It would be very nice if one of our Taoiseach's former admirers, now dripping disillusionment, wrote a novel about him. Robert Harris, once a flag-waver for Tony Blair's New Labour, has done just that. Presumably our disillusioned former flag-wavers are too frightened. I know I am.
It may be that no one would believe a book based on the facts of Bertie's life - that is, if the facts of Bertie's life could ever be established. It isn't that the rise of such a clever, charming and ruthless man is unusual in either the real or fictional worlds. It's just that the motivation of the main character would be hard for any reader to understand.
Things just kind of happen to Bertie: tribunals, blank cheques, suitcases full of cash. It is for this reason that the best way to tackle a novel about Bertie Ahern might be to make him tell the story himself, as Phoenix magazine does in De Diary of a Nortsoide Taoiseach. In the book, too, Bertie could be a naive narrator guiding us through a venal world. A bit like Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, whose gentleman friend, Mr Eisman, keeps her supplied with diamonds in return for unspecified favours. At least that's what it is beginning to feel like.
Harris's book, called The Ghost, is much more serious. A nameless biographer, more used to writing the life stories of soccer players and rock stars, is brought in to complete the memoirs of a recently retired British prime minister. This last, called Adam Lang, is charming but vain, a photogenic man who was once an enthusiastic student actor at a Cambridge college. Lang is now charged with war crimes, as a result of his political relationship with an incompetent American president. The man who had previously been commissioned to ghost-write the charming prime minister's memoirs has just been found dead.
Here we have the beginnings of an interesting thriller, of the type that Harris himself delivers so well. But the difference here is that this book seems to have been written in a white heat of anger. Harris is strongly opposed to Britain's involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which he sees as shameful kowtowing to the United States. On a more personal note, he was enraged by Blair's treatment of Peter Mandelson, a close friend of Harris's whom he believes was unfairly dismissed - the second time he was forced to resign - from the Labour government he had helped bring to power.
There are a couple of things we'd have to change for the Bertie version. For one thing, the outrage and debate within Lang's own party over what is seen as his supine attitude to the US. At one point a sceptical foreign secretary says: "Name me one decision that Adam Lang took as prime minister that wasn't in the interests of the USA."
In Ireland we have never bothered launching such a futile quest. As a poor country struggling for survival, it could have been argued, we did not have the luxury of asking such questions. But it might be difficult to explain to an international readership just how extraordinarily uninterested we are in exactly who or what has been flown through Shannon by the American military. Any thriller writer worth his or her salt would start speculating about whether any of the mercenaries employed by the Blackwater security company - currently being investigated by a congressional committee - has ever enjoyed a cigarette in Shannon's smoking enclosure. (The Department of Transport says it has received no requests from Blackwater regarding the transport of military equipment through Shannon. Blackwater is classed as a civilian company, and if it flies on civilian aircraft it is not obliged to notify the department of any refuelling stops.)
The other thing we lack for a decent thriller about Bertie is not, strangely, plot: we have too much plot; actually, we have plot coming out our ears. It is anger we are short of. No matter how irritated and even contemptuous we have become about Bertie, it is difficult to find anyone with enough rage even to sustain them through the marathon of writing a paperback diatribe against him.
What with declaring himself to be a socialist, and denying that the friends who were kind enough to lend him money were business people, and virtuously pointing out that any speculation about what the late Charles Haughey had done would be "wrong on people who are in the grave and it's wrong on people who are not in the grave", Bertie would have you fairly worn out.
Truly it was one of Joe Higgins's more inspired moments when he said that trying to get answers out of Bertie was like playing handball against a haystack. It is unlikely that even a conscientious professional like Harris could write a thriller about a haystack. Which means that we'll have to go the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes route.
Our heroine, Lorelei Lee, having started out her existence in a book, then became the subject of a very successful musical. Now there is a format we could work with.