Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (36 page)

This view of Ahern taking control of Dublin Central
from
the party is shared by the long-time party activist Joe Tierney, who says that Ahern was ‘no more a Fianna Fáil man than the man on the moon.’ People appeared at the tribunal to discuss matters relating to the constituency whom he had never heard of, even though he was immersed in the constituency organisation all his life. He said the annual dinners in Kilmainham had nothing to do with Fianna Fáil in the constituency.

It was obvious to anyone who considered the matter that Ahern had to be a tough character to become leader of Fianna Fáil, though it was an aspect of his character that he mostly kept out of public view. By contrast, his attitude towards money was entirely hidden. Ahern created an image of a man who was unusual in his lack of interest in personal wealth. According to Brady, nothing could have been further from the truth.

Ahern would sometimes bed down in the apartment upstairs in St Luke’s before getting the house in Beresford Avenue. According to Brady, it was not without its luxuries.

Ahern was the first person I’d ever seen with underfloor heating in the bathroom—for a man who said he had humble tastes! He said, ‘Take your shoes off and feel it.’ A man who liked to give the view that he sleeps on the couch with an anorak on.

According to Brady, Ahern was very interested in money, and very tight with money. ‘I would describe him as being borderline eccentric when it comes to money and stuff like that.’ St Luke’s was packed with gewgaws that Ahern had been given when performing official functions over the years. A friend of Brady’s once pocketed one, and there was consternation until it was returned.

I remember another incident on St Patrick’s Day. There were four of us: myself, Dominic Dillane [and two other supporters]. We went to the Brian Boru [a pub near Phibsborough] . . . We went in, and I just said, ‘What are you having?’ and he [Ahern] said, ‘No, I’ll stay on my own.’ So I brought drink for the three lads, and he bought his own drink. We had four drinks. So it would have been the sensible thing to do to buy a round each. But he bought himself the individual drink on each of the four occasions. So I just said to myself, coming away, I said to the lads—because we went into town and had a good few drinks, and he went off—I remember saying to the lads, ‘Did you ever meet such a miserable bastard in all your life?’ Here he is, the Taoiseach of the country, and you think he would have said—lookit, all the work we do, knocking on doors—that he would buy us a few drinks, but not a chance. It’s examples like that you remember.

Ahern’s long-time associate Paddy Duffy does not necessarily disagree with Brady’s claim that Ahern was slow to put his hand in his pocket. He said it was something they’d noticed about Charles Haughey, who would never have any money in his pockets. As time went on, Bertie became a little like that as well. ‘A bit of tapping the pocket, though he was obviously well known for buying his pint as well.’ His view on Ahern’s interest in his personal finances is that Ahern would have known about his own financial situation ‘down to the last dot’ at all times. It would be the same in most aspects of his life, he said. ‘He is a man of great precision, and particularly in regard to statistics.’

It became clear during Ahern’s evidence to the Mahon Tribunal that he had a keen interest in his own money. At times it was the tone he used, for instance when referring to not wanting to see his savings being exhausted by paying the legal bills that arose from his separation from his wife. Some observers wondered if Ahern had an interest in money that was similar to that of the disgraced former Assistant City and County Manager, George Redmond, who famously hoarded his money in his garage in boxes.

In September 2007 the Review Group on Higher Remuneration in the Public Sector issued a report that included a recommendation that the Taoiseach’s salary be increased by 14 per cent, to €310,000 from €271,882. However, in December the Government decided that it would defer the implementation of the recommended increases for ministers and the Taoiseach. When Ahern resigned as Taoiseach he became entitled to an annual pension of €111,235.20. As the economic crisis gathered momentum it was decided that serving deputies who were receiving ministerial pensions should accept a cut of 25 per cent. Then, later again, Ahern agreed to forgo his pension while he was a serving
TD
. In December 2010 he announced that he would not be standing in the 2011 general election. Had he not made the announcement until February 2011, his pension entitlements would have been considerably less. In the event, his combined ministerial and
TD
pension entitlements came to approximately €135,000 per annum, or almost €2,600 per week.

