FORMER TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern has said he feels sorry for builders who have “lost their shirts” in the recession.
Stressing that they employed 270,000 people in the Irish economy, he said he knew a lot of them, including Seán Dunne and the Baileys.
“You meet the Baileys at Croke Park every time you go there. You can’t avoid getting a slap on the back going in from them. Most of these guys lost their shirt. I feel sorry for them,” he said.
But he said it was untrue that the Fianna Fáil tent at the Galway races was full of big developers. The best year for the tent was 2005 and only 19 of the 635 people in it on the main day of the races that year, he asserts, could be classified as developers or big builders. Another 30 could be considered builders “and the rest are the fellas you’d get in to do a small job on your house”.
Mr Ahern’s remarks appeared in a newspaper interview in advance of the publication of his autobiography next week.
He also said that even if Ray Burke had told him about the money he received from builders he may still have appointed him minister for foreign affairs after the 1997 general election. “I think the problem with Ray was if he had just told me the whole story at the start I could have managed it . . . I often think that I still could have appointed him,” he said.
But in an extract from his forthcoming book, also published by the Sunday Times yesterday, he seemed to contradict this. He writes in his book that the appointment of Burke to his first cabinet “turned out to be one of the biggest misjudgements of my political career”.
In the book Mr Ahern also notes that he even asked the then Garda commissioner Pat Byrne if there was anything questionable in the Garda’s examination of planning irregularities in North Dublin with regard to Burke before he appointed him to Cabinet. “He was categorical that there was not.”
The planning tribunal found in 2001 that Burke, who had to resign from foreign affairs, received numerous corrupt payments from business friends during a lengthy political career. He was jailed in 2005 for tax offences.
Meanwhile, Mr Ahern also reveals in his book that two-thirds of EU leaders were encouraging him to run for the presidency of the European Commission in 2004 after Ireland’s six-month presidency of the European Council.
“Blair was very supportive, as were Schröder and Chirac. Even Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, who many thought wanted the job for himself, telephoned to say that he would declare immediately for me if I said I wanted it.
“The question was, did I? There’s no doubt I gave it serious thought,” he writes.
“In the end, I decided no. Partly it was because I thought there was still a job to be done at home. Living in Brussels didn’t appeal much, and while president of the commission was a good job, it was also a thankless one.”
As to whether Charlie McCreevy jumped before he was pushed when he left to become Ireland’s EU Commissioner in 2004, he says Mr McCreevy had asked for the job months earlier. If he hadn’t taken the job Mr Ahern said he would have offered it to the late Séamus Brennan.