Bertie’s bit of bother — PR genius

POLITICS has evolved so much in this country that if you want to get ahead in public life, all you need to do is embroil yourself in a spot of bother.

Full marks to the genius in Fianna Fáil who realised that having a Taoiseach who was as clean as a whistle was a bit of a downer as far as Joe Public went.

And so we had several weeks of Bertie Ahern digging himself into holes of Port Tunnel dimensions as was forced to clarify his clarifications of earlier clarifying responses he had made to newspaper revelations.

The upshot? A rocket-propelled lift-off for Bertie and Fianna Fáil in the polls. And more good news. After all the vacillations and dissembling, some 25% thought the Taoiseach was right in taking fifty grand off friends and giving a superlative account of the Manchester dinner.

Michael Wall never ate his dinner. Therefore, though he was there, he wasn’t really there.

Only three of the other 25-27 were mentioned. Strangely, the only details that were missing were references to ravenous dogs and homework.

In less advanced democracies like Sweden, ministers are given the order of the boot when they haven’t paid their TV licences or have taken on nannies without paying tax for them.

Or take Britain. Peter Mandelson fell on his sword for accepting a secret loan to pay for his swanky Notting Hill home from Geoffrey Robinson, the paymaster general (sounds eerily familiar doesn’t it, but maybe it was a straightforward loan, not a debt of honour).

But here, we have a more sophisticated method of dealing with such trifles. The formal word is proportionality. In common parlance, it goes something like this: It’s Bertie, the man in the anorak, the Duffel Coat from Drumcondra, the man who enjoys nothing more than a couple of pints of Bass or to be at Croke Park or Old Trafford.

And as far as the dipstick of opinion polls go, there’s enough oil in the machine to keep the Taoiseach motoring for a few miles yet.

The genius of it all. Fianna Fáil’s electoral stock rises. So does the Taoiseach’s popularity. And the whipping boys? Well the PDs, for sure. And the opposition too. When it comes to exposing weakness, the biggest weren’t Ahern’s failings but the abject failure of the opposition to make hay from it.

If the shoe had been on the other foot, the attack dogs of Fianna Fáil would have been scenting blood and going in for the kill. For them the only real meaning of mercy is an order of nuns involved in the educational system. The Opposition’s response to the Taoiseach’s travail was — here’s that word again — proportional.

Now let’s see where that gets you in Irish politics. Yep, to the outskirts of nowhere.

And how have FF emerged from all of this? With the confident jaunt of the top dog, of course, marking its territory on every available lamp-post (including those in Ranelagh).

You need look no further than the pronouncements of Brian Cowen this week. He has already bored us all into distraction saying December’s Budget will not be a giveaway Budget. And he was saying it again this week. It was his saying of it, and the manner of his saying of it, that was intriguing. It was bullish, it was confident, it brooked no alternative — why, it was almost vintage biffoesque.

Back in September, Michael McDowell announced that his party would be campaigning for stamp duty to be scrapped or modified.

Why should couples have to pay crippling amounts of stamp duty, he asked, when the State itself does not need that money?

Since then, we’ve had a little contretemps between the Tánaiste and the Taoiseach in which it all looked in danger of being ripped apart at the seams.

And what is the price the PDs have extracted for their support? A firm commitment on stamp duty? Not quite. Well what? Ahem, the equal of the repayments made on a debt of honour over a 13-year period.

Yesterday, the Tánaiste issued his own clarification, intimated he had always made it clear he was not talking about the next Budget but about a new Programme for Government and a General Election campaign. In other words, just as you swing around after your u-turn manoeuvre, you will encounter a dead duck on the road.

Meanwhile, the single-party Government of Bertie Ahern forges ahead with its one guaranteed formula for five more years — a treasure chest overflowing with booty.