So long Bertie...

Why does a person turn his back and walk away from his work and his passion? What’s the turning point? Which is the moment where the adored becomes the abhorred, the passion turns cold, when enough is finally enough? You could ask Bertie Ahern. Equally, you could ask John Maughan, who retired last week as manager of the Roscommon Gaelic football team.

Maughan had achieved much with Mayo in the past. But, notwithstanding a huge and highly skilled playing population, and the capacity, on their day, to outplay everyone, Kerry included, when it really matters Mayo teams have a fatal tendency to open their shirts and guide the opponents’ blade straight to their hearts.
Not so Roscommon. Their resources are far more meagre in terms of great players and skills. But where with Mayo it’s usually about the dog in the fight, with Roscommon it’s always been about the fight in the dog. Having had his heart broken by Mayo’s capacity to implode, Maughan must have been intrigued at the prospect of working with the Roscommon Viet Cong.
It all ended badly. He became the butt of ferocious personal abuse – ‘the mean jeers of a faceless crowd’, to quote Keith Duggan in the Irish Times – and he walked away. Summarising his experience to Duggan, Maughan referred to “a cesspit of ugliness and negativity permeating across the system” (in Roscommon).
Well, I’ve news for him. It’s not just Roscommon. Indeed, in many ways it’s a pretty good way to summarise the atmosphere in Ireland these days. And not just in sport. There’s a level of viciousness, spite and bile that beggars belief…
It’s hard to date exactly when it became the dominant quality of life here but it parallels, almost perfectly, the emergence of phone-in radio as a dominant form of discourse, the (related) growth of the imported tabloid press, the rise of celebrity culture, the achievement of critical mass by blogs and the permeation of society by cocaine.
These are all closely related – but the nature of their reciprocal effects is difficult to untangle. Fair enough, it wasn’t these characteristics of the modern Ireland as such that caused Bertie Ahern to yield the flag to his anointed successor. Yet they played their part.
Everyone knew it was coming and yet nobody expected it. Some have likened his passing to a Greek tragedy. In these, we frequently find a great hero fatally compromised by a single weakness. In Bertie’s case, this weakness – if that’s the appropriate word – his inability to keep tabs on what was going in and out of a whole bagful of bank accounts. Despite his presiding over prosperity and brokering peace in Norn Iron, in the end that fatal flaw brought him down.
Maybe so. To me, though, it always seemed more like Shakespeare. Think of all the plotting, intrigue, factions and farce. In particular, there were two battles royal, firstly between Ahern and the Irish Times and secondly between Ahern and his legal team on one side and the Mahon tribunal on the other.
As regards the first of these, the old lady of Tara Street pursued the Taoiseach with a cold and steely, even venomous, determination. And it wasn’t just the investigative arm of the organisation. The paper’s commentariat went for him too, sometimes in terminology worthy of Roscommon GAA.
This was a real professional heavyweight contest. It went the full fifteen rounds. The advantage swung this way and that. There was a cast of hundreds. There were sages and mystics, poets and clowns involved. There was hubble and bubble, toil and trouble.
Mark my words, it will supplant I Keano one day.
There are some residents of Hog Haven who vote Labour and who rejoice in Ahern’s passing, but not this little particular little piggy. For the Hog, he was a classic Irish politician, a supreme fixer as well as a canny negotiator.
As he heads to Washington to address the joint Houses, it isn’t mealy mouthed at all to contemplate Ahern’s achievements. Peace in Norn Ir’n may be his lasting legacy and it’s not a bad one. Moreover, comments made by those who were actually involved in the critical negotiations (as opposed to the Greek chorus outside the buildings) make it clear just how crucial Ahern was to the positive outcome.
Through his capacity to problem solve, to relate to people, to ‘work the room’, Ahern was able to clinch a deal that had eluded everyone else for a generation. It is no small achievement and deserves more than the mean jeers of a faceless crowd.
His looseness with contributions may have been the fence over which he stumbled – but it was his decision to let tribunals, rather than the Fianna Fáil party, deal with people like Ray Burke and Charles Haughey that really did for him.
Long ago he could have, and probably should have, used the knife. But he didn’t. And in facilitating the tribunals to do the dirty deeds, not only did he fashion the process that would end his reign, he also nursed a cash cow that has firstly enriched the legal profession at our collective expense and secondly comforted the vicious and curmudgeonly amongst us. No thanks there.