A FRESH insight into the character of former taoiseach Bertie Ahern and his attitude to money has emerged in a new book to be published next week.
In it, the current Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn says that politicians across party lines tended to believe, wrongly, that for most of his career Mr Ahern had no interest in money.
Mr Quinn says this perception influenced his own attitude to Mr Ahern as minister for finance during the Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition from 1992 to 1994 on such issues as the 1993 tax amnesty, tax designation concerns and a capital gains tax proposal that would have favoured the very wealthy.
"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 [former Dublin City and County Council assistant manager]. 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." Mr Quinn's comments are contained in the book Bertie: Power and Money, by Irish Timesjournalist Colm Keena which will be published next week.
Royston Brady, the former Fianna Fáil lord mayor of Dublin, says Mr Ahern always had an intense interest in accumulating money. “I would describe him as being borderline eccentric when it comes to money and stuff like that.”
A former Fianna Fáil party activist in Dublin Central, Gerald Kenny, was struck by the similarities between Mr Ahern and Charles Haughey, saying both were driven by a desire for power and were without mercy.
He believes Mr Ahern understood Mr Haughey from early on and modelled himself on him. Both were interested in money, although Mr Haughey used it to buy the good things in life and to aggrandise himself.
“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,” said Mr Kenny.
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin says he believed Mr Ahern was motivated by a genuine desire to serve the public.
Mr Martin says the former taoiseach had a fierce sense of history, and a fierce sense of old republican values that he got from his late father.
He added Mr Ahern had an interest in looking out for people and had many very honourable traits. The evidence that came out at the Mahon tribunal about his personal finances was very disappointing. “I don’t know what’s behind it,” he said.
Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte says no politician since Daniel O’Connell had as much interaction with the Irish people as Mr Ahern but his habitual wariness and worry were more focused on his own personal situation “and on the financial skeletons in his personal cupboards” than it was on dangers to the wellbeing of the State.
Long-time adviser to Mr Ahern Paddy Duffy says that from the earliest days of the former taoiseach’s career it was recognised that he had an unusual ability to understand how organisations worked and how people would vote on particular issues.
He says Mr Ahern and the people who gathered around him in the late 1970s and early 1980s were driven by a broad, deep-seated Irish Christian democratic viewpoint.
“Catholic, not socialist, but doing the right thing in terms of promoting equality of opportunity and fairness. Bertie would have had that, and we all would have had that from our own background. My own feeling is that Bertie actually developed his views as he did things.”
Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton says the idea of public-sector reform “collapsed” when Mr Ahern came to power because his governments used the public service as part of its electoral strategies. Mr Ahern’s instinctive response when confronted with any difficulty, according to Mr Bruton, was to pretend it was not there and, if that did not work, to throw public money at it.
The interviews for the book were conducted prior to the general election in February.