Ahern was paid in the region of £300,000 for his memoirs—money he earned tax-free because he made a successful application under the artists’ exemption scheme, this despite the fact that he had the assistance of a ghost writer. (The book did not sell as well as expected, and the publishers, Hutchinson, are believed to have lost heavily.) After his retirement as Taoiseach, Ahern earned an unknown amount from paid speaking engagements at which his fee was of the order of $50,000 per event, and the cost included first-class flights, accommodation in a top hotel and all expenses. It is standard for famous politicians—especially ones involved in historic events, such as the Belfast Agreement—to earn money in this way. However, Ahern did not get the number of company directorships that might have been expected, and one senior figure in the Dublin business world expressed the view privately to the present writer that companies did not want to be associated with him, pending the outcome of the Mahon Tribunal. In this way, Ahern’s engagement with the tribunal not only brought about an end earlier than planned to his career but also hit him hard in the pocket.

Ahern’s interest in, and capacity for, retaining numbers and statistics was another aspect of his character that became apparent during his time in the tribunal’s witness box. At one point, while giving evidence about a dizzying array of transfers between his various bank accounts, he launched into a lengthy list of movements of particular stated amounts, pounds and pence—between different accounts, on stated dates—all without referring to his notes. It was an extraordinary performance. Judge Mahon put down his pen and stared at Ahern, apparently more interested in his ability to rattle off such a list than in the evidence he was giving.

His ability to make people laugh was another aspect of his character that was not generally known. During Ahern’s latter period in office this writer covered a trade mission to Saudi Arabia and Dubai, which Ahern headed. One night the Irish group found itself at a party inside the high walls of a compound in Riyadh. There was a large number of Irish and foreign business people and public servants there, and, despite Saudi Arabia’s strict rules and the presence of armed soldiers on the other side of the wall, the alcohol was flowing. I recall standing at the bar watching people in long robes ordering glasses of Paddy. When Ahern arrived he stood up on a chair and delivered an impromptu address. He was absolutely hilarious and had the crowd—myself included—in stitches. Some people had tears rolling down their cheeks he was so funny.

He repeated the performance a few days later at a reception in a hotel in Dubai. His delivery was astonishingly good. A large part of the humour came from the fact that he was the Taoiseach and he was standing up on a chair talking about the money the people in the room were earning from their exploits, about how he wouldn’t mind having some of it, how he was sure the Revenue Commissioners would be very interested to know about it, and so on. Making money and keeping it was the dominant theme, with the Revenue Commissioners—and, by implication, the state—being seen as adversaries in that enterprise. Shock at the attitude being revealed was a large part of the comic formula.

The trust that many people had in Ahern during most of his political career was attributable to the belief that he had no interest in money or personal enrichment. Events during his ministerial career such as the row over the 1993 tax amnesty, the discussion of tax breaks for the wealthy during the Fianna Fáil-Labour Party coalition and the tribunal’s concerns about tax designation all sparked less suspicion than they might otherwise have done, because people in Leinster House thought that Ahern, unlike Haughey, had no interest in money. Ruairí Quinn, who was in government with Ahern when Ahern was Minister for Finance, said his view that Ahern had no interest in money meant that he tended not to wonder whether Ahern was corrupt.

I never got a sense that he had a hunger for money. The revelations subsequently came as a big surprise to me. The only correlation that came to me was George Redmond. George would eat his lunch out of a drawer. He loved the comfort of having the money. You just don’t know with Bertie what it was. The volume of money that was going through those accounts, when you place it in the context of the times, was enormous, and yet he didn’t seem to be the beneficiary of it or to live a life-style remotely like Haughey—or anybody else, for that matter.

