Read Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money Online

Authors: Colm Keena

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Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (28 page)

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The Fianna Fáil campaign was such a success that poll results, published on 15 May, two days before election day, showed that Ahern was almost certain to be re-elected Taoiseach and that there was a real prospect that he would be leading a single-party Government. The support for Ahern was spread right across the electorate, to the extent that for 39 per cent of Fine Gael voters he was the preferred choice for Taoiseach. Labour Party voters preferred Ahern to Noonan by a factor of three, and twice as many Labour Party voters indicated that they would transfer to Fianna Fáil as would transfer to Fine Gael.

It was at this late stage that McDowell made what many believe was a key intervention. He shimmied up a lamppost in Ranelagh with a new poster that attacked not the opposition but his coalition partner, Fianna Fáil.
One-party Government? No thanks!
shouted the poster, which received widespread media coverage, not least because McDowell was an Attorney-General inviting the electorate not to trust the majority party of the Government of which he was still a member.

Ahern came tantalisingly close to winning Fianna Fáil’s first absolute majority since 1977. To do so required 83 seats, and in the 2002 election it won 81. It increased its representation by 8 seats, while the
PD
s doubled its representation to 8. Fine Gael performed disastrously, losing 23 seats, so that it held only 31; it changed leader again afterwards, replacing Noonan with Enda Kenny. The Labour Party trod water, at 20 seats, with the Green Party increasing its power threefold, to 6 deputies. Sinn Féin reaped the benefits of the peace process and grew from 1 to 5. Independents went from 11 to 14. They included Michael Lowry, who, despite having accepted money from businessmen while in office, having cheated on his taxes and having misled the Dáil in relation to possessing offshore accounts, continued to receive the support of his North Tipperary electorate. Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party was also re-elected.

A startling aspect of the election was that Fianna Fáil had come so close to winning a Dáil majority with only 41.5 per cent of the national vote. Dublin Central apart, successful vote management was part of the reason for this; but another was a breakdown in traditional voting patterns, with significant numbers voting for opposition or independent candidates and then giving their lower-preference votes to Fianna Fáil. Fewer voters held out-and-out anti-Fianna Fáil views, and the unusual number of transfers to the party gave it a significant boost in seats. ‘The single most important factor in the broadening of the party’s appeal has been Bertie Ahern,’ wrote Mark Brennock in the wake of the election. ‘Sold by the party during the campaign more as a charismatic celebrity than sober political leader, Mr Ahern’s personal appeal and popularity went way beyond the confines of his own party.’ It was an achievement, Brennock wrote, to win so many seats on such a national share of the vote, and an achievement to get that national share in the first place.

The party has conducted extensive market research throughout the term of the Government and right through this campaign. Not for them the old-fashioned notion of writing a programme for government you believe in and selling it to the people. The scientific research was used to judge the public mood very accurately and then to devise a product that the public would be certain to buy. The research showed that enormous numbers of people felt better off now than they did five years ago, and would vote for someone who would keep things that way.

Fintan O’Toole wrote that it was time for critics to acknowledge Ahern’s achievements. Ahern ‘took over a demoralised, fractious party in the throes of a historic decline and turned it into a machine so slick that it can leave its traditional enemies at the starting line without even getting into second gear.’ Attempts to emulate Ahern would be difficult for opposition leaders. ‘If politics is framed as a contest to discover who is best at being Bertie, the winner will always be Bertie. Being Bertie is a hard trick, and it is time that his opponents acknowledged the Taoiseach’s achievements.’ Fianna Fáil’s results in 1997 and 2002 would, under earlier leaders, have been seen as very poor, but Ahern had changed the view of the party, which no longer saw itself involved in a contest between it and the rest of the world. Ahern, the ultimate consensus man, did not treat non-Fianna Fáil politicians as the enemy. The old Civil War politics were being quietly dropped, and Fianna Fáil was benefiting from the resultant transfers, according to O’Toole.

The nature and result of the 2002 election was analysed in two books,
How Ireland Voted 2002
and
The Irish Voter
, written and edited by political scientists and commentators. The former said the electorate’s concerns about the management of the health system, and the extent of the attention it was given during the election campaign, ‘probably cost the party its first overall majority since 1977.’ In general, however, it found that the data supported the argument that

a feel-good factor favoured the incumbent government in general and Fianna Fáil in particular. This is hardly surprising. Governments that preside over good times are supposed to be rewarded. While the result for the Rainbow of 1994–1997 was inadequate to provide for its re-election, in 2002 the bonus was a little more generous.

What was more surprising was the weakness of the opposition in the face of new parties and independents, the authors wrote. In his contribution to the book, the political journalist Stephen Collins wrote that, even though the election took place as the economy was beginning to weaken, Fianna Fáil strategists had decided that there was an opportunity for them in this if they could convince the worried public that it was the best option available to manage the economic downturn.

The party’s research, however, prompted it not to directly associate Ahern with the issue of economic management. The election posters all featured Ahern and the party’s chosen slogan: ‘A lot done. More to do.’ Thought had been given to having Ahern’s photograph alongside a slogan that referred to him directly—‘Let Ahern lead’—but research and experience showed that this might not run so well with the electorate. Ahern had been put centre stage for the Nice Treaty referendum in 2001 and the abortion referendum in 2002, and both had been voted down. Ahern’s popularity was a separate issue from the electorate’s faith in his competence.

In his article on the background to the election, Gary Murphy, a politics academic, noted that there was little difference between the manifestos of the main parties. Health was recognised as a difficult subject by all, including the Government parties, but the range of solutions proposed failed to excite the electorate. Similarly there was little by way of real debate on taxation. Though the Government had been heavily criticised for the nature of its personal taxation cuts, no party was proposing undoing them.

