Bertie Ahern is the comeback kid in perfect time

Journalist of the year Michael Clifford takes a sideways look at the return of Bertie Ahern to the Fianna Fáil fold

Bertie Ahern’s timing was always spot on. He was elected Taoiseach in 1997, just as the country was taking off to join the wealthy nations of the world. He stepped down in 2008, just as the world as we knew it was coming apart at the seams. He governed through the halcyon, albeit illusory, days.

And then reversed gingerly into the shadows as the foul stuff collided with the air conditioning. Nothing to do with me, guv, sure, none of this would have happened if I was still in charge, was the refrain he tried out a few times before realising he might be inciting violence against himself.

Yesterday, the country awoke to the news that he could be on the way back. His old Dublin Central constituency passed a motion calling for his restoration to the party. They want his expertise, his know-how, his magic, his Bertie-ness.

Fianna Fáil to ask Bertie Ahern to rejoin party https://t.co/hzBomJWHzM pic.twitter.com/O0SnNnDxcO

— Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) November 29, 2016

The timing of his possible return is excellent. There is a cacophony to restore public pay to its 2008 levels, a time when all was well and true and good with the world. The debate over water charges appears to be also be heading back to the future, to the days when the country was awash with money, and cryptosporidium was thought to be an app for the newly minted I-Pad. So who better lead us out of perdition all the way back the days of wine and roses than the man who was in charge the first time around.

The Bert’s timing for a return would also chime with the times we live in. Since the election of Donald Trump we have been officially consigned to a post-truth world, where facts don’t matter and telling the truth is for losers.

Invitation to Bertie Ahern made for 'electoral reasons' https://t.co/OTnmNlhzCt pic.twitter.com/tdVatkHKBi

— Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) November 30, 2016

As most people will by now have forgotten, Mr Ahern was deemed to have conducted himself in a manner unbecoming Fianna Fail when it was ruled in 2012 that he hadn’t told the truth at the Mahon Tribunal. Now, in the current dispensation, that oul business of telling the truth is no longer obligatory in politics. What’s sauce for the leader of the free world is sauce for The Bert.

Besides, the hullabaloo that accompanied the fall out from the Mahon Tribunal surrounded a mere £215,000 that Bertie had somehow got his hands on in an unexplained manner. Since those days, the country only sits up and pays attention when the amount at issue is north of a billion or two.

The country certainly missed him during the banking crisis. After all, this was a man who didn’t trust the banks back when the rest of us mugs thought they knew what they were doing. Bertie Ahern, as Mahon found out, didn’t even have a bank account when he was the Minister for Finance. No banker would have run rings around him as they did his successors in government.

He has, of late, been making some tentative forays back into the public square. Following both the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, the Bert showed up in radio studios to interpret this scary new world for us.

He brought his experience, his Bertie-ness to the table, setting out how he would, if he were running the show, deal with the twin catastrophes. In fact, he sounded like a man who was bulling to be given one more shot at it. Now that a door has opened, let’s see if he barrels back onto the stage. Who could begrudge him one more spin on the merry-go-round? Apart from poor Michael Martin.