Mick Clifford: Micheál Martin sidelined Bertie Ahern just as Bertie ditched Albert Reynolds
28 years later: Ahead of the 1997 presidential election, Bertie Ahern purported to support Albert Reynolds for the FF nomination but was actually canvassing for an 'outsider', Mary McAleese, who won the nomination and the election. File picture: Leon Farrell/Photocall
There is something sad in seeing a footballer go on longer than they should. It might become apparent through a missed tackle, a hopelessly stray pass, an incapacity to do at all what they once did with aplomb.
That’s the sign that the game is well and truly up.
Bertie Ahern was a handy enough footballer but he was superlative at the game of politics. Leave aside for a moment governing, or finances, or telling the truth to a tribunal, and consider him exclusively as a practitioner of politics in its purest form.
He knew when to hold and when to fold. He was often two steps ahead of colleagues or opponents.
On occasion, if a knife had to be plunged between shoulder blades, he purported to do it heavy with regret. He had a rare capacity to keep his ego in check in pursuit of a greater goal.
His political nous was a key feature of the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement. In some ways, he was masterful.
So it was sad to see his performance at an event to commemorate Éamon de Valera last Friday.
Bertie told the gathered media about his travails with the Fianna Fáil leadership in his now abandoned attempt to run for president.
He met senior figures in the party last December and asked one question, he said.
“The question I was asking was would the leadership back me,” he said.
He requested an answer by Easter. Nothing came back. He asked again in April. Nothing. A meeting was arranged with the party’s general secretary. That was postponed.
He asked in June. He asked in July.
“They said they’d definitely give it to me before I went to Kerry,” he said. Bertie goes to Kerry in early August every year.
Still nothing from HQ, no white smoke, no carrier pigeon dispatched to Drumcondra, no word conveyed through a chain of party activists. They left him twisting in the wind.
He sounded bereft at the treatment he, a party grandee, had received.
He’s not out, he said. So, up to this week he was technically still in the race — but in reality he was finished.
It was sad enough that he put himself through eight months of that rigmarole. Much sadder that he felt compelled to relate publicly how he had repeatedly returned with a begging bowl to officers and politicians of a party over which he once had total and unassailable control.
The Bertie in his prime would have asked for a reply by March and when it wasn’t forthcoming would have known what exactly the answer was.
He wouldn’t have bothered thereafter and instead focused his energies elsewhere. He would only have related publicly his treatment if there was something to be gained by it.
But, leaving all that aside, surely he can remember 1997 when he occupied the role Micheál Martin does today, and Albert Reynolds wanted to be president, just as Bertie has his eye on that prize today.
We don’t know how many times or in what form the late Mr Reynolds conveyed his wishes to Bertie.
What we do know is that when the parliamentary party was voting to nominate either Reynolds or Mary McAleese, Bertie showed Albert his ballot paper to assure the former taoiseach that he had Bertie’s vote.
When Albert mentioned this to his friend in the room, Brian Crowley, the then MEP in the Munster constituency replied: “You’re finished now.”
Crowley knew that Bertie would only show Albert the ballot paper if he was full sure that his henchmen had organised that McAleese was so far ahead Bertie could afford to perform the little charade. At least today Martin didn’t put Bertie through that.
The Bertie in his prime would have been totally appreciative of why Martin has opted for an outsider, Jim Gavin, to run.
In 1997, Bertie pulled Mary McAleese out of a hat because he thought she could win and Albert could not.
So it goes with the dilemma for today’s Taoiseach, except the route to victory is a lot steeper.
When Albert wanted to run, Fianna Fáil could command around 40% of the vote, enough to put any candidate with a pulse into contention.
Today, its base support is 20%. Whatever misgivings Bertie had about Albert getting over the line in 1997, Martin must have had far more doubts about Bertie, with all his baggage, doing so this year.
McAleese winning the presidential election was a confidence-booster for Fianna Fáil.
Six months previously, it had won a general election and the economy was going gangbusters. At that point in time, Bertie was in his element, with a coterie of senior politicians around him and, at a further remove, a few young guns, including his 37-year-old education minister, Micheál Martin.
The current Taoiseach has never related whether he was one of those dispatched by Bertie to quietly and assiduously canvass the parliamentary party on behalf of McAleese in 1997.
But, one way or the other, Martin was there. He learned from the master how these things work.
Nothing personal, just business.
All these years later, he is doing as his former master did, sorting things out so the party has the best shot at getting its candidate over the line.
The surprise is that Bertie couldn’t see that. Or, if he could, why he didn’t cop early this year that his presidential goose was already well and truly cooked.
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