No person should have to go through what Bertie Ahern endured in the weeks leading up to the general election, Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Brian Cowen said yesterday.
Speaking in the "John Healy debate" at the Humbert School in Ballina, Mr Cowen said a lot could be learned from the public's "balanced and reflective response" to the controversies that affected Mr Ahern.
"It remains a fact that confidential material was selectively leaked . . . with the sole intent of causing Bertie Ahern significant electoral damage. Only material which might cause damage was leaked, while other material was withheld," he said.
However, "after 10 years, the public know him pretty well by now and they understand that he is not motivated by personal gain. They have seen the progress made under his leadership. He has never been a specialist in the soundbite approach to politics, but he has more than made up for this in the substance of his achievements," he said.
Mr Cowen said two detailed analyses of the 2007 general election campaign by RTÉ and Media Market "show a picture of at times relentlessly negative coverage for Fianna Fáil. Equally clear from this publicly available research is the softness of the coverage of Fine Gael in general and their leader in particular."
He said that following the election in May "what we now know for sure is that there is a major gap between the manner and content of much political debate, and an electorate which is operating on a much more sophisticated and independent level".
Every serious survey had shown that when directly faced with a choice of either Bertie Ahern or Enda Kenny for the position of Taoiseach, the public went overwhelmingly for Bertie Ahern, he said.
"They did so in spite of the unprecedented pressure which he had come through in the first weeks of the campaign. The public showed that they have an innate sense of fair play and perspective which is willing to hear all the information before reaching a conclusion."
The party leaders' debate on RTÉ television between Mr Ahern and Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny was "a serious debate about substantive matters", Mr Cowen said.
"It was also a very unusual occasion by being a genuinely mass political event. Over 1 million people watched it, and the 62 per cent rating it received is very rare in modern elections."
No one now could seriously question that the Taoiseach dismantled Fine Gael's election strategy that night, he said.
"The general failure of the media to understand the impact of the debate should raise more questions than it has. Leaving aside the few who actually called the debate for Enda Kenny, the consensus was that nothing much had happened," he said.
He believed this reflected an attachment to "what the Americans refer to as an 'inside the beltway' " approach to politics. In the Irish context, this is a view that what matters most is the received wisdom of those who spend all day talking about politics.
"This received wisdom had it that Enda Kenny and Fine Gael had broken through to the public and that Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fáil were fatally wounded . . . the immediate post-debate assessment merely reflected the same interpretation which had become dominant in recent years."
He recalled that, according to The Irish Times polls between April 26th and May 21st, Fianna Fáil gained 7 per cent and Fine Gael lost 4 per cent.
"This was an unprecedented swing for an election campaign. I believe that some of this swing would have occurred before the campaign if the scrutiny which the Taoiseach subjected the opposition's policies to in the debate had been part of the coverage in the weeks and years before the election."
The leaders' debate "marked a victory of substance over style and it exposed a general failure to understand that the Irish public refuses to conform to a superficial view of how they see politics and politicians," he said.
As regards the current economic situation he said that through recent downturns "Ireland suffered less . . . than most countries because we kept our focus on the long-term.
"The old model where the State attempted to control every short-term economic change failed here as it has ultimately failed everywhere it has been tried." The priority was to increase the productive capacity of the economy, he said.