Judging Bertie Ahern: ‘We all partied, but he served the drinks’

Pat Leahy

Ahern's first government was his best
Ten years on is an arbitrary but apposite yardstick at which to assess a political career. Given the circumstances in which Bertie Ahern departed from office in 2008, as the country toppled over an economic precipice, it is perhaps the minimum required for any sort of detached and balanced view.

The great achievements of the governments led by Ahern were that they overcame the two great failures of the independent Irish State – one economic, the other political.

Between 1997 and 2008, Ahern’s governments – in which the taoiseach played a primary, pivotal indispensable role – negotiated, implemented and shepherded a peace process in the North that brought to a lasting end decades of sectarian and political violence.

As well as this, Ahern’s Ireland, for the first time, provided economic opportunities and wellbeing not just for her own children but for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of them former emigrants to the UK who were driven out by the failures of previous governments. The first is Ahern’s great monument, assuring him of his place in history. The story of the second is decidedly mixed, and remains contested.

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It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Ahern’s first government was a lot better than his second, or his third. It presided over record-breaking economic growth, yet managed to maintain reasonable control over the public finances; it negotiated the Good Friday agreement; it joined the euro. It was re-elected with a landslide in 2002.

But as the economy slowed in 2002 (a result of 9/11 and the dotcom bust) finance minister Charlie McCreevy slammed the brakes on a pre-election spending splurge, and its political fortunes spluttered for a while.

By 2004, the government was firmly unpopular, the media discourse hostile; the problems of prosperity were building. And yet Ahern walked tall, especially on the European stage, where he used his presidency of the Council in 2004 to smooth the entry of the central and eastern European nations of the former Soviet bloc – 10 of them – into the EU. By any standards this was an historic achievement, and one that has gone almost unnoticed.

Turning points
All careers have a trajectory; most have turning points along the way. The most consequential point for Ahern was in June 2004, when his European triumphs and the fiscal conservatism of McCreevy were rewarded by voters with a crushing defeat in the local and European elections.

Fianna Fáil's vote plummeted and right across Ahern's northside heartland, where Fianna Fáil seats fell to Sinn Féin.

McCreevy was despatched to Brussels, and the taps of public spending, tax reductions and bank lending were turned on full. Fianna Fáil went into the 2007 general election promising to spend more, to tax less, to deliver whatever it was that voters demanded. And they demanded a lot.

The result was not the crash. The crash would have happened anyway. The result was that the crash was worse in Ireland than it was anywhere else – in the public finances, in banking and in the consequences wrought upon the lives of ordinary people.

The hangover
If we all partied, there was no doubt who was serving the drinks. And who was largely responsible for the hangover.

Though tormented by the inquiries of the Mahon tribunal, Ahern was still politically strong enough to win the 2007 general election. Voters decided not that they believed he was being honest about his personal finances, but that this mattered less than his record of stewardship of the economy. The crash caused many of them to change their minds about that.

For all his achievements, he left office under a cloud a year later. His attitude seemed to be not just that he had done nothing wrong, but that it was unfair that he had been caught. It was an unfitting end.

The policy achievements stand as monuments, and the mistakes as rebukes to him. But what is easy to forget at this remove is how he dominated politics, remade it almost, to the extent that politics seemed to revolve around him in his pomp. His political abilities were peerless.

He had great personal charm when he wanted, and the sort of personal magnetism that all natural politicians exude, but few have to such a degree as Ahern. His temperament was exceptional; his work ethic Stakhanovite. Politics and public service were his life.

This complex, contradictory and ultimately unknowable man leaves a mixed political legacy, and sharply divided opinions. But the judgment of history will be more benign than the opprobrium prevalent in the post-crash period.

Living standards, life expectancy, educational attainment, leisure, wealth and opportunity all increased rapidly in the period he led the country. Ireland under Ahern became a much better place. There were great mistakes, but great achievements, too.

Pat Leahy is Political Editor of The Irish Times and author of Showtime: The Inside Story of Fianna Fáil in Power

Geraldine Kennedy

His enduring legacy is the Belfast Agreement
Bertie Ahern's enduring legacy is the Belfast Agreement that was 20 years-old last month. It could not, and would not, have happened without him. He presided over the greatest development in democratic politics since Ireland joined the EU, then the European Economic Community, at the same time as Britain in 1973.

