notable for their views on the limited extent of its authority.

The houses in Church Avenue and other surrounding streets are residential islands in a sea of Catholic institutions. Many of them are built on what were church lands, and most of the streets are named after bishops and archbishops of the city, a practice that had ended by the time Ahern’s house in the Beresford estate was being built. Ahern’s modest detached house can be seen clearly from the grounds of All Hallows, and it is built on what were once college grounds worked on by his father. You can even see the rooftop of the conservatory Celia Larkin had built onto the back of the house, using funds the Mahon Tribunal was told had been handed over in cash, in a briefcase, during a meeting in St Luke’s on a weekend in December 1994 when Ahern had been sure he was about to become Taoiseach.

Ahern attended St Patrick’s National School, in the teacher training college complex directly across Drumcondra Road from Church Avenue, and St Aidan’s Christian Brothers’ School in Whitehall, a fifteen-minute walk up Drumcondra Avenue, away from the city. In his memoirs Ahern spends little time on his schooldays, saying simply that he had first hated the school, which was rough, but later came to like it and worked hard. Academically he was an average student. He was interested in sport, history and politics—subjects that featured strongly in the home. His sister Eileen, who spoke in the documentary ‘Bertie’ by Mint Productions, broadcast on
RTE
television in 2008, said that his favourite book was James O’Donnell’s
How Ireland is Governed
, published by the Institute of Public Administration.

During Ahern’s teenage years a neighbour, Noel Booth, who was the chairperson of the local O’Donovan Rossa Cumann of Fianna Fáil, drew him into providing a helping hand during the 1965 general election campaign. He helped put posters up on lampposts, and on polling day shook hands for the first time with Charles Haughey in a Drumcondra polling booth. By the time of the 1969 general election, when he again helped out with the canvass, Ahern was a member of the party and the cumann.

After his Leaving Certificate, and with the help of his sister Eileen, Ahern got a summer job with the Dublin District Milk Board. When an opening came up for an accounts clerk he secured the position and soon afterwards joined the Federated Workers’ Union of Ireland. He studied accountancy at night in Rathmines College, though his memoirs are not clear on whether or not he finished the course. (Later, when he was Taoiseach, he would state on his
CV
that he was an ‘accountant’ and that he had also studied at the London School of Economics. When the
Sunday Tribune
looked into the matter it could find no evidence that he had attended the
LSE
. The short controversy ended without Ahern being able to show that the doubts raised by the paper were unfounded, and the claim that he had studied at the
LSE
was quietly dropped from his
CV
. The matter is not mentioned in Ahern’s memoirs.)

In April 1974, before he had finished his studies in Rathmines, Ahern got a job as an accounts clerk in the Mater Hospital, a twenty-minute walk from his Drumcondra home. There he met Tony Kett, who was to be a lifelong friend and supporter and whom Ahern later appointed to the Seanad. Kett, Ahern and others set up their own soccer club, the All Hamptons, which became the focus of a sporting and social group that often met for drinks in the Cat and Cage and other local pubs after games on a pitch in the All Hallows grounds. As noted by his friends and himself in the ‘Bertie’ documentary, Ahern was interested in both Gaelic games and soccer and was involved with his friends in the running of the All Hallows club. ‘We had hot showers when a lot of League of Ireland teams didn’t,’ he told the documentary-maker, Steve Carson. About his footballing style he said, ‘We were physical guys. We could handle ourselves . . . I didn’t like guys getting past me, so I suppose I got a reputation, but I was never sent off, never got a red card.’ His friends said Ahern had a talent for organisation and wanted to be captain of whatever team he was on. Organisational ability, toughness and determination were to be hallmarks of Ahern and the team of supporters who travelled with him through his political career.

One of those he met through the football club and the social scene that grew around it was Miriam Kelly, a bank clerk who lived with her family in Clonliffe Road. They began to date, became engaged and were married in St Columba’s Church in September 1975, on Ahern’s twenty-fourth birthday. The service was conducted by Father Martin O’Connor, who was known to them through football and the All Hallows grounds. Miriam was twenty-one. In his memoirs Ahern says they went to Malta on their honeymoon and were back just in time for that year’s all-Ireland final. They moved into their new home at 133 Pinebrook Road, Artane, where one of their neighbours was Joe Burke.

Another person who came to know Ahern at about this time was Paddy Duffy. A teacher in the De La Salle primary school in Finglas (which the present writer attended in the 1960s and early 70s), he became involved with the local Erin’s Isle
GAA
club and, through the club, came into contact with the local Fianna Fáil organisation. Duffy is a very well-educated man, notably so for a member of Ahern’s inner circle of supporters. He joined the Christian Brothers as a trainee at the age of twelve and studied in Bray and in Marino teacher training college. On graduation he taught for a while at O’Connell’s
CBS
on the North Circular Road before being sent to Rome to study philosophy and theology in Italian and French. This was 1967–70, a period when, according to Duffy,

Rome was in a ferment. It was the time of the whole renewal of the church begun by Pope John
XXIII
; it was all about bringing the congregations up to date and renewing the faith . . . just after the Second Vatican Congress.

