Bertie Ahern interview: I see all this stuff now about TDs with 20 houses - I’m still with me one house

As he sallies down memory lane to a snowy Stormont 25 years ago, a host of ghosts comes out to meet Bertie Ahern. Around him swarm John Hume, Martin McGuinness, David Trimble, Ian Paisley, Albert Reynolds, Mo Mowlam, Seamus Mallon, Rita O’Hare, David Ervine, Gusty Spence. All gone to their eternal rest after playing a part in ending 30 years of bloodletting in Northern Ireland.

Due to their collective efforts, it has been estimated that about 1,500 people are alive today who might otherwise have died in the violence, but the departure of the old guard worries the former taoiseach. He fears the Belfast Agreement he signed on Good Friday 1998 could buckle if a new generation with no memory of the Troubles that left more than 3,600 people dead fails to grasp “the art of compromise” that was essential for his generation to change the course of history.

With jolting synchronicity, Sandie Shaw is singing wistfully that “those were the days, my friend” on the sound system in the lounge of the Skylon Hotel, Ahern’s de facto sub-office where he greets staff members by name and where, sometimes, he meets his “informal contacts” from Northern Ireland’s old warring sides. It is 15 years since he resigned as taoiseach following his widely scorned testimony at the planning tribunal on payments to politicians, which found he had not been truthful in his evidence. At 71 and “a stone-and-a half lighter”, which he attributes to “walking 10 miles a day” for the past year, he might be taken for a politician in training to hit the election campaign trail. But questions about his presidential intentions for the Áras vacancy in 2025 invite a whole other cadre of spectres; this time it is his legendary election machine dubbed the Drumcondra Mafia.

“By that time I’ll be 74 or 75. Most of my close guys now – which people don’t seem to realise, and I laugh at these things in the newspapers when they talk about the Drumcondra Mafia – most of them are in the graveyard, unfortunately. Of my top 10 guys, six of them are dead and two of them are in bad health. That’s the reality. I haven’t discussed it with any of them. I would with their families if I was ever going to think about it but I haven’t even discussed it with my own girls,” he adds, referring to his daughters, Georgina and Cecelia.

Irish Times poll: Majority say they would not vote for Bertie Ahern to be president

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Bertie Ahern interview: I see all this stuff now about TDs with 20 houses - I’m still with me one house

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Bertie Ahern says he should have taken constitutional challenge against planning tribunal

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Ahern’s return to Fianna Fáil as an ordinary member last December and his prior admission that he had considered contesting the 2011 presidential election have prompted speculation that the role of first citizen is in his sights. He sounds implacable in refusing to discuss his potential candidacy for Áras an Uachtaráin, “out of respect” for President Michael D Higgins, but then he goes and leaves the door ajar.

“Wouldn’t you go out of your mind with boredom greeting ambassadors in the Áras day in and day out?”

“I probably would,” he concedes, initially. “It wouldn’t be my thing but maybe, as you get older, you get slower.”

I used to tell Paisley the stories about how much my father hated him and we used to laugh our heads off

—  Bertie Ahern

Of all those dearly departed from Ahern’s orbit, he feels one absence most acutely, especially every April around the time of the agreement’s anniversary. One of the unforgettable moments during those tense negotiations in snow-carpeted Stormont, where politicians and former gunmen grew visibly exhausted inside the illuminated windows, was the taoiseach’s return directly from his mother’s funeral in Dublin on Holy Thursday. As he walked towards the entrance to Castle Buildings, news photographers laid their cameras down on the muffled ground in a gesture of sympathy for his loss. For the youngest of Julia Ahern’s offspring, every April is a bittersweet month.

