by Colm Keena
Ahern’s interest in, and capacity for, retaining numbers and statistics was another aspect of his character that became apparent during his time in the tribunal’s witness box. At one point, while giving evidence about a dizzying array of transfers between his various bank accounts, he launched into a lengthy list of movements of particular stated amounts, pounds and pence—between different accounts, on stated dates—all without referring to his notes. It was an extraordinary performance. Judge Mahon put down his pen and stared at Ahern, apparently more interested in his ability to rattle off such a list than in the evidence he was giving.
His ability to make people laugh was another aspect of his character that was not generally known. During Ahern’s latter period in office this writer covered a trade mission to Saudi Arabia and Dubai, which Ahern headed. One night the Irish group found itself at a party inside the high walls of a compound in Riyadh. There was a large number of Irish and foreign business people and public servants there, and, despite Saudi Arabia’s strict rules and the presence of armed soldiers on the other side of the wall, the alcohol was flowing. I recall standing at the bar watching people in long robes ordering glasses of Paddy. When Ahern arrived he stood up on a chair and delivered an impromptu address. He was absolutely hilarious and had the crowd—myself included—in stitches. Some people had tears rolling down their cheeks he was so funny.
He repeated the performance a few days later at a reception in a hotel in Dubai. His delivery was astonishingly good. A large part of the humour came from the fact that he was the Taoiseach and he was standing up on a chair talking about the money the people in the room were earning from their exploits, about how he wouldn’t mind having some of it, how he was sure the Revenue Commissioners would be very interested to know about it, and so on. Making money and keeping it was the dominant theme, with the Revenue Commissioners—and, by implication, the state—being seen as adversaries in that enterprise. Shock at the attitude being revealed was a large part of the comic formula.
The trust that many people had in Ahern during most of his political career was attributable to the belief that he had no interest in money or personal enrichment. Events during his ministerial career such as the row over the 1993 tax amnesty, the discussion of tax breaks for the wealthy during the Fianna Fáil-Labour Party coalition and the tribunal’s concerns about tax designation all sparked less suspicion than they might otherwise have done, because people in Leinster House thought that Ahern, unlike Haughey, had no interest in money. Ruairí Quinn, who was in government with Ahern when Ahern was Minister for Finance, said his view that Ahern had no interest in money meant that he tended not to wonder whether Ahern was corrupt.
I never got a sense that he had a hunger for money. The revelations subsequently came as a big surprise to me. The only correlation that came to me was George Redmond. George would eat his lunch out of a drawer. He loved the comfort of having the money. You just don’t know with Bertie what it was. The volume of money that was going through those accounts, when you place it in the context of the times, was enormous, and yet he didn’t seem to be the beneficiary of it or to live a life-style remotely like Haughey—or anybody else, for that matter.
The tribunal sessions changed many people’s views about Ahern in this regard. Instead of being uninterested in money he was in fact very interested in it and hugely impressed by—if not in awe of—those who had a lot of it. Furthermore, he appears to have had a sense of grievance that so many people were getting rich while he, in the Department of the Taoiseach, was merely being paid a few hundred thousand a year. Joan Burton believes this to be so and that it was a view shared by many of those involved in the running of the country during the boom years.
Both Burton and Brady make the point that from early on in his political career Ahern arrived at a point where most of his expenses were covered. He didn’t have to run a car or buy his meals; even socialising and attending sports events could be paid for by others. Both believe that he must have accumulated a vast amount of money. (There is no evidence of his doing anything with it, and he may well have left it in deposit accounts.) Burton says Ahern would not be alone in Leinster House with regard to accumulating money. Miriam Lord thought she noticed in Ahern an interest in luxury that was at odds with his public persona.
Ahern appears to have particularly enjoyed the company of wealthy property developers and builders, many of whom came from modest backgrounds—something that must have influenced his views on the management of the economy, the construction sector, property-based tax breaks and so on. He was less comfortable in the presence of old money or of people who came from privileged backgrounds. There was a view in Leinster House that Ahern resented Fianna Fáil blue-bloods, such as members of the Lenihan and Andrews families, and was less inclined to promote them. In general, many people feel that Ahern suffered from a sense of insecurity and resentment. This may in part explain his enormous ambition and political drive. Lord, who herself came from close to where both Haughey and Ahern grew up, used to get irritated by the inferiority complex she felt that both men had.
I always thought there was something not quite believable about the whole image of the young fella from Dublin, the working-class hero. When he went abroad he always stayed in the best hotels. And he was always very dazzled by those who had money and by people who were in showbiz. For a guy who professed to only like the simple things in life he seemed, from the Galway tent [the hospitality tent at the Galway Races] onwards, to like to be among those who liked the opposite: the trappings of wealth.
I often wondered if that [his awe of people who had money] was an inferiority complex and was that what he had in common with Charlie Haughey. There was a sort of uneasiness with people who didn’t seem to have a problem with their position and with people who had money and seemed at ease with it, and you wondered did he want to be like that, and couldn’t.
