Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (18 page)

Brady said from early on he noted that Ahern was very ‘eccentric’ about money, and mean. He said that, during one election in the 1980s, when he was still a teenager, he and a friend, Andrew Farrell, spent polling day handing out Ahern leaflets. They had been promised food, but it failed to materialise, and in the afternoon, when they were famished, his friend confronted Ahern near the Gardiner Street polling station and asked for money. Ahern gave them a fiver, and they went and bought some chips and Cokes in nearby Dorset Street. They had some change and were thinking of using it to buy cigarettes, but when they came round the corner they were confronted by Ahern looking for his change.

Farrell now lives in Arizona, but he confirmed the story when we spoke by phone. He said that he and Royston and Royston’s brothers used to hand out leaflets for Ahern at election time but also between elections,

to let people know that Bertie was still around, still looking out for them. I did it to help Royston out and his dad. And we were thinking also that Bertie might get us in somewhere—get us fixed up with a job—though with me personally that never worked out. I moved away. I think the main reason we were doing it was a good job at the end of it, you know. I think that’s why a lot of people do it. I’d say the majority of people hope to get something out of it.

He said the only thing he ever got from Ahern was a
FÁS
job painting the railings around the Stardust Memorial in Coolock.

Farrell confirmed the story about the chips. He said he and the others would begin as early as five in the morning on polling days. They used to call themselves the
BBC
: Bertie’s Breakfast Crew. In his memory it was not until later in the day, maybe back in St Luke’s, that Ahern asked them for the change. He said his picture was taken that day and ended up in a book called
Dubliners
, written by Colm Tóibín and with photographs by Tony O’Shea. (Tony has kindly agreed to his photograph of Farrell being reproduced in this book.)

As has already been noted, the Fianna Fáil premises in Amiens Street were sold in 1989 in circumstances that remain unclear. Joe Tierney, a former elected officer of the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair in Dublin Central who remains active in the constituency, said the sale of Amiens Street occurred without the membership being consulted and without the treasurer knowing what happened to the money that was paid.

It should have been put to the floor for a vote. That’s how it should have been done. And the constituency treasurer should have known what happened to the money. But that never happened.

A sense of Ahern’s ambition and drive, as well as of his take on the nature of a political career, was placed on the record in November 1984 when the front-bench spokesperson on labour attended a party conference in the Gresham Hotel organised for female would-be local election candidates. Haughey also attended, but it was the address from Ahern that was given prominence in Denis Coughlan’s report for the
Irish Times
. ‘Bertie tells
FF
women: sell your soul’, read the headline. His view was fairly grim.

Keep your balance. Keep well in with everybody. Say hello to your local
TD
s and councillors even if you hate them, and you might get nominated at your local convention. You have to walk the line, take the middle ground. You may hate your
TD
s but you must do what is required. We all have to swallow humble pie, and I have been doing it for years, but if you keep at it you can break through and get selected to the convention.

If you do it the other way, you haven’t a chance. And if getting there means selling your soul a little bit, there isn’t a profession in the world where you don’t have to change your principles. If you play it right and keep your balance, you can get to the convention.

Ahern told the women there was a built-in antipathy towards women in Fianna Fáil and expressed the view that the National Executive could do more to ensure that good candidates were selected at local conventions. Once through the convention, all candidates, be they men or women, ‘have to take all the nonsense, the hard talk, the face-to-face and door-to-door criticism, while taking your own stand on particular issues.’ The last point was an alternative take on his frequently expressed view that what he loved most was going out and meeting the people in his constituency, though, in fairness, it may well be that the delivery made the address amusing. Ahern has a great gift for humour.

The Gresham meeting was in preparation for the 1985 local election. Ahern’s breakthrough into national prominence came from his position as a councillor rather than that of a deputy. He first got a seat on Dublin City Council when he replaced Jim Tunney in 1977. He contested and won the 1979 local election and topped the poll. In the 1985 local election the party’s National Executive added him to the ticket after Stafford and others joined forces locally and outvoted Ahern’s selection for the north inner-city ward. Ahern fought a hard battle against Tony Gregory in the campaign and took great pleasure in coming out on top. Fianna Fáil generally did well, with Ahern’s brother Noel being among the new councillors elected. Ahern became the party leader in the council chamber and in 1987 was appointed Lord Mayor of Dublin, succeeding Tunney.

He threw himself into the role and seemed to accept just about every local and national invitation that came into his office. (He had no interest in any foreign engagements that arose, and his Artane neighbour Joe Burke, who had also been elected a councillor and was Ahern’s Deputy Lord Mayor, usually travelled for him.) Ahern began to apply to the citywide, and indeed national, stage the insight and practice he had developed locally. His work rate was phenomenal and was part and parcel of an attitude whereby everything was a form of canvassing. The public took to the image of the somewhat tousle-haired ‘true Dub’ devoted to politics and public life, and from this period on Ahern lived his life in the full glare of the media. He became a public figure, even a political celebrity, with the media focused to an unusual extent on his appearance and character rather than on the substance of his work.