His biggest regret is that he did not get back to his childhood home on Church Avenue in time to assuage his mother’s worries about the negotiations and to finish a conversation they had been having a week earlier, before she was rushed to the Mater hospital after suffering a heart attack. Julia was a petite and staunch republican from Castledonovan, near Bantry in west Cork. She had told her children about the notorious Black and Tans coming to her childhood home, “throwing my grandfather over the ditch and killing all the geese”. She had been fretting about her son’s proposal to surrender the territorial claim to Northern Ireland “in Mr De Valera’s Constitution” as a quid pro quo for Britain repealing the 1920 Government of Ireland Act and had remained unsatisfied by his reassurances the last time they spoke.

“I got delayed in London [on the Saturday evening before Good Friday] and was going to call down to the house,” Ahern recalls. “I didn’t – my huge regret in life. I went to a constituency do in Cabra East, in Christ the King [church], as all TDs tend to do. I had an early start the next morning because we had to meet Sinn Féin and then the SDLP and then the [Garda] because I was worried, if this thing didn’t work, what the security arrangements were going to be. So I had all those meetings arranged for the Sunday. Went home, went to bed, didn’t go down to me ma.

“The following morning, I was going to have breakfast with some of the Sinn Féin guys in my constituency office. That didn’t happen. They got delayed or something. So, instead of going back up to the house and having breakfast with me ma I said ‘I’ll call to her later’, and I went to Government Buildings. When I got to Government Buildings, I heard she’d had a heart attack. So I never got back to tell her [about the constitutional bargain]. She was very political, read a huge amount. Even up to when she died, she’d be reading. My father was the same.”

Julia and her husband, Con, an anti-treaty veteran of the Civil War and two-time prison hunger-striker who hailed from near Kinsale, raised their family on a feed of Irish reunification with a dollop of anglophobia that was not uncommon in those times. Forever after, Con maintained that the anti-treaty side should have continued fighting in 1923 until a united Ireland was achieved.

“My dad believed there’d never be real peace until there’d be a 32-county Ireland. If he was around today, I think he’d still be saying that,” Ahern says, “but I think [the agreement] would convince him that a united new Ireland was the way forward because he was a republican and he believed strongly in tolerance.

“I used to tell Paisley the stories about how much my father hated him and we used to laugh our heads off. He came to my father’s grave in Glasnevin, himself and Baroness Eileen, and said his prayers over my father’s grave in the republican plot. It was very funny because when we were leaving we were walking by [ex-Provisional IRA leader and subsequent dissident] Daithi O’Connell’s grave on the other side – in the other republican plot. They laughed – at least, Baroness Eileen laughed.”

Ahern was outside the British Embassy in Merrion Square when it was burned down by an angry crowd in 1972, after the British army’s parachute regiment shot dead 13 peaceful civil rights marchers in Derry on Bloody Sunday. He says the mass killings so enraged some of his friends that “they gave up on politics and joined the IRA”.

“I remember talking to my dad at the time and he predicted that this was going to [set the situation] back to where it was 50 years ago; that it was going to boil over and the whole Border thing would become an issue. I went to one of my first Fianna Fáil meetings after the Arms Trial [1970, when former taoiseach Charles Haughey was charged in relation to the planned importation of arms for Northern Ireland], and half of the cumann walked out because they went to join Aontacht Éireann [a breakaway party founded by Kevin Boland]. I was only a kid coming in and you could see the split.”

Two years after Bloody Sunday, Ahern was in the Mater hospital, where he worked, when victims of the Dublin bombings by the UVF, with suspected collusion by British security force members, were being stretchered in. He says he has never witnessed such horrific sights as the injuries and disfigurement caused by the evening rush-hour explosions that killed 26 people. At the impressionable age of 22, how did this quintessential Dub brought up soaked in a Brits-out ethos, contain his anger at the attack on his city and go on to negotiate peace with representatives of those who had perpetrated it?

“It was difficult,” he admits. “I always remember the day I walked into a room with a whole lot of paramilitaries in the talks process around the end of ‘97. One of the loyalist guys said, ‘Taoiseach, we were just having a conversation’ – which they weren’t, by the way – ‘and to the best of our knowledge, you’re the only person who isn’t a murderer in this room.’ It was a real one to try to upstage me or upset me. Of course, he was implicating McGuinness and Adams and Gary McMichael and Ervine, the whole bloody lot of them. I said we’re here now [and] we’re trying to bring peace.”

