Resigning now would give Bertie the chance to crown his true legacy

SEAMUS MOYNIHAN, the former captain of the Kerry football team, announced his retirement from the sport this week. In the process, he set an example which could be followed to the benefit of the whole nation.

Many people felt that he was ‘man of the match’ in the All-Ireland final, and he is certainly going out at the very top. There is an old saying that you are only as good as your last game.

Moynihan will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the greatest footballers of his era. He will be remembered in Kerry as one of the all-time greats, even though he only won four All-Ireland medals. Of course, he could have stayed on, and he could well have added to his medal tally. He displayed a tremendous sense of positioning in the All-Ireland final, which would undoubtedly have made up for any loss of pace over the years.

However, Moynihan obviously decided that his time had come, and he had the good sense to get out at the top. Growing up in Kerry I was privileged to see some of those who have been rated among the greatest of all time, such as Mick O’Connell.

I remember some masterful games by O’Connell for South Kerry in the county championship in the 1950s and some brilliant games against Dublin in All-Ireland semi-finals. It is probably unfair to compare the players from one era with another but there was never any doubt in my mind that Jack O’Shea was the greatest footballer I had the privilege of watching. At the height of his career, he covered the whole field and was never found wanting on the big days.

Seamus Moynihan was particularly proud to recall this week that he played on the same Kerry team on which Jack O’Shea’s played his last championship game, which was a losing Munster final against Clare. One sensed Moynihan was determined that he was not going to bow out on a day like that, so he decided to call it a day after this year’s All-Ireland final.

In football, you may be only as good as your last match, but in politics they say that all careers end in failure. Eamon de Valera retired as Taoiseach, but he is not remembered as going out at the top, because in a sense he was already well over the hill. In time, he would be remembered for having stayed on too long and thus denying Seán Lemass a chance to shine earlier. If de Valera had just stood down in favour of Lemass instead of calling an early election in 1948 to wrong-foot Clann na Poblachta, he would have done himself and the country a service.

Lemass was the only one of whom it can be truly said that most people regretted did not have a longer run as Taoiseach. Bertie Ahern has already been Taoiseach for longer than any of our 11 other leaders, with the sole exception of de Valera. It is about time he moved on.

Through bungling, Bertie has allowed a political crisis to develop that could well end his career.

In 1993 and 1994, when he got almost €50,000 from friends, he may well have considered it a loan.

However, the danger of this should have been apparent by August 1997 when Judge Brian McCracken concluded in his tribunal report that it was “unacceptable that a member of Dáil Éireann, and in particular a Cabinet minister and Taoiseach, should be supported in his personal lifestyle by gifts made to him personally.”.

As Taoiseach, Bertie endorsed the McCracken findings. “The tribunal stresses a point I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone,” Bertie told the Dáil when it reconvened the following month. He was right, but he made the political mistake of behaving as a hypocrite. If he really believed that the “dig out” was just a loan, he should have paid it back in 1997.

He feared he might be accused of just paying it back because of the danger of being exposed, but he would now be in a much better position to defend himself. At least it would have looked like a loan and fair-minded people would have been prepared to forget about it.

Bertie compounded his original mistake with a series of other blunders, such as acting the hypocrite over the McCracken report, and, more recently, by trying to suppress the story by deriding the “50 journalists running around behind me”. They were doing a job that is a vital part of a functioning democracy, but he effectively compared them to rats with his Pied Piper analogy. To cap it all, he lied about the amount of money he had received, when he said that the figure of between €50,000 and €100,000 was “off the wall”.

LATER he tried to suggest €50,000 was comparatively small. It may have been small in relation to the kind of money that Charles Haughey or Liam Lawlor were pocketing, but surely nobody would suggest that their conduct should be used to set or even influence any standards. The majority of Irish people still do not take home €50,000 for a whole year of honest work.

Judge McCracken warned that politicians who accept money from people in such circumstances compromise themselves. The Taoiseach found it necessary to defend his appointment to State boards of a number of the people who gave him money, but he botched his defence. “I appointed them because they were friends, not because of anything they had given me,” he told RTÉ’s Brian Dobson. Surely he should have said the most important consideration was that those people would do a good job, not that they were his friends.

Bertie says he considered the money a loan, not a gift. He may have talked about repaying it, but his suggestion that he could not get his friends to take the money was an insult to the intelligence of the electorate. It also provided critics with a golden opportunity to ridicule him.

Joe Higgins seized the opportunity in the Dáil when he suggested that Bertie could have just written to his friends: “Ah, jez, lads — yous’ll have me in big trouble if you don’t take back the 50 grand. My circumstances have improved and I’ll have 50 journalists traipsing around after me if word gets out.”

Higgins capped it off with a ludicrous postscript: “Tell Paddy the Plasterer to stay clear of Callely’s house — he’s in enough trouble over the painter!”

Of course, this skilfully raised the issue of Ivor Callely being forced to resign, because he “forgot” to pay the bill for having his house painted, which cost only a fraction of the money given to Bertie. He had to go, as did P Flynn and even Senator Liam Cosgrave, who got much less than any of them. Bertie should go, too.

The Taoiseach could do the honourable thing by recognising his mistake and announcing the date of his resignation. This would set a valuable precedent that no politician should ever accept such favours.

If he announced his resignation now to coincide with the conclusion of the upcoming talks in relation to the North, this would give Fianna Fáil plenty of time to consider a successor.

It would also afford Bertie an opportunity to crown his greatest contribution, which was the part he played in helping to forge the Good Friday Agreement.