It was during this period, when he was living in the Mansion House, that Miriam Lord of the
Irish Times
began to write about him regularly.

He was so welcoming, so nice, but he was always a bit of a mess, always real dishevelled. Senan Molony wrote a great piece at the time in the
Herald
. He was leaving a gig in the Mansion House, and he looked in the back of the Lord Mayor’s car and it was filthy with crisp packets and old papers and so on, and he wrote a piece, the headline was ‘Poor Old Dirty Bertie’.

As already noted, at about this time Celia Larkin became more involved in the administration of the Ahern machine. What began as a close role as a supporter changed during the period 1982–7 into an intimate relationship, and by the time Ahern moved into the Mansion House his marriage was coming to an end. Ahern’s drive and focus was such that he had developed a life-style for himself in which everything else took a back seat to his political ambition. In his memoirs he wrote that he was torn between continuing his career in politics and accepting an opportunity he said he had to become chief executive of the Mater Private Hospital, while continuing to do freelance tax consultancy work. He saw the choice as one between politics and money. With hindsight, he wrote, it was in fact a choice between politics and family.

Chapter
7  

MINISTER

B
ertie Ahern met Ruairí Quinn in the members’ bar in Leinster House on a night soon after the 1987 general election that brought Haughey and Fianna Fáil back into power. Quinn, who, like Ahern, had been first elected to the Dáil in 1977, was considered by many to be closer to Ahern than most opposition politicians, and indeed closer than most deputies from Ahern’s own party. When Quinn was Minister for Labour during the 1982–7 Government, Ahern had marked him as Fianna Fáil spokesperson on labour. When Ahern was appointed opposition spokesperson Quinn sent him a copy of the briefing document he had been given when he was appointed minister. He felt Ahern had a right to it. The two men worked well together, and in his memoirs Ahern is generous in his praise of Quinn and in the regard he has for him.

According to Quinn, in 1987 they discussed Ahern’s position. Ahern told him that Haughey was thinking of appointing him Minister for Health. ‘I said, “Are you out of your mind? Look at what has to be done. You’ve shadowed labour, you know the territory.”’ Not long afterwards Ahern was appointed Minister for Labour. It was an appointment that greatly suited him and that placed him at the heart of the establishment of the social partnership process—a development recognised by many as a key contributor to the subsequent Irish boom.

After Ahern’s appointment, he and Quinn met at the Coq Hardi restaurant in Ballsbridge, a favourite of Haughey’s in those years, to discuss Ahern’s takeover at the department. Ahern asked if there were any projects in the department that Quinn wanted finished, and Quinn briefed him on the work he had been doing. According to Quinn, Ahern ran with the policies and plans that Quinn had already put in place and initiated very little himself by way of legislative change.

Quinn said in all his dealings with Ahern he found him to be very matter of fact, with ‘no sides’.

I never got any sense from him that he had any great political ideas or any projects he wanted to do. To this day I don’t know what he stands for. I haven’t the slightest idea. He basically seems to me to be the ultimate chameleon.

Because of sharp cutbacks in Government spending overseen by the Minister for Finance, Ray MacSharry, there was a period of intense industrial unrest. Ahern maintained a high profile within Leinster House and outside it as he became associated with the settling of a series of important disputes. Some of his core skills were particularly useful in this regard: his toughness, his ability to make people feel he was sympathetic to them, his capacity for absorbing detail, his concealment of any view or position he himself might have on matters, his patience and his capacity for work. The unions saw him as someone they could do business with.

Ahern developed a reputation as a successful mediator and as someone with a record of successful interventions in seemingly intractable industrial disputes, often carried out in the early hours of the morning. In his memoirs, writing about Northern Ireland, Ahern made the point that participants always prefer agreements if they are arrived at in the hours after midnight. He also took a swipe at employers, who, he said, tended to cave in the minute industrial action was taken and immediately want the Government to settle the dispute.

Pat Rabbitte, a trade union official before he became a full-time politician, believes that the image Ahern created during this period—a friend of the trade unions and a skilled mediator—was just another example of the serial misrepresentation that marked his political career.

He made so much of his trade union contacts which were largely nonexistent. He used to put it about that he was a shop steward for the Workers’ Union of Ireland, prominent in its machinery, a trade unionist first. There was no basis for that. In reality, if he ever held a union card it was only briefly and it was only to have the card. He had a minimal role as an activist, but he used that to develop a very good relationship with the trade unions, especially during the Haughey years. They were the years of the anorak and the long hair. He developed a relationship with, for example, Billy Attley [former
SIPTU
general secretary]. He was never quite so close to the Transport Union, as it was at the time. There were a number of celebrated industrial disputes down those years. People like Des Geraghty will tell you. Take the engineers or the electricians: Bertie always had someone inside who would keep him in touch with how things were going, and he would arrive just as the breakthrough was happening, and he would be there to take the kudos after the all-night session. He had an uncanny knack for that.