My favourite line from Martin [McGuinness] was saying ‘I never thought I’d go to bed at night, kneeling down saying the rosary and praying that Ian Paisley would stay alive longer’

—  Bertie Ahern

Considering his own family history, what is his view of Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s First Minister-designate in the North, saying there was no alternative to the conflict at the time it was happening?

“Most of the people you talk to in the North on the nationalist side felt there were events that happened that horrified them, that drove them to protest [but] it didn’t drive them to join the IRA. I think nationalist people in the North who were totally opposed to violence were opposed to the RUC and, before them, the B Specials. I mean, if people in your community were being killed – and from the civil rights movement – you can understand the agitation and you can understand that the younger people at the time said ‘well, there’s no political solution to this, we’ll get involved in the conflict’. So I think that’s very understandable. She grew up in that.

“I think one of the sad things that happened out of the agreement is that the [loyalist] parties that were there 25 years ago – the UDP and the PUP – don’t have the strengths they had. Sinn Féin have cleverly moved their senior people into Sinn Féin positions so the army council doesn’t exist but the senior guys who would be identified with it are in Sinn Féin. They’re influential. I don’t think Mary Lou [McDonald] is answerable to them but I don’t think Mary Lou would want to upset them either. They’re not definitely running the party. The senior guys are still there but they’re getting old. When you talk to them, they talk about the North and the political situation and the dynamics of the situation. They don’t in any way have a sense that they’re trying to run [the party’s] housing policy or education policy. I think that’s a fantasy.”

Now a professor of peace studies and conflict resolution at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ahern is in Northern Ireland “every single week” and, he says, he is frequently in contact with Tony Blair and the former British prime minister’s private office in England. While describing John Hume as “my great hero”, he acknowledges that Gerry Adams, who is being tipped as a possible Sinn Féin candidate for the presidency in 2025, and the late Martin McGuinness “did their very best to keep the [Sinn Féin/IRA] movement together and I give them credit for that”.

“Gerry, perhaps, for the organisation. Martin for keeping the hard men in line. His credibility with the hard men was bigger. Martin often said to me: ‘Listen, I’m the one who has to go into the caves and talk to these guys.’ Martin and I got on great. I went to football matches with him [at] Man United. My favourite line from Martin was saying ‘I never thought I’d go to bed at night, kneeling down saying the rosary and praying that Ian Paisley would stay alive longer.’”

Despite his impeccable suit, shirt and tie and his statesman status abroad – he co-chairs the InterAction Council of Former Heads of State and Government with Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo – the true-blue football-mad, anorak-wearing Bertie of yore remains largely unreconstructed, as he attests when he declares “Drumcondra is the centre of the word”. Still prone to the spoonerisms and malapropisms, such as “upsetting the apple tart” and “lulus hiding in the bushes”, that became his trademark during his 11 years as taoiseach, he reminisces how the IRA’s £25.6 million (€30.2 million) Northern Bank robbery in 2004 came close to scuppering the peace process. “Talk about Humpitty Dumpitty fallin’ off the wall,” he laments.

I think a new united Ireland is possible in time. It won’t happen tomorrow

—  Bertie Ahern

But there is one Bertie Ahern narrative he is anxious to rewrite because, of all his ghosts, it is the one that continues to haunt his reputation and that threatens to overshadow any tilt he might make at the presidency in 2025. It is the 3,270-page report of the planning tribunal published in 2012, which found that he did not truthfully account for payments lodged to accounts connected with him and that he did not operate a bank account between 1987 and 1993 when he was, respectively, the minister for labour and the minister for finance. Aherns insists he told the tribunal the truth.

“I think I was very badly treated, quite honestly. If I had the money, to this day, I would have gone back and overthrown the whole bloody thing. But I didn’t have the money to do that. Even after the thing came out, I thought about challenging the whole thing but it [had already] cost me a fortune and it would have cost me another fortune. If [I was] anyone else, I’d never have got any of that stuff.

