Bertie Ahern has always removed obstructions to the smooth functioning of politics - and when he became a distraction, he had to remove himself, writes Tom Savage.
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA tended, in the immediate aftermath of Bertie Ahern's resignation, to suggest he was driven from office. Local loyalists, in parallel, talked of him being hounded from office, largely by The Irish Times and RTÉ.
The Taoiseach was clearly not hounded into the timing of his announcement. If anything, the legal decisions of the past couple of days gave him a bounce his PR people stood braced to optimise, yet his decision as to when he would go and how he would announce it ignored those decisions, and pre-dated them.
No softening up of public opinion was undertaken on his behalf. No leaks gave an advance sense of readiness to anybody in media. He walked around the grounds of All Hallows by himself for several days, thought it through and then took everybody by surprise, including Cabinet members.
Whereas Charles Haughey, prior to his departure from office, tended to hammer home his expectation, nay, his entitlement to decide the date and manner of his exit, Bertie Ahern never articulated any such advance warnings. But that was fairly typical of a man who rarely sought to sketch out impressive overarching visions, preferring to be judged on the achievement of incremental progress.
Yesterday's resignation carried an unstated message. "I will do it my way," said that message. "I will call the shots."
Last week, Dáil Éireann, courtesy of Fine Gael's Phil Hogan, saw the first strategic attempt to do divide-and-conquer, addressing Cabinet members rather than the Taoiseach himself. But while the carefully non-prescriptive statements of Mary Harney and John Gormley talked of public disquiet and the need for clarification from the Taoiseach, that was as far as it went. His own front bench stayed solid, not least because Brian Cowen so resolutely rejected opportunistic action.
In stark contrast to the raucous personal partisanship by prominent Fianna Fáil figures which distinguished Haughey's later days in office, Bertie Ahern was surrounded by a united Cabinet and party. When he made reference, in his statement, to the fact that he had inherited a fractured party and was leaving behind him a united one, the truth of the claim was unarguable.
One aspect of his statement which has received relatively little attention is its uncomplaining tone. In the past year, the Taoiseach has, on occasion, veered between testiness and fury when doorstepped by the media about some aspect of the Mahon tribunal.
In his statement yesterday, he had reached a conclusion about a media reality that had dogged him for months: it was, he said, a distraction. No more. No less. A distraction he was now removing as a government issue.
That's what he had done throughout his career. He removed obstacles to the proper functioning of the public machine.
He went into Leinster House at the first election on which I ever consulted: the 1977 Jack Lynch landslide. Since then, I have seen him and worked with him in various guises and roles, finding him unfailingly courteous and a man who never forgot a kindness.
Historian and anthropologist Margaret Visser has written about the nomenclator, without whom no senator in ancient Rome could survive. "This slave's job was to tell his master the names of the people he met. American presidents, imitating the Romans, are often supplied with a similar service," she adds.
Bertie Ahern never needed such help. He was a man who went out of his way on social and other occasions where there was no publicity gain to seek out individuals who were always left with the sense he remembered and valued them: because he did.
In aggregate, those individual relationships added up to a unique relationship with the nation, a relationship which will make the task of both media and Opposition, in addressing the issue of his going, delicate.
When Haughey left, triumphalist reaction was safe. When de Valera left, his age and history created a vaguely reverential response. As Bertie Ahern leaves, whatever about the fluctuations in recent opinion polls, he is surrounded by a level of personal identification by the public unequalled in Irish politics.
Within his own party sits an acute appreciation that the successes of Fianna Fáil in more than a decade owe much to Bertie Ahern's phenomenal personal popularity with the Irish electorate. That appreciation will frame the nature of all internal comment on his going.
By the timing, authority, dignity and restraint of yesterday's announcement, Bertie Ahern tied the hands - and possibly softened the tongues - of the Opposition, as it comes to terms with the vista of a post-Bertie era.
Tom Savage is chairman of the Communications Clinic. He was communications adviser to taoiseach Albert Reynolds and has advised senior politicians for more than 35 years