Leo Varadkar should have prepared a different answer last week when asked about the truthfulness of Fianna Fáil’s latest recruit. The question about Bertie Ahern’s risible claims at the Mahon tribunal was predictable, provoked by the kind of political gotcha question guaranteed to tickle any reporter.
Approaching the sensitive 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement and given his party’s mutual dependence on Fianna Fáil, how would this guarded, statesmanlike 44-year-old Taoiseach react when confronted with the words of his 30-year-old newbie TD self? The one who in 2008 eviscerated Bertie Ahern’s claim to big wins on the horses as “the [convicted drug dealer] John Gilligan defence”?
His 2023 reply, “you know, I think that was at a particular point in time”, was vacuous.
Varadkar the novice, blurty TD was bang on the nose 14 years earlier of course. Ahern’s tribunal defence had been jaw-droppingly shameless. For 2023, a more considered reply to the question might be, “well, you know the best politicians are not necessarily the most admirable human beings” – before noting as he did, correctly, the totality of Ahern’s career as one of the architects of the Belfast Agreement.
[ Miriam Lord’s week: Bertie Ahern is happy, he enjoys the attention. He misses itOpens in new window ]
The two parts of the reply would have been perfectly consistent for then and now. High-stakes negotiations and their often repulsive compromises often require the input of imperfect human beings.
The Belfast Agreement demanded a high price of us all in terms of early prisoner releases, the concession of key constitutional claims and crates of moral fudge. In its various fudgy components, it demonstrated the cunning of Mother McCree’s dog, the mutt derided for its habit of going a bit of the road with everyone.
Ahern instinctively understood that. To stop the bloody slaughter, every party had to come away with something.
We’ve had enough brutal incidents and insights since to remind us of those times and to build an appreciation of the skilled negotiators who are prepared to leave ego outside the door (no small feat for politicians) and absorb the waves of provocation, obfuscation and whataboutery while exercising infinite patience, political calculation and engendering trust, not to mention the ability to plant ideas in protagonists’ heads which they come to believe are their own. Or as he described it to me in a 2009 interview, “What you have to do is try and pull people together, and sometimes you have to persuade them of your things but you almost have to make them feel that they’re saying them rather than you’re saying them.”
How many of us could hack it? Moral outrage and/or an allergy to sanctimonious wafflers and hectoring ideologues would probably have us yanked from the session within 20 minutes. You don’t have to be a morally dubious, Machiavellian operator to do it of course but it helps.
Ahern took exception to having his mediation skills – and, by extension, his role in the Belfast Agreement – described as the traits of a man with no convictions to begin with.
But until such face-offs are capable of being sorted by chat bots, all these traits will matter – and the best of negotiators, as Varadkar could have said, will rarely be the most admirable human beings.
What Varadkar or Ahern will never say – because they’re politicians – is that the voting public also have a case to answer. The appalled, eye-rolling reaction to Ahern’s resuscitation last week is a timely reminder of the electorate’s short memory.
When Varadkar, still in opposition, was hammering his j’accuse into the Dáil record in 2008, it was in the context of Ahern’s recent resignation, forced by the continuing effluent from the tribunal.
But the plain fact is that less than a year before, despite the wall-to-wall tribunal coverage and a plainly stumbling economy, Irish voters had swept Ahern’s Fianna Fáil to an unprecedented third election victory with an extraordinary 42 per cent of the vote. Repeat: 42 per cent.
[ Why has Bertie Ahern suddenly rejoined Fianna Fáil, and why should we care?Opens in new window ]
How many of last week’s eye-rollers now remember that that election was about housing – as in ensuring the continuing rise in the price of houses? Or that the pivotal voter in that election was Breakfast Roll Man who pulled a handbrake turn a week beforehand and won it for Bertie?
“The reason is very clear,” wrote David McWilliams a few days later. “Breakfast Roll Man does not do ideology. He does pragmatism. He votes for whoever he believes will keep the show on the road and Bertie is this man at the moment... He will drop Fianna Fáil as soon as the fall in the price of houses becomes more apparent. This allows him to ignore the realities of today. Bertie is the custodian of the future. He is the dream keeper.”
The people voted for him, said McWilliams, because under Ahern “a new social contract had evolved between the State and the citizen, based entirely on the continuing rise in the price of houses…”
About 17 months later and just a few months after young Varadkar’s onslaught on Ahern, the Lehman collapse would tip the global economy into disaster and Breakfast Roll Man would be rebranded as a “lost generation”.
[ Still 75 ‘ghost estates’ left over from property crashOpens in new window ]
It’s a given that the resuscitation of Bertie Ahern is of little interest to anyone beyond a certain cohort of old Fianna Fáil and is an embarrassment to many. But of all the eye-rollers this past week, how many of them now remember holding their noses and voting with the breakfast roll boys, back when it really mattered?