41 Bertie Ahern

Bertie may be the last of our leaders whom, instinctively and with ironic good humour, we refer to by his Christian name. Bertie. Albert. Charlie. Garret. All four names have a resonance in Irish politics, echoing backwards over three decades when first names carried significance beyond mere familiarity. This was a period of Irish life which may retrospectively be identified as falling between the reign of the austere father-figure (Dev/Lemass/ the Cosgraves) and the coming time of the mere administrator, a period when leaders were lifted up by the force of personal radiance as much as by aptitude or an appetite for power. The coherence of this theory is challenged by a single exception: John Bruton, always ‘Bruton’, a man who was only partly the victim of a ubiquitous Christian name. He was also a Taoiseach out of sync, never having achieved a popular mandate, and, moreover, seeming to point to that future time when an air of uncharismatic competence would be the defining quality of leadership. Bertie’s successor would never be ‘Brian’, but ‘Cowen’ or ‘Biffo’.

The Bertiness of Bertie, like the Charliness of Charlie, and the Garretness of Garret, is something we’re inclined to take for granted. These men did not rise to the top on the basis of ability alone, but more on their capacity to inspire liking, affection, even a kind of love, by insinuating a more intimate relationship with the voter by tapping into an instinctive connection with a deeper culture.

Most Irish people who were around during the recession of the 1980s regarded the Celtic Tiger as a fraud or an accident. It didn’t seem natural or real. Even those who came to embrace it could not quite shake off the suspicion that it had little to do with those guys grinning down from election posters. The thing about Bertie was that he didn’t seem to know what was happening either, but somehow came to personify our sense of growing optimism and glee. Although he made interventions from time to time implying that he knew what was going on, nobody ever took these too seriously.

Something changed, then, when we lost faith in Bertie, and it may take a while to perceive exactly what. The disappointment we felt at the end was not merely on account of his failures, which emerged, in retrospect, as legion. It went much deeper than that. Bertie had seemed to have it all sussed. He seemed to do things effortlessly, to possess a sure touch that not merely reassured us as to his competence but made us think that our big mistake all along had been that we were too inclined to see the glass as half empty.

Bertie, with his genius for malapropism, his talent for the unfinished sentence, his mastery of scrambled syntax, radiated something beyond competence, beyond even affability. He created a unique connection with the Irish people by seeming to be remarkably unremarkable in almost every way. He did not draw attention to himself, except by being there, somewhat bemused and diffident, the sheepish Taoiseach. The breadth of his gift for politics was equalled only by its invisibility. Sometimes it seemed that the artifice might be about to reveal itself, but such moments were always ambiguous and fleeting. Bertie was Bertie, and, even though this condition baffled every attempt at description, we fancied we had come to comprehend how it moved and what it meant.

Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair, the two leaders on these neighbouring islands in the boom times coinciding with the advent of the third millennium, were stars in bright skies, both belonging more to show business than politics. The external conditions somehow conspired to ensure that both could shine, that nothing could break the illusion of the performance. Blair and Ahern made it look easy in a way that Brown and Cowen, even given similar conditions, would have been unable to match. Things might have gone just as swimmingly, but we would not have felt quite so self-satisfied about it.

Bertie and the way he might look at you. Bertie, who made it all seem so easy. Bertie, who might tell the odd porky, but wouldn’t do you a bad turn.

Stay cool, he seemed to say, in the very timbre of his voice. So, we stayed cool and started to believe in the miracle. What did Bertie stand for? Erm? What were his guiding ideas? Dunno. Bertie took the helm at a time when all the pieces were clicking together. He held the tiller steady enough to see out his own time before the whole thing went mushroom-shaped.

For just over a decade, Bertie Ahern grinned down at us as if to say: ‘Jaze, who’dave ever’ve taut it’d get so good?’ And then the bills came in.

There is a fantastic gothic novel by Patrick McGrath called Dr Haggard’s Disease, in which the eponymous protagonist, lovesick and isolated, goes slowly insane. Early in the story he seems perfectly stable, but by the end is clearly barking. And yet there is no clear tipping point, no definitive event, epitomizing or signalling a clear beginning to this process. By the time it begins to dawn on the reader that this character has actually been mad from the beginning, there is a sense not only of being taken in but of actually being conjoined in the doctor’s madness.

The Bertie Ahern saga is like that. At the outset of his joust with the Mahon Tribunal, when his explanations for his sudden windfalls of unaccounted and unbanked cash tended to hinge on the breakdown of his marriage, it was perhaps understandable that people would support him. Things began to get a little flaky after that, but still, in a certain light, his accounts of his bookkeeping and banking practices fell within the bounds of comprehensibility for those of us who can’t remember what we did with our wages last month, never mind a decade ago. Comprehensible, that is, provided you soft-focused the fact that, at all relevant times, Bertie was the Minister for Finance.

And if you took into account, as he never tired of hinting, that the tribunal process was driven by his political enemies, the idea of Bertie as persecuted innocent had a degree of plausibility. But inexorably the inconsistencies piled up and his multiple-choice explanations created a gridlock of scepticism that gradually vindicated those who had proposed a simple explanation from the beginning: Bertie was as dodgy as a nine-euro note.

Bertie’s mentor and notorious predecessor, Charles Haughey, was, in a certain sense, corrupt, but he was also unlucky. Bertie was lucky enough to lead in tumultuous times, which meant that he created a vast credit of indulgence for when the tribunal came knocking. Interestingly, the growing public incredulity concerning his evidence seemed to parallel pretty precisely the ominous rumblings of the coming recession.

While everything was going well, a little bit of how’s-your-father may have seemed like grease for the wheels of development and prosperity. But, with the boom over and a growing sense that we have little enough to show for it, there began to develop a palpable public feeling that, as the story of Bertie’s financial misadventures essayed a slow slide into farce, we were watching a dramatization of something much larger and much more ominous.

At each stage of the story, until the very end, it had been possible to leave open the merest chink of doubt. Taken in isolation, every one of his explanations had a certain ring of plausibility, though for those who zeroed in on the detail, the big picture became increasingly and embarrassingly irrefutable. Finally, as Bertie straightfacedly told the tribunal about his incredible run of betting coups and windfalls, the penny began to drop for even the most myopically loyal. The cats’ laughter from the gallery in Dublin Castle, as Bertie sought to weave yet another version of his financial good fortune, provided a most articulate summary of public attitudes. Before long, the implosion of the economy seemed to replicate the mess of Bertie’s personal finances, and we came to the ineluctable conclusions.

In the end we regarded him much as the wife and children of a polygamist might do on hearing that Daddy had four other families in various parts of the city. Our affection for Bertie had been total at times. And so the emergence of the truth about his miraculous powers meant, really, that we could never love again.