The Dublin Fianna Fáil activist Joe Tierney said this was something he raised with Ahern early on in his political career.
I said to him, ‘What’s wrong with you, Bertie, is you are too insecure.’ He was the most insecure man that God ever put on this earth, and this is what drove him all the time. Whatever it was happened to him in his past life, I don’t know.
He added that you could ‘have fifteen conversations with him, and every one of them would be about Bertie.’
Gerald Kenny was struck by the similarities between Haughey and Ahern. They were both driven by a desire for power and were without mercy. He thinks Ahern understood Haughey from early on and modelled himself on him. ‘He would talk about Haughey’s shrewdness, his ability to do deals, his work ethic. Because Ahern was a workaholic, really.’ Both were interested in money, though with Haughey it was used to buy the good things in life and to aggrandise himself. Ahern had different issues with money, but they were both really motivated by power. ‘A lot of people I knew were in the party because they thought that was the best way to run the country and was in the interests of everybody. But once Haughey took over it all began to change. Bertie was a direct continuation of that.’
For Tierney and Kenny, Haughey and Ahern between them brought about the collapse of Fianna Fáil’s dominance in Irish politics. According to Tierney, Haughey allowed corruption to flourish because this protected him from his own corrupt acts. The years of scandal were noticed by the electorate, but the effect was muted until the economy collapsed. Once the economy faltered, however, the result was the party’s miserable performance in the 2011 general election.
On the day of the election, according to Tierney, he received a phone call from the candidate Mary Fitzpatrick that prompted him to go to Stoneybatter, where Ahern was standing on the street close to a polling station hoping that his presence would encourage people to vote for Fitzpatrick’s competitor for party votes in the constituency, Cyprian Brady. Tierney flew into a temper when he saw Ahern’s state car sitting nearby.
I said, ‘Are you a fucking headcase? Is there something wro
ng with you? Your fucking state car! There are people in there [O’Devaney Gardens] who haven’t a bit to eat this morning. And the fucking state car!’ I said to him, ‘You fucked up the whole country, you fucked the party up, and you have the state car in the most deprived area in the place.’ He said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
During Ahern’s period as Taoiseach he had an enormous media presence, and he became a type of presidential figure, almost above politics. His press operation was formidable. He avoided serious current-affairs programmes and forums where he could be subjected to any sort of sustained questioning. Reporters were told where he was due to be appearing that day and would assemble—most often outside—to get a few lines from him on the way in. This was particularly important for broadcast reporters. Whatever the issue of the moment was would be put to him, and he would give his prepared response and then go into whatever function he was attending. His response, therefore, would often be the first item on television and radio, as it gave a fresh opening to the broadcasters’ reports. And so he managed to be prominent in the media without being subjected to questioning by it.
Over time his press-handlers developed a system whereby they would ask the reporters beforehand what they were going to ask him so that he could consider his response. Some reporters objected to this, but the broadcast reporters were under pressure to get hourly updates on the stories of the day, and a comment from the Taoiseach was important to them in that regard. There was pressure on them to play ball. According to Lord, who attended many of these ‘doorsteps’, Ahern developed a strong dislike for reporters who asked him hard questions, but he went to great lengths not to show it.
The reporters would ask the agreed questions, and then when they had something in the can they would ask the hard question. Some hacks were more liable to ask the hard questions than others, and it soon became known from sources close to him that he absolutely detested those particular journalists. And yet when he met those journalists it was always a matter of great hilarity that he would go out of his way to be particularly nice to them when everybody knew he hated them. Ursula Halligan [of TV3] was a case in point. He hated Ursula. She didn’t care, and he knew that. His unique charm didn’t work.
While Ahern gave the impression of being amiable and relaxed, his press agents were often under great pressure. When he had been questioned in a way he did not like, the press secretary would often get it in the neck afterwards. Likewise, the press secretary might try to lay into the journalist beforehand to try and stop him or her from asking a particularly awkward question. According to Lord, the press secretary ‘would have no compunction about ringing up people and absolutely tearing the head off them, and then you’d meet the boss five minutes later and it was like nothing had ever happened.’
Lord says Ahern spent his Thursdays canvassing around the country and his Fridays canvassing in Dublin. The country visits received huge coverage in the local media. The party press office didn’t want the Dublin media covering the country canvasses, because it didn’t want the local media being told that Ahern’s visit to whatever constituency it might be was a type of pro forma event that was being repeated every week. The Dublin media engaged to some extent in a cat-and-mouse game in which they would seek to find out where Ahern was going to be that Thursday and Ahern’s press people would try to keep the venues secret. On occasion there were minor scandals when the Dublin media reported on the speed at which Ahern’s convoys sped along country roads. According to Lord, ‘he was on a permanent canvass around the state, and it worked really well for him—really pissed off the opposition.’ After he resigned, a senior figure in the Cowen Government privately expressed the view that the country was paying dearly for having a Taoiseach who was so heavily involved in near-permanent canvassing.