Raising taxation for spending or to cope with any possible downturn in the economy was not an option [the parties] were willing to put into their manifestos. The Taoiseach provided the best evidence of this overlap in terms of macroeconomic policy when he stated that there was nothing in the manifesto of the
PD
s or Labour with which he fundamentally disagreed.

The Irish Voter
was published in 2008 and so provided the authors with an extended period for assessing the 2002 election. Again they concluded that the governing parties, and Fianna Fáil in particular, were rewarded by the electorate for doing ‘a good job’. Where there were negative assessments, such as with crime or with the quality of the health service, the Government was not held responsible, or was seen as, in any event, probably being better than the opposition parties would have been. Interestingly, however, the authors played down the importance of Ahern’s popularity.

In the period before the 1997 poll, Ahern had enjoyed only a very small lead over Bruton and Spring. However, as that Government’s period in office progressed, Ahern’s lead over the Fine Gael and Labour Party leaders (later Noonan and Quinn) widened, so that by the time of the 2002 election Ahern’s lead over Noonan was an unusually large one. What had happened was that, in the period since 1997, Ahern’s star had ascended, while those of the opposition leaders had fallen. The authors looked at survey data on what it was that people liked about Ahern, Noonan and Quinn. Respondents were asked to rate the leaders in relation to honesty, competence and closeness to the people. Ahern won on all three counts, particularly in the last two. An analysis of the data, in conjunction with figures on popularity, found that in Ahern’s case honesty had a particularly strong correlation with his general evaluation. ‘Had the opposition been able to persuade more people that Ahern’s character was more dubious, they might have damaged him, but they were unable to do so.’

Ahern’s huge lead over Noonan in the popularity stakes had a limited impact on the performance of their parties, the authors said. ‘It is clear that where the popularity of leaders and parties diverge, and they often do, voters follow parties rather than leaders. This is not to say that a popular leader is not an asset, but that the asset is one that makes only a marginal difference to vote totals.’ However, they noted that a marginal change can make the difference between being returned to office and not. Fianna Fáil placed a huge emphasis on Ahern during the election campaign, but the conclusion of the authors’ analysis was that the perception of the advantage this had conferred was exaggerated.

Ahern was back in office, but he was not happy with the election result. Micheál Martin met him in St Luke’s soon after the poll, and they discussed the outcome.

He [Ahern] went through every constituency with me. It was extraordinary. The man was amazing in his detailed grasp of every constituency. He was really annoyed after 2002 in terms of not winning the overall majority, and he felt people had let him down in terms of telling him, We are going to win that seat, win this, and then they didn’t. It was party organisation, ministers and
TD
s and so on that he was angry with, not Michael McDowell.
Chapter
9  
TAOISEACH, 2002–8

C
harlie McCreevy nominated Bertie Ahern for the position of Taoiseach after the 2002 general election. McCreevy rose to address the Dáil just before noon on 6 June as Ahern’s partner, Celia Larkin, looked on from the public gallery.

The Government leaving office today held it longer than any other in peacetime. At the end of five years it also became the first Government in thirty-three years to receive the people’s mandate to continue in office and did so on the basis of increased representation in the House. Central to these unprecedented achievements has been the steady and clear leadership of Deputy Bertie Ahern. Although he has held high office for a significant period, he continues to be in touch with the people, and they continue to have faith in him. Over the past five years they saw a leader who helped deliver a historic breakthrough for peace, helped the largest sustained period of economic growth in our history and ensured economic growth meant real social progress throughout the country. He went before the people with a clear message of wanting to build on this peace, prosperity and progress, and they gave him a mandate.

Ahern was elected by 93 votes to 68. He got the support of his own party, the
PD
s and some independents. Accepting the result, Ahern spoke again of the honour involved. Politics was a noble calling, he said, and the justifiable pride those who had been returned to the Dáil could feel had to be matched by a sense of duty and by ‘the determination to earn our place by hard work and with integrity.’ He praised Michael Noonan, who had been replaced as leader of Fine Gael by Enda Kenny, and also spoke generously about Mary Harney, Ruairí Quinn, Trevor Sargent of the Green Party and the former party leaders Proinsias de Rossa, John Bruton and Dick Spring. ‘I pledge to work ceaselessly . . . and never to give less than my very best.’

Ruairí Quinn congratulated Ahern on his political achievement and his return to office—a testimony to his extraordinary popularity and his dedication to politics and public life. He also spoke of the Lazarus party of Irish politics—the
PD
s—and noted that his constituency colleague, Michael McDowell, had on his third attempt managed to get into the Dáil at the same time as his party was going into government.

For my part, the Labour Party will provide a critique of the politics of choice, this centre-right Government which has pursued a deliberate political ideological agenda masked in the cosy populism of a very popular man, who sincerely believes what he says but allowed his Minister for Finance to contradict him at every twist and turn in terms of the policy that was implemented.

At four in the afternoon Ahern was back in the Dáil chamber to announce his new Government. Harney was Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment. The other members were Michael Smith (Defence), Joe Walsh (Agriculture and Food), Charlie McCreevy (Finance), Brian Cowen (Foreign Affairs), Noel Dempsey (Education and Science), Dermot Ahern (Communications, Marine and Natural Resources), John O’Donoghue (Arts, Sport and Tourism), Micheál Martin (Health and Children), Séamus Brennan (Transport), Michael McDowell (Justice, Equality and Law Reform), Martin Cullen (Environment and Local Government), Éamon Ó Cuív (Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs) and Mary Coughlan (Social Affairs and Family). The Attorney-General was Rory Brady
SC
.

BOOK: Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money
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