There are many politicians and civil servants, of course, who can claim their place in history, completely justifiably, for the part they played in bringing the peace process to fruition in that accord on Good Friday 1998: Albert Reynolds, John Hume, Gerry Adams, David Trimble, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to mention but a few. And, Seamus Mallon.

But, Ahern, as Taoiseach, possessed a particular skills set to get the Belfast Agreement over the line. He was a born negotiator; he knew the minutiae of the sensitivities and the differences between the parties in Northern Ireland; he could compromise on the national question in a way that only Fianna Fáil could do. He was the right taoiseach in the right place at the right time.

Nothing or nobody can take that away from him, ever.

The second important achievement that will form part of his legacy is a party political one. Ahern was the first politician to be re-elected Taoiseach for a third consecutive term since Éamon de Valera in the 1930s. It could be argued, in fact, that his electoral success in 2007 exceeded that of de Valera because he had to do so without ever having an overall majority for Fianna Fáil.

He also broke another political record on that occasion when he led Fianna Fáil into the first three-party coalition government in its history. He even underpinned that coalition with the Progressive Democrats and the Green Party, with the support of four Independent TDs outside.

Eclipsed by shortcomings?
Against those achievements, enduring though they are, the question is whether they will be eclipsed by his shortcomings when history comes to be written.

Bertie Ahern wasn’t vain. He didn’t lead an extravagant lifestyle. He loved a pint with the lads in the local pub. He was obsessed by politics. But, he craved popularity for all of his actions, and that influenced so many of his policies.

Unlike his successor, Brian Cowen, he was lucky to be taoiseach during the Celtic Tiger years of plenty. The country was awash with money and his style of economic management was to throw money at problems. One could reasonably ask where are the lasting monuments of those years of unsurpassed wealth?

Yet, the state of the economy will not be the determining factor in assessing Bertie Ahern’s legacy.

It will be the controversies surrounding the handling of his personal finances, the digouts from friends, which brought him before the Mahon tribunal. For a politician of such positive achievement, they brought him to an ignominious end.

The flip side of the talent and skill that facilitated such a breakthrough in the political history of the island of Ireland was his absence of judgment, as taoiseach, about his own personal affairs in the end.

Geraldine Kennedy is a former editor and political editor of The Irish Times

Fintan O’Toole

The man now seems like a living fossil
Perhaps, if we are to understand Bertie Ahern's place in history, we must think, not of 2008 when he resigned from office in disgrace or 1998 when the Belfast Agreement gave him his greatest triumph, but of the 19th century.

For he is arguably the last living representative of 19th-century Irish machine politics. This is not an insignificant thing to be – the Irish machine once ran great cities such as New York, Boston and Chicago. But it is a dead end.

The man who once seemed so effortlessly dominant now seems like a living fossil.

If he had indeed been, not in Drumcondra but in South Boston or the Lower East Side, Ahern would have been instantly recognisable. He was what the Irish machine politicians called a ward heeler, the local operative who knows not just every street but every house in every street and every family in every house.

He doles out petty patronage, gets things fixed, gives people the sense that they have a friend who can mediate between them and power. He gets out the vote, reminding people when the time comes that favours must be returned.

And above all he is loyal to the Boss. Even if he is exceptionally talented, he knows his place, which is to serve and to wait, to take only a modest portion of the spoils of graft and hope to catch the eye of the Boss. If all goes well he will in time become the Boss’s political son and inherit his glory.

Ahern did all of this right – too right. He was a ward heeler who couldn’t stop being a ward heeler even when he became the Boss.

Even as taoiseach at a time when Ireland seemed to be the darling little country of the West, the model of post-cold war conflict resolution and hyper-globalised capitalism, he could not refuse an invitation to open an off-licence or present a school prize.

And even when it was in his interests to distance himself from the kleptocratic values of his Boss, Charles Haughey, he could not help accepting the infamous dig-outs.

