Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (34 page)

Although Ahern had asked Larkin in 2004–5 to obtain information from the bank, he had not disclosed her involvement in his banking affairs to the tribunal until the Peelo document was presented in April 2006. Nor had he listed these accounts when he had responded to the tribunal’s original order of discovery. When Ahern appeared at public sittings, O’Neill asked him whether or not Larkin had supplied him with the documents she had been given by the bank in January 2005. Ahern said he didn’t think so; he said he thought she had briefed him on what she had been given. It also emerged that it had not been until the tribunal had made an order of discovery against the bank that it learnt that it had much earlier given Ahern documents that had only later been discovered to the tribunal.

The pressure on Ahern as the general election neared, and as the tribunal was discovering more and more material about his finances, must have been immense. He was still working in a sustained way with Blair to achieve progress in Northern Ireland while Sinn Féin and the
DUP
were playing hardball in relation to their respective positions. The election for the Northern Ireland Assembly in March led in time to the formation of the first devolved government, with Paisley as its head, working with Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin. The following month Paisley came south, where he met Ahern in Farmleigh, the former Guinness residence in the Phoenix Park. Paisley stepped out of his car and walked towards Ahern, with the cameras recording his every word and move. ‘I have to shake hands with this man,’ Paisley said, smiling warmly at the Taoiseach. The two men also visited the site of the Battle of the Boyne. Adams’s Sinn Féin colleague Martin McGuinness became Deputy First Minister to Paisley’s First Minister, and the two men astonished everyone by how well they got on. Once again, historical developments in Northern Ireland were the focus of the domestic and world media, and Ahern was at the heart of them.

Soon after the establishment of the Northern Ireland Executive, Blair announced that he was stepping down as Prime Minister. Before doing so he extended the honour to Ahern of addressing a joint session of the Houses of Parliament. The 15th of May 2007 was a truly historic occasion, with the former British Prime Minister John Major, a number of former Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland, the former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and all the major sitting figures in Britain’s political system—including, of course, Blair—in attendance. Irish writers, actors, sports figures and fashion designers were in attendance, as were Des Richardson and his wife and the property developer Seán Dunne and his wife. Miriam Lord, in her report for the
Irish Times
, noted ‘something’ about Ahern ‘sitting pensively in the gilded surrounds of the Royal Gallery as the illustrious assembly stood and applauded him. Him, Bertie, the boy from the northside.’ Blair’s glowing, heartfelt address introducing Ahern went far beyond the normal call of commendation, she said. When the moment came for Ahern to stand and make his address, he had stalled, she noted, and when he did stand he was not smiling, though he must have been delighted—the proudest man in the room. ‘Yesterday evening he was back in his Dublin Central constituency, knocking on doors, looking after business. People on the Navan Road, who had been watching the Taoiseach on the six o’clock news in the Houses of Parliament, opened their doors to find Bertie on the step.’ Lord wondered whether the pensive, worried air that seemed to surround Ahern was prompted by a general understanding that what was being marked was the closing of his political career. He was in the middle of a general election campaign, and he was fighting for his political skin.

In the weeks before Ahern’s visit to London the tribunal was preparing for a module of public sittings that would be mostly about Ahern’s personal finances. He had not been able to adequately explain the source of the large lodgements to his accounts, the tribunal was fed up trying to deal with the matter by way of correspondence and it had taken the highly charged decision to complete its inquiries by way of public sittings. The module was due to open on Monday 30 April, and the tribunal had said it would sit until two weeks before the election. The decision to hold public sittings meant that confidential papers would have to be circulated to interested parties before the sittings. It was at this stage that leaks to the media usually occurred. Ahern could have defused the matter by calling the general election earlier, as the tribunal would have had to stall matters until it was over and the papers would not be circulated. Privately he continued to urge the tribunal to wait, but he was reluctant to call the election. Perhaps he felt that if he held on, some unexpected development would set him free.

