Good morning, John. Did you know there’s a fellah hiding in your kitchen cabinet who wants you to “guess which footballer’s been caught with his pants down again?”
As John and his unnamed female partner go about the business of preparing breakfast, he opens the pantry door. Inside, sitting at a little table drinking a cup of tea is a scrunched-up little man in a suit and tie, squeezed between the carrots and the biscuits. Bertie Ahern, for it is he, says: “Never thought I’d end up here, but I’ve the latest on today’s big match.”
He never thought he’d end up there, making an eejit of himself as a shill for Rupert Murdoch’s rag The News of the World – a paper so rotten that Murdoch had to kill it off in 2011. And it’s easy to imagine the creative types in the ad agency brainstorming the idea: “Nah, he’d never do it, would he? I mean it’s not so long ago since he was taoiseach, right?” and “Well, he does like a dig-out…”
The weird thing about the ad is that it ends up as a micro horror movie. After John closes the door on Bertie, he looks queasy. He turns to his partner and asks: “Love, will you finish the breakfast?” The subliminal message from the ad-makers seems to be: even this poor guy couldn’t stomach the sight of such self-abasement.
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Yet it seems that a lot of people in Fianna Fáil think it’s now time to take Bertie out of his pantry and put him into the Áras. According to Mary Regan, who has been canvassing the views of the party’s backbenchers for the Sunday Independent, “‘he would walk it’ is the unanimous view”. One TD told her that “people have moved on from the harsh view of wanting to hang him for everything. It’s now recognised that the financial crash was more of a global event”.
The presidency is ultimately about one thing: national dignity. We are (in principle) a republic of equals. We don’t have a monarchy, titles or an aristocracy. But we have one office whose holder has the job of embodying the notion that we can hold our heads up, not with arrogance or vanity but with self-respect.
And every holder of the office has done that. Some have been dull, but all have been dignified. It is worth remembering that one of them, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, felt he had to resign in 1976 when he was subjected to a loutish attack by Paddy Donegan, then the minister for defence. Ó Dálaigh did so, as he put it, “to protect the dignity and independence of the presidency as an institution”.
The opposite of national dignity is national humiliation. The News of the World ad resonated because it dramatised the way Ahern had belittled public office and degraded the State. It is tempting actually to want Fianna Fáil to nominate him for the presidency because we do perhaps need a sharp reminder of what collective shame feels like.
If the TD who thinks that “people have moved on” into amnesia is correct, it might be no bad thing to recollect what it is we are supposed to have moved on from.
A Bertie campaign would be a live episode of television’s Reeling in the Years and what would be reeled in would look like a mass fish-kill on the Blackwater.
What we might be forced to relive is a double indignity. There is the ignominy of a minister for finance who lined his own pockets with donations from wealthy individuals. In explaining to the Mahon tribunal why he gave Ahern money, one businessman, Barry English, encapsulated the culture in which this happened: “I work in the construction industry and my clients are developers and the like and I don’t think it does me any harm to be known as a friend of Bertie Ahern’s.” The other side of this equation was equally well summed up in English’s recollection of what Ahern said to him when he handed over the money: “Thanks very much and I’ll sort you out.”
Crash, part one: Brian Cowen and the unravelling of Ireland
If citizens don’t have their stomach turned like John’s in the News of the World ad by the memory of this denigration of public office, then they will surely remember their own humiliation. Bertie stood down before the crash of 2008, but he was more responsible for it than anyone else. This was not just because of his idolisation of the bankers (especially ‘Seanie’ Fitzpatrick of Anglo Irish Bank) and developers who shaped the disaster. (One of the nightmarish flashbacks of a Bertie campaign would be his special guest in the palace of Westminster when he addressed a joint session of the UK parliament in 2007: the egregious developer Seán Dunne.)
The whole disaster (now, apparently, to be whitewashed as a “global event” for which no one in Ireland was really responsible) was made possible by the corrosive effect of political corruption on financial regulation over the years – banks that became casinos, regulators who had reason to fear that the fingerprints of their political masters might be all over fraudulent schemes.
And all this resulted in the ultimate national humiliation: the loss of our sovereignty. We became wards of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission. The Irish budget was scrutinised by a committee of the Bundestag in Berlin before it was submitted to the Dáil. We had to meekly hand over our national pension fund so it could be pumped into dead private banks.
This was personal. People lost their houses. They took their own lives. And the pain is not forgotten: listen to the brilliant CMAT singing “All the big boys/ All the Berties/ All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me/ I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me...”
Tucked away in the public memory of national indignity and private shame, there’s Bertie, crouched at his little table. Does Fianna Fáil seriously want to open that door and let him out?