And so he had the machine politician’s virtues and weaknesses. He was intimate, accessible, a consummate handler, greeter and chatter. He was a great man to have a pint with. He was always Bertie, the name itself perfect in its unthreatening mateyness.

These qualities, moreover, intersected with a moment in history when they could take on an epic significance. They were the qualities of a dealmaker, a fixer. In 1998 there was a deal to be done, a horrible problem to be fixed, and he was the right man at the right time.

But the machine is ultimately mindless. Its sole purpose is to keep itself going, to fuel its motor with the only fuel that powers it, which is power itself.

Ahern had the best opportunity that any Irish leader has ever had to build a decent, just and sustainable kind of prosperity. And he blew it.

When the machine was careering towards the precipice all he knew to do was to pull out the stops and let it rip.

Fintan O'Toole is an Irish Times columnist

Gerard Howlin

A calm workhorse with iron-willed determination
Nothing, not years in government, or being leader of the opposition prepares a politician for the intensity of the taoiseach's office. It is unmatched in any other job. The personality of the incumbent sets a tone.

Bertie Ahern was affable, accessible and behind the public malapropisms completely fluent in private and absolutely driven. Memory is always selective, and far from infallible. Ten years after an era that seemed from the outside to be immutable, my abiding recollection of Bertie Ahern is of a man who never lost his temper or his composure.

There was the famous snap once at Gay Mitchell – he called him a waffler – but that, compared to modern histrionics, is hardly a murmur.

Ministers take turns in the spotlight of crisis but a taoiseach is at the centre of events daily. The requirement of answering to the Dáil several times a week, of taking questions at planned and impromptu press conferences involves detailed knowledge across government. That is not to mention chairing cabinet, and getting behind the opacity of official documents.

Ahern was a meticulous, grinding slogger. Briefcases full of cabinet papers, letters to be read and signed personally, material for cabinet subcommittees and more was dispatched every Friday afternoon to Drumcondra. There were read, signed and annotated by Monday morning. And of course he had personal sources nesting across government, the better to verify official accounts.

Unfailingly polite, he never forgot to say please and thank you. He had an appetite for gratuitous goading from his opponents that was apparently insatiable, and on the stormiest days remained outwardly completely calm.

That composure, was aided by a capacity for compartmentalisation of multiple crises, not just on the same day but in different meeting rooms within the same hour. He could switch back and forth from the relatively trivial, to the politically life-threatening, remembering that the insignificant was important to someone.

Everyone was a voter, probably personally related and possibly allied to many more.

The closest thing to bad temper was silence. Reading a shifting stillness as it moved from concentration on the issue, to incredulity at what was being said was essential training.

If apparent simplicity generally masked a great deal of complexity, one thing was straight forward. Apart from his family, Croke Park and a few pints, work was life.

For the longest-serving taoiseach of the modern era, the hours were relentless and the number of years eventually unequalled since de Valera. Mocked as a ditherer, he could be slow to take decisions and was largely immune to the pressure do anything for the sake of doing something. Once decided, however, things generally stayed decided.

Ahern inherited a traumatised and factionalised party in December 1994. Losing the election of 1997 would have jeopardised his survival. He won so narrowly, few gave much hope initially for the survival of that administration. Nobody gave it the five years his political skills ensured it. That was the first of two full terms.

The 2007 election was apparently destined to be lost, and internally traumatic. But calm, concentration and iron-willed determination was his critical constancy over years. It says something of his endurance in the face of events, that he was taoiseach for longer than the decade that has passed since his departure.

Gerry Howlin, an Irish Examiner columnist, was a government press secretary under Bertie Ahern

Newton Emerson

He never became a hate-figure among unionists
Bertie Ahern is first and last a peace process figure in Northern Ireland. The tarnishing of his legacy in the Republic passed us by – the Mahon tribunal was interminable and the damage to the northern economy from the 2008 financial crisis, although significant, was incomprehensible.

By the time it had wound its way through Nama it felt like a DUP scandal.

Ahern began working on the peace process with Tony Blair in 1996, while both were still in opposition. It is a testament to how the former taoiseach handled the Belfast Agreement negotiations that he never became a hate-figure among unionists.