The tribunal papers were circulated in the last weeks of April. On the night of Saturday 28 April, Ahern learnt that Frank Connolly of the
Mail on Sunday
had them. Clearly panicked, he decided that he would call the election. Journalists were shocked on the Sunday morning to receive text messages at about 6 a.m. telling them that the Taoiseach was about to visit the President to hand in his resignation. He would be there at 8 a.m. Reporters and television crews raced to cover the unusual end of Ahern’s second Government. His visit lasted only ten minutes. He said nothing to the assembled media. A statement issued to the press revealed that the general election was to be held on Thursday 24 May. Ahern later had a press conference at Treasury Buildings, where Fianna Fáil was again being accommodated for its election campaign. Ahern made a lacklustre address to the assembled media, then turned and walked away without taking questions. He appeared to be in meltdown. For Micheál Martin,

that was a bizarre enough election . . . I think he called it at six in the morning. I don’t think he was confiding much with colleagues at that stage in terms of what was happening. Most ministers found out about one o’clock in the morning that an election was being called at six. My only observation is that he may have been playing cat and mouse with the
Mail
. Maybe he wanted them to throw everything at him and then he could go to war.

Within the Fianna Fáil camp there was a disagreement over whether it should present itself during the election campaign as the party of fiscal responsibility or whether it should try again to woo the electorate with optimistic views of the future and of the decisions about public expenditure that would be made. Cowen was seen as being in favour of the fiscal responsibility message, with Ahern being nervous and tempted to unleash new, expensive promises. According to Martin,

going into the 2007 election we were actually quite moderate . . . I think Brian Cowen was responsible for that. He said 5 per cent growth, everything is based on that; if we don’t get it everything else is off the table. All the other parties were presuming 5 per cent growth. We actually were a bit more responsible going into 2007 compared with 2002. In fact when you look at 2007 you see Pat Rabbitte beating everyone else in terms of saying there would be tax cuts. There was a debate about cutting taxes again in 2007. I actually thought tax cuts were a bit over the top at that stage, given what we’d done already.

Brian Cowen wanted conservative economic management to be our pitch. The fear in the party was, and it must have been Bertie, was that it was too conservative and that it was kind of dour stuff and wouldn’t match the bidding war from the others, the kind of stuff that goes on in elections. There was nothing dramatic in the manifesto in terms of spending. There were no iconic issues compared to previous elections.

The campaign was dominated by Ahern and his inability to explain his personal finances. The present writer began to get access to leaked material, and other information, which appeared in the
Irish Times
. Every time Ahern emerged in public he was surrounded by reporters who wanted to quiz him about his money; every time he sought to explain himself his answers were evaluated, and more questions emerged. It was not until after the campaign that the media noted that during the first two weeks of the campaign he was emerging for only one photo-call each day. The party’s main vote-getter, the crazed canvasser and sound-bite expert without equal, was in hiding.

Michael McDowell eventually responded to the leaks by calling on Ahern to explain what was going on—something that Ahern obviously had great difficulty in doing. By Sunday 6 May a number of the most senior figures in Fianna Fáil felt that the matter had to be confronted head-on. Brian Cowen, Micheál Martin and Dermot Ahern were due to give a press conference at Treasury Buildings, but it was delayed. Behind the scenes the three Government heavyweights had sought a meeting with their Taoiseach.

‘It was an incredible day,’ according to Martin. The press conference was meant to be at midday, but there was fresh information in the
Mail on Sunday
. The ministers spoke to P. J. Mara, and Cowen said the press conference was being put back to three o’clock. Martin recalls that it was agreed that Ahern would come to meet him and Martin’s cabinet colleagues, Cowen and Dermot Ahern.

We couldn’t have the media mob following us over to St Luke’s. Looking back on it, it’s really quite funny in a way. So Ahern came to us, in through a back way. He’s very genial, as you know. He went through everything, relaxed and calm. He literally went through all his expenditures. I remember taking notes. I said, ‘If that’s all it is, why don’t you go out and say this, issue a statement, deal with all these issues?’ We thought he would issue a statement. He didn’t think he should issue a statement yet. Then we thought he would. We had a no-holds-barred meeting. We were saying, ‘This is serious, politically’, but he went through everything in a plausible way, in terms of the issue that day, where all the money had gone in terms of the spending on the house . . . We were urging him to make a statement to settle nerves. He said he would, but he didn’t want us to say when. For some reason he didn’t want to do it before the following weekend. A spokesman said that after he’d left the building.

