Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (37 page)

I said, ‘Are you a fucking headcase? Is there something wrong with you? Your fucking state car! There are people in there [O’Devaney Gardens] who haven’t a bit to eat this morning. And the fucking state car!’ I said to him, ‘You fucked up the whole country, you fucked the party up, and you have the state car in the most deprived area in the place.’ He said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

During Ahern’s period as Taoiseach he had an enormous media presence, and he became a type of presidential figure, almost above politics. His press operation was formidable. He avoided serious current-affairs programmes and forums where he could be subjected to any sort of sustained questioning. Reporters were told where he was due to be appearing that day and would assemble—most often outside—to get a few lines from him on the way in. This was particularly important for broadcast reporters. Whatever the issue of the moment was would be put to him, and he would give his prepared response and then go into whatever function he was attending. His response, therefore, would often be the first item on television and radio, as it gave a fresh opening to the broadcasters’ reports. And so he managed to be prominent in the media without being subjected to questioning by it.

Over time his press-handlers developed a system whereby they would ask the reporters beforehand what they were going to ask him so that he could consider his response. Some reporters objected to this, but the broadcast reporters were under pressure to get hourly updates on the stories of the day, and a comment from the Taoiseach was important to them in that regard. There was pressure on them to play ball. According to Lord, who attended many of these ‘doorsteps’, Ahern developed a strong dislike for reporters who asked him hard questions, but he went to great lengths not to show it.

The reporters would ask the agreed questions, and then when they had something in the can they would ask the hard question. Some hacks were more liable to ask the hard questions than others, and it soon became known from sources close to him that he absolutely detested those particular journalists. And yet when he met those journalists it was always a matter of great hilarity that he would go out of his way to be particularly nice to them when everybody knew he hated them. Ursula Halligan [of
TV
3] was a case in point. He hated Ursula. She didn’t care, and he knew that. His unique charm didn’t work.

While Ahern gave the impression of being amiable and relaxed, his press agents were often under great pressure. When he had been questioned in a way he did not like, the press secretary would often get it in the neck afterwards. Likewise, the press secretary might try to lay into the journalist beforehand to try and stop him or her from asking a particularly awkward question. According to Lord, the press secretary ‘would have no compunction about ringing up people and absolutely tearing the head off them, and then you’d meet the boss five minutes later and it was like nothing had ever happened.’

Lord says Ahern spent his Thursdays canvassing around the country and his Fridays canvassing in Dublin. The country visits received huge coverage in the local media. The party press office didn’t want the Dublin media covering the country canvasses, because it didn’t want the local media being told that Ahern’s visit to whatever constituency it might be was a type of
pro forma
event that was being repeated every week. The Dublin media engaged to some extent in a cat-and-mouse game in which they would seek to find out where Ahern was going to be that Thursday and Ahern’s press people would try to keep the venues secret. On occasion there were minor scandals when the Dublin media reported on the speed at which Ahern’s convoys sped along country roads. According to Lord, ‘he was on a permanent canvass around the state, and it worked really well for him—really pissed off the opposition.’ After he resigned, a senior figure in the Cowen Government privately expressed the view that the country was paying dearly for having a Taoiseach who was so heavily involved in near-permanent canvassing.

Ahern had charm, drive, stamina and patience. Brady believed he was vain, liked publicity, liked having his picture in the newspapers, liked being popular. He spent the bulk of his adult life in the glare of the media, and he certainly gave the impression of enjoying it. After his public image was damaged by the revelations about his personal finances, he at times made his dislike of the media plain and lowered his guard to display sulkiness and self-pity. In an extended interview with Ursula Halligan on
TV
3 after he had left office, Ahern articulated a sense of grievance and failed to assert his political achievements. Asked at the end of the interview if it had all been worth it, he said he wasn’t sure.

One can only imagine what it does to a person to be constantly in the public gaze, to have to assert
bonhomie
at all times, to pretend to be optimistic and outgoing and friendly when in fact you are insecure or worried or angry. Some in Leinster House came to dislike Ahern because of the endless succession of friendly greetings, comments about sports events and so on, which were false insofar as he had no real interest in the people he was greeting. However, others appreciated the effort, the short pauses for brief conversations, the ability to remember names. Greg Sparks was once at a race meeting and found himself near Ahern. He introduced his wife and daughter, and during the very brief encounter Ahern remarked to Sparks’s daughter Alannah that she was nothing like her sister Billy. (They have different colour hair.) When Sparks got home he asked Billy if she’d ever met Ahern, and she said she hadn’t. Then she remembered that she’d been at an official function in Na Fianna
GAA
club some months earlier and had been one of many who had shaken Ahern’s hand as he worked the room. She had introduced herself; he had asked if she was related to Greg Sparks, and she had said she was his daughter. That was the extent of the encounter, and months later, during another brief encounter, Ahern had been able to recall her name and to note her sister’s different hair colour.

Miriam Lord had covered Ahern as a reporter since his days in the Mansion House, and she never noticed any change in him over the years, despite the years in power, the civil servants seeking to please him and the fawning backbenchers and councillors hoping for advancement.

I never saw any change in him. Even when he became Taoiseach he was always very accessible to us, always very affable. No matter what you wrote about him he never got annoyed. In fact he’d make a point of seeking you out when you were hiding because of something you’d written; he would go out of his way to find you and be nice to you, to make you feel even worse, which was actually a great trick, because you’d feel less inclined to go hard on him the next time.

Up to the very end, when things got very bad at the tribunal, he remained very accessible, very affable. Even on the day he left government he came over to me, said, ‘Thanks for everything, no hard feelings, you were only doing your job.’ But there was another character there, whom we never got to see.

