Exit for Bertie

I wanted to say something smart and relevant a few days ago about Bertie's announcement of depature but nothing good came - I'm still a bit confused and unconvinced that the 'Ahern era' is indeed at a close. He came to power just as I was beginning to take cognisance of my political surroundings, and has been there for all of my adult life. So while the world went from technology bubble to 9/11 to Iraq to Climate Change, there has always been Bertie - immovable, the set stock pattern of Irish political life.

A few words about his virtues. Certain tricky things can only be worked out by people who are consummate, pre-programmed politicians - the ever-friendly, glad-handing, back-slapping whats-the-craic-lads types, people who are at base shallow and cynical, but who know that the price of power is eternal smiling vigilance in the face of the wary voter. Bertie Ahern was such a man - "ruthless, cunning, devious" when he needed to be, but, out in the world, a smily-wavy man, a joker, hand permanently extended to greet the next potential Fianna Fail supporter. Nobody likes this person - the fakery and fronting - but everybody falls for him. And, more than likely, the majority of people vote for him.

We don't go to such people for vision or purpose or inspirational leadership. We don't quote their speeches, or ape their habits, or consider them prime movers in world-historical terms. But these are exactly the kinds of people who can figure out how to finangle a knotty situation and bring intractable problems to resolution. Someone needs to coax and charm and wheel and deal, to lard the gears with effulgent flattery. Someone also needs to be persistent, dogged, unrelenting - as if outside Tolka Park on a Friday night, shaking hands and making nice in the cold, going after every last vote, enquiring after grannies and hip-operations and housing lists. Certain problems need time and effort and an unhealthy barrage of manpower.

Bertie Ahern was that sort of politician, and the stalemate in the North was that kind of problem. He didn't do it alone, by any means, but his contribution may just have been the decisive nudge from the South to keep things rolling, to make sure problems were ironed out (or properly ignored), to ensure people were kept cordial and smiling and - above all - working toward some kind of final settlement. What was wrought by the Belfast Agreement was not perfect in any sense, but it reflected the efforts of the man who helped raise it - an ill-formed, wholly-functional, overly-pragmatic edifice, designed not for beauty but for work. And work it did. It is to Ahern's endless credit that the edifice still stands today, and that it has set the boundaries for a stable and lasting peace in the six counties.


The flipside of all this is, of course, the dispiriting, enervating, utterly-defeating way that politics in Ireland has continued to be practiced. Ahern represents all that is febrile and frightful about our public life - the Galway tent, the narrow vision, the lack of commitment to the public good, the disregard of the most cursory ethical standards, the lack of proper policy goals, the extraordinary incompetence in spending public money, the shame and shallowness of it all. And all of this was lacquered over by a thin film of diversion and deceit, an unwillingness to be forthright and honest about matters large and small. Only yesterday did he completely invert the actual import of events when he went after the Mahon Tribunal as "low lives" for their "harsh treatment" of Grainne Carruth. That such a claim was bizarrely at odds with the readily-available facts at hand, it was remarkable that no journalist present didn't muster the requisite courage and say - "Hang on you fraud, you were the one who lied and forced an innocent woman to take the stand!"

Much of this was, of course, of a piece with the reigning political culture within Fianna Fail, stretching back to the salad days of Chief Haughey and his myriad accounts. In a way, Ahern never really emerged from the Boss's shadow, and forever represented a throwback to a meaner, less scrupulous, less honest politics (we'll see if Cowen, whose heritage is that of a different FF wing, can banish Haughey's crooked atmosphere for good). That Bertie has presided over great economic growth is without dispute, and his early management of our fiscal affairs proved very smart indeed. But in the run-up to the 2002 election, prudence and thoughtfulness were thrown out the window, and all serious management of the way we spend public money seemed to go elsewhere entirely. In the last seven years, Fianna Fail have not been responsible stewards of our finances. As a result, we are left now with a steadily-cooling, over-exposed economy, a faltering property market, a serious dearth in competitiveness, and dim prospects ahead. Infrastructure was not properly invested in - not was education - and this could cause Ireland severe problems in the short term.

All of this without mentioning the manner of Ahern's ignoble exit - forced out to divert concern about his financial records away from the Government. He does not appear to anyone as spectacularly corrupt on the Haughey scale, but, as has been long established by the tribunal, he breached the public trust on several occassions, and in serious ways. As his evidence grew more contradictory and less convincing, leaving was only one way to salvage the reputation that he had so assiduously cultivated - Bertie the plain man of the people, a simple son of Dublin. This wasn't an act - my dad saw him in Fagin's the night before he gave his notice - but it was an affectation that grew more and more implausible, as records emerged showing that his varied accounts runneth over with friendly, unexplained cash donations, at a time in Irish life when most people (my parents included) had to get a Credit Union loan for an oven.

We will have to await the tribunal's no doubt Tolstoyan report to get the full picture on Bertie's finances. But it is not an altogether harsh judgment to say that Bertie's legacy may be viewed as one massive achievement in the North, an early, competent manager of the boom, but marred by a series of significant failures - in health, education, and transport. His triple-electoral success bestows upon him the historic imprimatur of the Irish people and he was, above all, an unrivalled politician, an expert on doing what politicians need to do more than anything - get votes. History may, in the end, judge us more severely than it judges him. But, as Adlai Stevenson once quipped - "In a democracy, people usually get the leaders they deserve."

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