Little things that trip you up
Bradlee was faced with one of those fateful decisions — to publish and be damned.
In exasperation, he turned to the two reporters and said: “You know the results of the latest Gallup Poll?” he asked them. “Half the country never even heard of the word Watergate. Nobody gives a shit.”
“It’s the little things that trip you up,” remarked Albert Reynolds ruefully after the Fianna Fáil and Labour coalition nose-dived in 1994. What triggered that? The Anthony Duggan (a teacher accused of sexually assaulting students in an English boarding school) extradition case, if you must know. It was a trivial sideshow, If you put on your Vulcan ears and looked at it logically, it was of zero importance.
But with both parties increasingly enveloped by a red mist of mistrust, it nudged the brittle alliance over the edge. At some point in the past week the focus of the Bertiegate crisis shifted from the responsibilities of Bertie Ahern as a public figure to the nature of his relationship with Michael McDowell.
The new story line that emerged on Wednesday evening was not in itself capable of scuppering Ahern. Sure, the coincidence was strange. One of the fellows in the Four Seasons Hotel on that famous night in 1994 was Micheál Wall, the same Micheál Wall who sold Bertie his house in 1997.
When Ahern came into the Dáil on Thursday he explained it away plausibly and that line of inquiry ran out of track.
But there was “uisce faoi thalamh” and its significance became apparent later. McDowell had pointedly refused to appear in the chamber alongside Ahern. The optics of that were bad.
And as the day wore on, we witnessed something new in Irish politics — its first contemplative political party.
For 24 hours, the PDs disappeared from view. Flummoxed, political pundits began to cast around for rationalisations. Gradually, it began to hover in on the legendary Micheál Wall. A week before, McDowell made a huge play about the Taoiseach naming names from Manchester. From the Taoiseach’s perspective, this was a non-starter. Both men compromised (to McDowell’s cost politically) on a promise that Ahern would do his best to remember.
Later that week, when it became known Mr Wall had been in the hotel on the fateful night — and Ahern had known about it since the weekend — the Tánaiste was “unhappy”, we were told. How do you define his unhappiness? By the massive mushroom cloud that appeared above his ministerial offices on St Stephen’s Green, that’s how.
Ahern’s explanation for not naming Wall was entertaining. He did not eat the dinner, he said. Therefore, he wasn’t really present and there was no need to name him.
This affair has revolved around plausibility. The more you examine Bertie Ahern’s account, the more holes emerge. Subjectively, though, he did enough to persuade the public and the PDs.
During the Watergate investigation, Deepthroat also told Woodward that people assume those who pull the levers of power are clever people. But with a strain of scorn in his voice, he dismissed a lot of them as stupid.
The strategies adopted by both FF and the PDs revealed more stupidity than cleverness, more accident than design. Ahern’s series of doorstep interviews — and his rampant fuzziness — were a disaster. McDowell is not as clever a tactician as he is a thinker. His handling of the affair was also a disaster, with his position fluctuating wildly from day to day. The only smart move by FF was its flexing of muscles, telling the PDs they could continue without them.
It was a punt but it had the desired effect. The PDs knew that by pulling the plug on coalition they would also pull the plug on their own electoral hopes. And that exposed their very weak position very starkly, indeed.
The unorthodox 24 hours of silence from the PDs was another disaster, for them. Again the headlines pointed to imminent collapse. Two days after describing Bertie Ahern as honest and “fit” to be Taoiseach, McDowell was now implying the opposite.
It will all be patched up.
They’ll issue statements proclaiming unity and purpose. But the mistrust is now deeply embedded. How long more will they tolerate each other?
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