Duffy lived in the Christian Brothers’ monastery in Rome, ‘where they taught the elite’, as the church was going into a period of upheaval that, in the Western world at least, would be marked by a collapse in vocations.

It was wonderful. I had a wonderful time with the brothers . . . There were thirty-two of us in the group, all highly energised in terms of vocation. Twenty-eight of the thirty-two left at that time—it was the beginning of the collapse. The door was open. Over five or six years thousands left—it all happened very quickly.

As a result of his work with Erin’s Isle, Duffy got to know the Fianna Fáil
TD
in Finglas, Jim Tunney, as well as many of the members of the local party organisation.

The apparatchiks ran the local organisation at the time like Opus Dei; that’s how perfect it was at the time. You didn’t sneeze but the organisation knew. At the very first meeting I attended I met Bertie Ahern.

Although he was slightly older than the others, Duffy grew friendly with a group of men in their twenties who were active with the local party machine.

We were all working, which was something in those days. He [Ahern] was working in the Milk Board, later the Mater. He and his mates were mad on soccer, All Hamptons was their club, whereas I was more Gaelic-aligned. There was no social segregation. Things are much more so now. The talk was politics or football, hardly any talk about work, whereas now people are almost immediately into what they are doing in their work situation.

The attitude was there were these very great oak trees of politicians in the political landscape and we were very much the young lads. We thought we knew everything. We talked and we consumed politics . . . The organisation was very old, like a family, well knitted, people had been around for years. Everyone had been vetted, I don’t mean in a communist way, but almost. You held the true faith of Fianna Fáil, or you didn’t. Disloyalty to the party would never be tolerated.

In the 1970s Ahern’s O’Donovan Rossa Cumann was in the Dublin Finglas constituency. When Duffy first met Ahern, the future Taoiseach was a youth delegate for his cumann who attended the monthly meetings of the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair. The latter body selects the constituency’s delegates to the party’s annual ard-fheis and also its candidates in local and general elections. The Dublin Finglas Comhairle Dáil Ceantair meetings were attended by between 100 and 150 people. Duffy says he grew to notice some valuable traits in Ahern.

From the early stages it was clear to me and the other younger lads that Bertie knew and understood the mechanics of the organisation. One of the early signs was that at different comhairle meetings people would be selected to go here and there and everywhere, even as delegates to the ard-fheis, and almost imperceptibly we came to realise that Bertie was very good at working out if something would pass—that he had this innate capacity to understand people and the way they would vote. This is something that I never really got to the bottom of myself. It is a very rare combination of psychological insight and numerical dexterity or adaptability.

Such positions as officer for the comhairle would be fought over ferociously, according to Duffy, because the honour was so great. Over the years he and others noted Ahern’s ability to predict who would get elected. Ahern would learn, sometimes by heart, the rules of the party and the local organisations, and he used this in conjunction with his flair for assessing people.

We all came to understand that Bertie was able to smell the wind . . . Bertie would be able to say what he thought about every one of a hundred delegates, within one or two, which is a very, very special gift, because how you really see into somebody’s soul—I don’t mean in a Freudian way—but how you really know how people are going to blow is very difficult, and a great gift to have.

Duffy’s view is that Ahern was exceptional in his family in some ways. For a start, no-one else spoke with the Dublin accent Ahern had. In addition, Ahern had a pronounced capacity for figures, statistics and rules and for the study of systems and structures as they were applied to human organisation and endeavour. The ability to retain detail, however, was something he shared with his father, who was noticeably good at learning and retaining racing form, the progeny of horses and the records of trainers and jockeys. Ahern was not as interested in horses as he was in football, Duffy says. ‘Even up to today if you asked him who won the all-Ireland cup in 1934 he would be able to tell you. And probably the score. He was very interested in learning all that.’

The multi-seat proportional representation system creates great rivalry not only between candidates from different parties but also—and sometimes even more so—between candidates belonging to the same party. Within constituencies there is a natural desire for the sitting deputy to want to maintain his or her position both within the constituency organisation and in the public eye. The favour or control of a sufficient number of cumainn gives support to the politician at the comhairle level and ensures selection for future elections. Up-and-coming members with ambition and ability are at one and the same time positive portents for the future of the constituency organisation and a potential threat to the position of those at its apex. Such tensions exist in all parties but tend to be particularly acute in Fianna Fáil, because of its passion for winning and holding power and its extraordinary record in doing so.

One of the decisions around which these tensions become focused is the choosing by the constituency of the number of candidates to be put forward at election time. Sometimes the sitting
TD
s will insist that no other candidate be put forward. At other times they and the constituency organisation might believe that it is in their interest to run a new candidate to sweep up votes in particular parts of the constituency where the sitting
TD
s are weak, so that those votes could be transferred when the new candidate was eliminated from the count, or to fend off the threat of a candidate from a rival party. Sometimes head office has a different view from that held by the constituency organisation. The debates over such matters can be heated and prolonged.