Blair's communications director Alastair Campbell recalls that Ahern was "basically putting the Sinn Féin position most of the time" – at a time when Sinn Féin had only 15 per cent of the vote.

But in public Ahern avoided nationalist grandstanding. Always fearful of a British sell-out, unionists focused their mistrust on Blair instead. The taoiseach’s principal contribution appeared to be removing articles 2 and 3 from the Irish Constitution – a source of unionist neuralgia for 60 years.

Ahern knew he was swapping a symbolic aspiration to a united Ireland for a practical means of delivering it, and said so openly to republican and nationalist audiences – but that is not how the agreement was portrayed to unionists by anyone, least of all by the Fianna Fáil leader.

At a crucial junction in the negotiations Ahern’s mother died. He was in England when it happened, then came straight to Belfast from her funeral.

At an emotional time for everyone, it touched the whole community and has never been forgotten.

Surprisingly, Ahern seemed more prominent through the 2006 St Andrews agreement. Along with Blair he chaired almost two years of intergovernmental talks, and his hand-holding of the Stormont parties was more in evidence.

Ahern formed a relationship with DUP leader Ian Paisley that looked fonder and more natural than the strange "chuckle brothers" dynamic between Paisley and Martin McGuinness.

The taoiseach arranged gifts and visits linked to the Battle of the Boyne site, producing historic handshakes and remarkable statements from the DUP leader, including a profession from Paisley that he was an Irish man who saw no need for the English to run his affairs.

Ahern maintained his friendship with the entire Paisley family long after the DUP leader stood down and was sidelined by his party – and that was not forgotten either. When Paisley died in 2014, Ahern was one of the few politicians invited to the small private funeral.

Over the past year, the former taoiseach has warmed unionist hearts again with his gleefully forthright comments on Brexit. The Border will be fudged, he has confidently predicted, with technical fixes and blind eyes turned once Brussels and Dublin brinkmanship has run out the clock.

Ahern is no fan of Brexit and may be having a poke at his Fine Gael successor but he does not see EU departure tarnishing the peace process – his legacy in Northern Ireland.

Newton Emerson is an Irish Times columnist

Cliff Taylor

He left the economy cruelly exposed
When Bertie Ahern's term as Taoiseach came to a sudden end 10 years ago, the economic storm clouds were gathering, though no one knew the extent of the terrible collapse that was about to hit. The former taoiseach was correct when he told the Oireachtas banking inquiry in 2015 that nobody could have foreseen it: "If hindsight was foresight I'd be a billionaire," as he put it.

The economy boomed under Bertie and collapsed after he left. No Irish government could have avoided the fallout from the worst international economic collapse in living memory, but when he left office in the summer of 2007, he left an economy that was cruelly exposed.

Our collapse into an EU/IMF bailout was based on the twin towers of our economic policy – budget management and banking oversight – both failing at the same time. The extent of the international collapse meant we could not have escaped a big hit. And, yes, bankers, regulators and speculator played a role, too. But so too did government policy.

Bertie Ahern had some experience of economic crisis. He was minister for labour in Charles Haughey’s 1987 government that grappled with a debt and unemployment crisis and initiated the social partnership model which Ahern clung to for too long. It became part of the national delusion that growth could continue endlessly and overrode warnings from the Department of Finance about budget policy.

As minister for finance Ahern decided, correctly, to recommend to the government that the Irish pound be devalued in early 1992, avoiding serious damage from trying to defend its unsustainable level. And he was taoiseach when the dot.com crisis hit in the early 2000s, requiring a tightening in budget policy.

In the event the dot.com collapse was a temporary hit. When Ahern took office as taoiseach in 1997, the economy was flying. Years of underperformance and a young population, combined with a stable economic situation, were finally leading to a period of “catch-up” with European living standards.

EU funding to boost investment was helping as, crucially, did falling interest rates after we joined the euro.

The unsustainable part of the boom took hold around 2001-2 – the exact point is arguable. By the time Bertie declared in 2006 that the boom times were getting “even more boomer”, annual housing growth had risen to an astonishing 90,000-plus, and both the economy and tax revenues were reliant on this one sector.