“I see all this stuff now about guys in [Leinster] House with 20 houses and 15 houses and 17 houses. Jesus, I’m still with me one house... and all the stuff that was thrown at you after 24 years in politics. But anyway, that’s life. You’re just dumped on.”

In June 2008, the High Court upheld a challenge by Ahern that the tribunal was constitutionally prohibited from questioning him about statements on his financial affairs that he had made under Dáil privilege and decreed that he was entitled to claim legal privilege over 150 documents relating to his retention of Paddy Stronge, a banking expert, to refute claims by the tribunal about two bank lodgments. The tribunal subsequently declined to hear evidence from Stronge.

Asked if he had that time back, would he do anything differently in his dealings with the tribunal, he says: “I probably would have listened to my legal team more. I tried to do it politically rather than legally. My legal team wanted to go a very different route. I mean, they believed they could have brought the whole [tribunal] down and they believed the way I was treated was unconstitutional. But that meant me taking challenges. There were several issues they thought they had.

“On my own part, I would have given it more time. You see, I just didn’t have the time to do it. I was literally trying to do things on a Saturday night.

“I was asked at an international thing recently [by] a journalist was it not strange that the minister for finance and the taoiseach of the country had no bank account? I had 14 bank accounts but they were all in my name and my wife’s name and because we weren’t at each other’s throats – which we’re not, I was with her yesterday – I was cashing my cheque and giving her X. That’s all I was doing. We had all sorts – building society and post office accounts – in both our names.

“The tribunal never allowed my friend give his evidence. To this day, I don’t understand how you can’t have the person who’s the basis of proving what I was saying was true.

“While I feel bitter about it, there’s nothing I can do about it. In the end of the day, I did nothing wrong. The tribunal was [to do] with corruption in planning. I’d nothing to do with those guys. They implicated me. All that was found out about me was that, you know, I didn’t use my bank accounts when I was going through a difficult [marital] separation and I got money from friends and I used my own money.”

Following the report’s publication in 2012, Micheál Martin, the Fianna Fáil leader, stated in the Dáil that he accepted the tribunal’s findings. He announced he was instigating a procedure within the party to expel his predecessor, but Ahern resigned before he could be banished. While he says the relationship between the two of them is “good” now, he makes no attempt to conceal its past iciness.

Asked if he would like a formal role to continue his work for the peace process, he says, he currently works well on the basis of informal contacts and, besides, “it won’t happen because they don’t give you that role. If they were going to do that, they should have done it 10 years ago. Now, I have my own contacts – I don’t need them... For a long time, the least engagement I had was with my own party.”

Why was that?

“Someone else has to answer that,” he laughs. “In more recent times, as the leader of the party has said, he did engage with me but I was a long time talking to everybody except my own lot. I’ve had very good relations along the way with Charlie Flanagan, Enda Kenny, Leo [Varadkar], Simon Coveney. I would have had regular contacts with them all.”

Ahern says “Fianna Fáil must understand that republicanism is about talking to everybody” and he claims there is not enough work being done to design a new 32-county Ireland.

“I think a new united Ireland is possible in time. It won’t happen tomorrow. The institutions in the North have to be running for a sustainable long period. God knows how many years that is. The second thing is the planning has to be done. How are we going to integrate the PSNI and An Garda Síochána? How would you get SCs and QCs to bring our courts together? How would your government departments come together? I think that’s all doable.”

Should that work be under way now?

“Yes, yes and it’s not.” He adds that he urges Fianna Fáil “all the time” to get on with it. His impatience bespeaks an urgency unquenched in the politician Charlie Haughey once called “the most cunning” of them all.

Later, as he strolls off into the anonymous bustle of his beloved Drumcondra, where his neighbours prefer to remember his private kindnesses than his tribunal shame, the ghosts of Bertie Ahern’s see-saw life float all around him.