Ahern had charm, drive, stamina and patience. Brady believed he was vain, liked publicity, liked having his picture in the newspapers, liked being popular. He spent the bulk of his adult life in the glare of the media, and he certainly gave the impression of enjoying it. After his public image was damaged by the revelations about his personal finances, he at times made his dislike of the media plain and lowered his guard to display sulkiness and self-pity. In an extended interview with Ursula Halligan on TV3 after he had left office, Ahern articulated a sense of grievance and failed to assert his political achievements. Asked at the end of the interview if it had all been worth it, he said he wasn’t sure.
One can only imagine what it does to a person to be constantly in the public gaze, to have to assert bonhomie at all times, to pretend to be optimistic and outgoing and friendly when in fact you are insecure or worried or angry. Some in Leinster House came to dislike Ahern because of the endless succession of friendly greetings, comments about sports events and so on, which were false insofar as he had no real interest in the people he was greeting. However, others appreciated the effort, the short pauses for brief conversations, the ability to remember names. Greg Sparks was once at a race meeting and found himself near Ahern. He introduced his wife and daughter, and during the very brief encounter Ahern remarked to Sparks’s daughter Alannah that she was nothing like her sister Billy. (They have different colour hair.) When Sparks got home he asked Billy if she’d ever met Ahern, and she said she hadn’t. Then she remembered that she’d been at an official function in Na Fianna GAA club some months earlier and had been one of many who had shaken Ahern’s hand as he worked the room. She had introduced herself; he had asked if she was related to Greg Sparks, and she had said she was his daughter. That was the extent of the encounter, and months later, during another brief encounter, Ahern had been able to recall her name and to note her sister’s different hair colour.
Miriam Lord had covered Ahern as a reporter since his days in the Mansion House, and she never noticed any change in him over the years, despite the years in power, the civil servants seeking to please him and the fawning backbenchers and councillors hoping for advancement.
I never saw any change in him. Even when he became Taoiseach he was always very accessible to us, always very affable. No matter what you wrote about him he never got annoyed. In fact he’d make a point of seeking you out when you were hiding because of something you’d written; he would go out of his way to find you and be nice to you, to make you feel even worse, which was actually a great trick, because you’d feel less inclined to go hard on him the next time.
Up to the very end, when things got very bad at the tribunal, he remained very accessible, very affable. Even on the day he left government he came over to me, said, ‘Thanks for everything, no hard feelings, you were only doing your job.’ But there was another character there, whom we never got to see.
She pointed out that Ahern’s daughters were bright and attractive children who managed being in the limelight with their famous father with great grace and skill. They were a credit to Ahern as a father.
No-one I spoke to had any suggestion to make as to why Bertie Ahern was such a driven politician or why he wanted to be in politics at all. Pat Rabbitte professed to having been always fascinated by Ahern.
He was single-mindedly focused on politics like nobody I ever encountered before. Everything he did was a political action. The much-vaunted Manchester United fan, the Dubs aficionado—it was all a political action; going to Parnell Park or Croker. I’m not saying he didn’t enjoy seeing the Dubs, but it was a political action.
He believed that for Ahern being in politics, ‘being Bertie and functioning as Bertie’, became a type of addiction. He recalled one Christmas when there was nothing much happening and then Ahern popped up commentating on English soccer for Setanta Sports. ‘Nothing for two days but Bertie in his jumper commenting on the Premiership. They showed it over and over again. How could you compete with that?’
The disclosures that came from the Mahon Tribunal changed people’s view. Ruairí Quinn was shocked, in part because he had never noticed a hunger for money in Ahern. Lord felt angry when she heard the evide
nce. ‘When you think that someone who was in charge of running the country . . . was accepting money . . . which is what happened from the very start.’
Ahern’s performance in the witness box, and the evidence that emerged from it, drew a picture of a wary man constantly mulling over potential dangers, making preparations for dealing with these dangers should they ever arise. Yet even as he was giving his evidence, it was clear that the man in the witness box had presided over a bubble economy and had overseen a period of economic management so disastrous that western Europe’s star economic performer was about to again become the dunce.
For Pat Rabbitte there is no paradox here, nothing to be explained. Ahern’s wariness was about politics but also about self-protection, and it goes back to the corrosive influence of Haughey. A number of people around Haughey knew what was going on, according to Rabbitte.
Bertie’s wariness in the witness box was a wariness about his own protection. I never recall him demonstrating a similar wariness about where the economy might go, and I rationalise that along the lines that very, very few politicians in Leinster House would have been able to carry around in their stomachs what Bertie Ahern carried around during his period as leader.
He never told the tribunal anything that he wasn’t sure they knew already. That was the way he treated them: tease out what do they know, and, who knows, next weekend it might be different. A challenge in the High Court might be successful, something might happen, one of the beaks might tumble over and die—who knows? He played it right up to the wire, and that’s why he finally became so disorientated during the 2007 election. He felt that it was catching up with him.