By the time Ahern left office, the economic gains were substantial. During his tenure as taoiseach the size of the economy had nearly doubled and the number of people at work had risen from fewer than 1.5 million to more than 2.1 million, an extraordinary increase by international standards.

It was one of the most successful periods in Irish economic history.

And Ahern’s first government, in particular, from 1997 to 2002 oversaw a successful period that included joining the euro and the start of a massive flood of inward migration. But in its latter years, and particularly towards the end of his second administration, the fuse of destruction was lit.

The combination of successive tax cuts and spending increase may had got Fianna Fáil re-elected but left the budget exposed. Ahern’s government also extended property tax reliefs time and again, helping to ramp up the commercial property sector to which lending from the banks was perhaps the most damaging economic exposure.

Ahern has argued that huge gains were made during this term and that few saw the collapse coming. Of course he wished he had done some things differently, he told the banking inquiry. And in some ways history can be a harsh judge, shining a clear light on mistakes not so obvious at the time.

The boom and the bust might both well have happened, in some form, whoever was in office. But as taoiseach during the crucial decade Bertie Ahern cannot claim credit for one and absolve himself of blame from the other.

Ireland could not have escaped the international recession, but the key lesson of the period is surely to realise just how quickly our economic fortunes can turn.

Cliff Taylor is an Irish Times columnist

Miriam Lord

Brazen behaviour can never be fully left behind
The once unsinkable Bertie Ahern scuttled his own career 10 years ago, but a salvage operation may be under way.

So should the good stay interred with the mouldy bones of his tribunal comeuppance? Or do the former taoiseach’s achievements and unique personal qualities merit a reclamation effort?

For example, we could be glad to have the Bert in our corner when the Brexit talks turn nasty. Politically razor-sharp and a gifted negotiator, his patience and experience wouldn’t go amiss. And the insights he gleaned while playing a key role in the Northern Ireland peace process could be put to great use elsewhere in the world.

A decade ago, Bertie finally bowed out as taoiseach after a five-week swansong of self-indulgence and wilful delusion. His lap of honour included addresses to the Joint Houses of Congress in Washington and the British parliament in Westminster, and it ended with a lavish production on the site of the Battle of the Boyne with marquees, marching bands, cannonballs and a star turn from Ian Paisley.

It was so wonderful we almost forgot the reason he had to resign and the reason his legacy is so deeply and indelibly tarnished.

But we don’t forget the shedloads of cash sloshing Bertie Ahern’s way when he was minister for finance. He couldn’t credibly say where it came from, but that didn’t stop the then-taoiseach brazenly insulting everyone’s intelligence from a tribual witness box with risible explanations.

The tribunal didn’t believe him. Nobody did.

But to this day, Bertie brazens it out. Bad judgment.

Back in 2007 when Bertie was still taoiseach, a cocky young Fine Gaeler attacked him in the Dáil over his disgraceful tribunal evidence.

“Sadly, this dark affair will darken the taoiseach’s record in the same way as Tony Blair’s involvement in Iraq or Bill Clinton’s personal scandals darkened theirs. History will judge the Taoiseach as being both ‘devious and cunning’, in the words of his mentor, master and, clearly, role model.”

Stung by the Charlie Haughey reference, Bertie lashed out. “When you hear a new deputy who isn’t a wet day in the place not alone castigating me, but castigating Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, I wish him well. I’d say he’d get an early exit,” he wrote in a newspaper column.

More bad judgment.

That new TD was Leo Varadkar.

On his last day in the Dáil, Bertie quoted the Jesuit priest and writer, Fr John Sullivan: “Take life in instalments. This day now, at least let this be a good day. Be always beginning, let the past go. Now let me do whatever I have the power to do.”

We run into each other now and then.

Bertie, unfailingly affable. Still impossible to dislike. Still impossible to fall out with.

Is it really 10 years since he left?

We can’t fully agree with Fr John and let the past go. Taoisigh should not lie to tribunals and government ministers should not trouser money.

But Bertie, always beginning, still has the power to do good.

And take the next instalment.

Just not in cash.

Miriam Lord is an Irish Times columnist