Cowen told the media afterwards that Ahern would be directly confronting the issues that were being raised in the media. While the party said the issue was not really of concern to people ‘on the doorsteps’, it was damaging morale within the party, damaging its ability to get its message across and threatening to leave it without any prospective coalition partner. Martin thought Ahern may have decided on an unusually long election campaign so that the matter could play itself out.

He does think way ahead of most people. I was always curious as to why he gave a four-week campaign against the usual three. I think he gave himself enough time to recover.

On one occasion when a reporter from the
Daily Mail
asked Ahern a question the Taoiseach was lost for words. The question was met with an unusual response for a politician in a media scrum in the midst of an election campaign: silence. It lasted for a number of seconds. Ahern appeared to be crumbling. ‘Next question,’ a party handler said, bringing the silence to a close. The moment was shown on the six o’clock and nine o’clock news. Ahern appeared to have another moment of near-collapse later in the campaign at a press conference at which he was confronted from the floor by the journalist Vincent Browne. His story about his house just wasn’t credible, Browne said. Ahern let his head droop and didn’t speak, but then he picked himself up again and began to fight back. For many in Fianna Fáil, including Martin, this was a key moment in the campaign.

It was a fairly robust press conference which many journalists thought was a turning-point for us. And then we had the Westminster speech, which was a huge success. And then there was the debate [on
RTE
with Enda Kenny], and he won the debate, hands down, and you could feel it on the ground, and Brian Cowen had a powerful week on the economy, with Richard Bruton. These were the turning-points, but he [Ahern] had the two weeks to recover. It was only the last two weeks that he came out of his shell. He wasn’t campaigning at all in the first two weeks. He seemed to be personally down about the whole thing. He played a blinder in the last two weeks; the first two weeks were a disaster. It was paralysis. It was meltdown territory.

Astonishingly, Fianna Fáil survived and the
PD
s didn’t. The party of rectitude was seen as having lost its focus, and it collapsed. McDowell lost his seat and resigned as party leader on election night. Not long afterwards the party shut up shop.

But Ahern was still in business. Soon after the election, he announced that he thought Brian Cowen was the most suitable person to succeed him. It wasn’t his decision to make, and his comments angered other senior party figures who had an interest in the leadership. And Ahern didn’t indicate that he was going any time soon. However, the comments served as a disincentive to anyone else who might be considering a leadership heave, and Cowen was famously loyal. Ahern managed to put together a stable Government using support from the Green Party and a number of independent
TD
s, including Michael Lowry, who topped the poll once again in North Tipperary.

Ahern’s last period in government was dominated by the proceedings of the Mahon Tribunal and his inability to explain his finances. Every time he or any of the other parties involved appeared at the tribunal it fed immediately into political debate, with
TD
s and ministers being asked for their view of the latest development. It is fair to say that many members of his Government continued to support him despite the evidence of large lodgements of cash to his accounts that he could not explain.

Matters crystallised around the appearance of a former secretary in St Luke’s, Gráinne Carruth, though the true damage came, as always, from bank archives. Irish Permanent had produced what it believed was all the relevant documents it had about transactions on Ahern’s accounts in its Drumcondra branch, and Ahern had given testimony that accommodated the available material. However, the bank discovered fresh archive material in or around March 2008 which showed sterling being exchanged for Irish currency before lodgements were made to Ahern’s accounts. Carruth’s name appeared on the lodgement dockets. Ahern and Carruth had already given their evidence about lodgements to the accounts, which Carruth frequently did for Ahern. Carruth had already said she had not lodged sterling, and on 19 March she was asked to explain that evidence. She was represented at the tribunal by the solicitor Hugh Millar, who had also represented Celia Larkin.