It wasn’t the past that did for Ahern but how he handled the present

By Matt Cooper

Thursday, April 03, 2008

BERTIE AHERN had lost the public.

Proof of that came during last Friday night’s Late Late Show.

Senator Eoghan Harris had made a passionate and highly articulate contribution to a debate about the Taoiseach’s suitability for office but, notably, it did not elicit a single ripple of applause from the audience. Instead, there were disbelieving laughs as Harris sought vainly to defend the Fianna Fáil leader. This was very telling and damning. It would not have happened before.

On the same programme almost a year earlier Harris had struck a chord by bucking the media consensus and correctly assessing the mood of the people prior to the general election.

While many in the media — myself included — and opposition banged on about the ethics of Ahern taking money while holding ministerial office and about the implausibility of his excuses, Harris maintained that it didn’t matter in the overall scheme of things: people could see the bigger picture.

It seems highly likely that Harris’s 2007 Late Late Show contribution convinced many of the unsure that Ahern had been wronged by his treatment by the media, opposition and Mahon Tribunal and deserved re-election. But not even Harris — with his brilliant polemics — could have swung it had Ahern not enjoyed so much public affection already.

Affection is the suitable word for the emotional hold the people had for Ahern. Whereas other politicians of previous generations had inspired loyalty or hatred, Ahern did not generate passion.

His appeal was not charged. His ordinariness was emphasised, his appeal based on an image of his being a man of simple and common tastes. He was closest to Jack Lynch in that regard.

Yet, as befitted the new Ireland of the late 20th century and early 21st century, his life was also complicated, like the television soap opera versions of life that so many people consume. There was the marital separation, the new partner, the breakdown of that new relationship, one daughter’s literary success, the other’s marriage to a pop star. It didn’t damage him at all but served to increase the public’s fascination with their perception of him. He played up to the image brilliantly and the public, without even really knowing him, had almost come to think that he is their friend, the man they can depend to look after what they want. They have thought of him as an ordinary man who just happens to hold an extraordinary position.

The upside of this was that it meant the public was prepared to forgive Ahern a lot, especially when, as part of the now infamous Brian Dobson TV interview, he explained away his financial shenanigans as the unfortunate byproduct of his marital break-up. The downside was that its mood changed once a substantial part of his story was revealed to be a fiction and that he was complicit in perpetrating a deceit against the public and required others to assist him in that.

No politician is better able to read the public mood than Ahern. Sometimes politicians — particularly those in power for a long time — become detached from public opinion and believe only what they want to believe. Ahern never had that failing, even after 11 years as Taoiseach.

He was the best listener in Irish politics and the most astute in knowing what the public wanted and would bear, something that meant he rarely led from the front on issues until he was sure that a consensus in favour of action had formed already.

He achieved much of this by regularly canvassing his constituency door to door, as well as touring the country, meeting ordinary people and listening to them, almost as much as he spent time with other politicians, bureaucrats, trade unionists, wealthy businessmen, lobbyists and other influential people. It meant that he knew and understood the issues and the way people felt about them. It also meant that Ahern was always well placed to know what people thought of him and his government.

He went on the doorstep to canvass in Dublin Central on Good Friday, the day after Grainne Carruth completed her fateful evidence to the Mahon tribunal. It would be fascinating to know what response he picked up and if it reflected the widespread horror that seemingly she had been left to hang on his behalf.

The public’s love for him — both at local level and nationally — had been proven at the last general election but recent opinion polls had seen his personal popularity rating nationally slump to 40%. His local popularity hasn’t been measured, but even it may have suffered. The revelations that local party funds had been used by his old girlfriend Celia Larkin for a house purchase and that his local constituency secretary had been forced to contradict his story about never lodging sterling to bank accounts must have hurt.

It was notable too in recent weeks how reluctant his ministers had become about supporting him publicly. While always willing to defend his record as taoiseach, when pressed they could not declare that they believed all of the evidence he had given to the Mahon Tribunal.

Their condemnations of the workings of the tribunal and its fairness to Ahern were too rehearsed and premature. Then, hypocritically, when efforts were made to examine Ahern outside of the tribunal it was cited as the only venue to test evidence and reach judgment. It all was too contrived and it lacked conviction.

That left Harris as the main standard bearer for Ahern’s defence, using his column in the Sunday Independent and many broadcast appearances. It is damning of the intellectual poverty within Fianna Fáil that it has been left to Harris — an independent, albeit someone who has moved to support Fianna Fáil in recent years — to lead the charge. From the parliamentary party only Martin Mansergh and Ahern’s brother Noel have spoken with real passion and conviction, even if the validity of some of their arguments have been highly suspect.

And as more information tumbled out even Harris found it near impossible to come up with plausible explanations for Ahern’s behaviour.

It was inevitable that Ahern would have to go, even if it looked until yesterday that he was prepared to brazen it out for as long as possible. It seemed that Fianna Fáil was prepared to be complicit in that, judging that it might be better to allow Ahern take the hit for any poor performance in next year’s local and European elections before allowing Brian Cowen to take over with a clean slate.

But things had gone too far to allow for that. There was a danger that the EU referendum could have become a quasi-plebiscite on Ahern’s fitness for office and that Cowen’s prospects would be damaged by overseeing a huge deterioration in the public finances due to the economic slowdown.

WE MAY never know if Ahern was under pressure in the background to resign, although it seems he will be allowed to maintain the timing of his departure is his own decision. In some respects it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that he is gone, because the government was being destabilised by the constant speculation and controversy at a time when it needs to be focused. There will be a backlash. Harris won’t be alone in claiming that Ahern was hounded out of office by the obsessive pursuit of a combination of the tribunal, media and opposition. They will continue to argue that whatever wrong Ahern did was minor in scale and should not have been allowed to overshadow his achievements as taoiseach. He oversaw an economic boom — although the government’s role in facilitating that has been overstated and its handling of the money was far from perfect — and the importance of his contribution to the northern peace process has been vouched for by the right people.

But Ahern brought it all upon himself. His financial behaviour was not appropriate and the excuse that standards were different in the past does not wash. Finance ministers and leaders of Fianna Fáil should not be taking secret money, no matter what the currency.

But what made it worse were the stories he told over the past 18 months in an attempt to protect himself and how many of his statements to the Dáil over the years were exposed as hypocritical mistruths at best. It wasn’t necessarily the past that did for Ahern but how he has dealt with things in the present.

The Last Word with Matt Cooper was broadcast on 100-102 Today FM, Monday to Friday, 4.30pm to 7pm.

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Thursday, April 03, 2008