The tribunal sessions changed many people’s views about Ahern in this regard. Instead of being uninterested in money he was in fact very interested in it and hugely impressed by—if not in awe of—those who had a lot of it. Furthermore, he appears to have had a sense of grievance that so many people were getting rich while he, in the Department of the Taoiseach, was merely being paid a few hundred thousand a year. Joan Burton believes this to be so and that it was a view shared by many of those involved in the running of the country during the boom years.

Both Burton and Brady make the point that from early on in his political career Ahern arrived at a point where most of his expenses were covered. He didn’t have to run a car or buy his meals; even socialising and attending sports events could be paid for by others. Both believe that he must have accumulated a vast amount of money. (There is no evidence of his doing anything with it, and he may well have left it in deposit accounts.) Burton says Ahern would not be alone in Leinster House with regard to accumulating money. Miriam Lord thought she noticed in Ahern an interest in luxury that was at odds with his public persona.

Ahern appears to have particularly enjoyed the company of wealthy property developers and builders, many of whom came from modest backgrounds—something that must have influenced his views on the management of the economy, the construction sector, property-based tax breaks and so on. He was less comfortable in the presence of old money or of people who came from privileged backgrounds. There was a view in Leinster House that Ahern resented Fianna Fáil blue-bloods, such as members of the Lenihan and Andrews families, and was less inclined to promote them. In general, many people feel that Ahern suffered from a sense of insecurity and resentment. This may in part explain his enormous ambition and political drive. Lord, who herself came from close to where both Haughey and Ahern grew up, used to get irritated by the inferiority complex she felt that both men had.

I always thought there was something not quite believable about the whole image of the young fella from Dublin, the working-class hero. When he went abroad he always stayed in the best hotels. And he was always very dazzled by those who had money and by people who were in showbiz. For a guy who professed to only like the simple things in life he seemed, from the Galway tent [the hospitality tent at the Galway Races] onwards, to like to be among those who liked the opposite: the trappings of wealth.

I often wondered if that [his awe of people who had money] was an inferiority complex and was that what he had in common with Charlie Haughey. There was a sort of uneasiness with people who didn’t seem to have a problem with their position and with people who had money and seemed at ease with it, and you wondered did he want to be like that, and couldn’t.

The Dublin Fianna Fáil activist Joe Tierney said this was something he raised with Ahern early on in his political career.

I said to him, ‘What’s wrong with you, Bertie, is you are too insecure.’ He was the most insecure man that God ever put on this earth, and this is what drove him all the time. Whatever it was happened to him in his past life, I don’t know.

He added that you could ‘have fifteen conversations with him, and every one of them would be about Bertie.’

Gerald Kenny was struck by the similarities between Haughey and Ahern. They were both driven by a desire for power and were without mercy. He thinks Ahern understood Haughey from early on and modelled himself on him. ‘He would talk about Haughey’s shrewdness, his ability to do deals, his work ethic. Because Ahern was a workaholic, really.’ Both were interested in money, though with Haughey it was used to buy the good things in life and to aggrandise himself. Ahern had different issues with money, but they were both really motivated by power. ‘A lot of people I knew were in the party because they thought that was the best way to run the country and was in the interests of everybody. But once Haughey took over it all began to change. Bertie was a direct continuation of that.’

For Tierney and Kenny, Haughey and Ahern between them brought about the collapse of Fianna Fáil’s dominance in Irish politics. According to Tierney, Haughey allowed corruption to flourish because this protected him from his own corrupt acts. The years of scandal were noticed by the electorate, but the effect was muted until the economy collapsed. Once the economy faltered, however, the result was the party’s miserable performance in the 2011 general election.

On the day of the election, according to Tierney, he received a phone call from the candidate Mary Fitzpatrick that prompted him to go to Stoneybatter, where Ahern was standing on the street close to a polling station hoping that his presence would encourage people to vote for Fitzpatrick’s competitor for party votes in the constituency, Cyprian Brady. Tierney flew into a temper when he saw Ahern’s state car sitting nearby.