She pointed out that Ahern’s daughters were bright and attractive children who managed being in the limelight with their famous father with great grace and skill. They were a credit to Ahern as a father.

No-one I spoke to had any suggestion to make as to why Bertie Ahern was such a driven politician or why he wanted to be in politics at all. Pat Rabbitte professed to having been always fascinated by Ahern.

He was single-mindedly focused on politics like nobody I ever encountered before. Everything he did was a political action. The much-vaunted Manchester United fan, the Dubs aficionado—it was all a political action; going to Parnell Park or Croker. I’m not saying he didn’t enjoy seeing the Dubs, but it was a political action.

He believed that for Ahern being in politics, ‘being Bertie and functioning as Bertie’, became a type of addiction. He recalled one Christmas when there was nothing much happening and then Ahern popped up commentating on English soccer for Setanta Sports. ‘Nothing for two days but Bertie in his jumper commenting on the Premiership. They showed it over and over again. How could you compete with that?’

The disclosures that came from the Mahon Tribunal changed people’s view. Ruairí Quinn was shocked, in part because he had never noticed a hunger for money in Ahern. Lord felt angry when she heard the evidence. ‘When you think that someone who was in charge of running the country . . . was accepting money . . . which is what happened from the very start.’

Ahern’s performance in the witness box, and the evidence that emerged from it, drew a picture of a wary man constantly mulling over potential dangers, making preparations for dealing with these dangers should they ever arise. Yet even as he was giving his evidence, it was clear that the man in the witness box had presided over a bubble economy and had overseen a period of economic management so disastrous that western Europe’s star economic performer was about to again become the dunce.

For Pat Rabbitte there is no paradox here, nothing to be explained. Ahern’s wariness was about politics but also about self-protection, and it goes back to the corrosive influence of Haughey. A number of people around Haughey knew what was going on, according to Rabbitte.

Bertie’s wariness in the witness box was a wariness about his own protection. I never recall him demonstrating a similar wariness about where the economy might go, and I rationalise that along the lines that very, very few politicians in Leinster House would have been able to carry around in their stomachs what Bertie Ahern carried around during his period as leader.

He never told the tribunal anything that he wasn’t sure they knew already. That was the way he treated them: tease out what do they know, and, who knows, next weekend it might be different. A challenge in the High Court might be successful, something might happen, one of the beaks might tumble over and die—who knows? He played it right up to the wire, and that’s why he finally became so disorientated during the 2007 election. He felt that it was catching up with him.

But in fact, of course, the people were still prepared to give him absolute licence. As I said—and I came in for a lot of criticism inside the party for saying it—in answer to a question on
TV
one night as to why I didn’t pursue [the issue of Ahern’s finances during the election], when I did pursue it after the original story in the
Irish Times
I lost five points [in the opinion polls] and he gained seven, and I never got them back. People did not like—whatever it is about Irish people—they did not believe Bertie was dishonest, and they didn’t like the
Irish Times
story, and they didn’t like the opposition pursuing it, and they showed that in the poll. And although he was quite crestfallen during the campaign, the Irish people were quite happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. And the Irish people, of course, were also quite happy that if it could maintain our individual prosperity, then a little nod and a wink on the direction of minor corruption in Fianna Fáil was always a price we were happy to pay for and joke about it afterwards in the pub.

Ahern had a phenomenal capacity to retain information. His frenetic canvassing around the country and the endless succession of meetings with politicians, developers, professional experts, business figures, party activists and ordinary members of the public meant that he had an ear to the country like no-one else. Everywhere he went he received praise and was subjected to lobbying. He appears not to have understood the need to listen more closely to critics—in particular to informed critics—than to supporters and to those who are prospering from his policies. Hearing only what you want to hear is a common and human failing, and one to which political minds are particularly susceptible.

For Joan Burton one of the great political tricks Ahern managed was to project himself and his party as the begetter of Irish prosperity and to persuade the public to perceive him as being credible.

That’s a very valuable political asset for a politician to have—an enormous political asset. The opposite is deadly. They can be very good, but they are ruined if no-one finds what they say believable. So that confidence that emerged, that he managed to create, was a tremendous asset.

However, in time, in Burton’s view, he came to believe this myth.

In Sparks’s estimation the economy had lost international competitiveness by the end of Ahern’s first Government. But Ahern and his colleagues were in awe of the economic numbers, the growth that had occurred and the increase in employment. ‘They lost the run of themselves. The figures were phenomenal, and they believed their own propaganda.’ The fact that most Irish people who are not from a farming background are only one or two generations away from the land may form part of the fascination with property that developed then and later. When Irish people began to buy trophy properties abroad, such as the Savoy Hotel in London, it fed into a type of nationalism. ‘But from a government’s point of view you have to step back from the propaganda and be a lot more analytical than that, but there is no evidence that they did.’

Lord believed that Ahern had a well-developed capacity to overlook his own failings and to use whatever material was available to seek advantage. When she agreed to be interviewed for this book, it had just been announced that there would be a commission of inquiry into the collapse of the banking sector. Lord recounted that when Ahern was asked about the idea he had said he would be willing to give evidence. He was a ‘taskmaster’ at giving evidence, he had told the media. In Ahern’s own mind, Lord speculated, he was making a virtue out of his appearances at the tribunal, ignoring the devastating testimony that had emerged. Perhaps he was able to compartmentalise everything he encountered, putting the good bits in one part of his mind and the bad bits in another. ‘The bad box is every so often jettisoned off the end of the pier, and then the good box is opened and there to be used.’ After he had left office this aspect of his character began to get him into trouble when the blatant ignoring of the mistakes he had made began to rile people.