HAIL AND FAREWELL: We tend to forget now that, even 12 or 15 years ago, Bertie Ahern was an unlikely Taoiseach, writes JOHN WATERS
ALL POLITICAL careers end not so much in failure as in tragedy, and Bertie Ahern's is a classic example. I mean tragedy in its proper, literal sense: greatness beset by travails flowing from ineluctable human limitations, rather than as a synonym for pathos, which seems to be the ineluctable, perhaps tragic, fate of a once great word.
It is obvious, when you think it through, that politicians always carry their fatal flaws from the beginning, but also that we simply don't notice until near the end. The ending is already implicit in the character of the subject, but the drama has yet to unravel. When disaster begins to unfold, as it must, we think of this as natural attrition, whereby the growing complacency of the powerful comes under pressure from events, leading to the stories which become the undoing of the dream.
But really there is another process, a kind of initial blindness deriving from the idealism of the observers, a refusal to see anything but the shining newness in relief against the rejected dullness of the old, gradually succeeded by a seeing born of disillusionment and the recurring and inevitable boredom.
So it has been with Bertie. His departure this week is marked by a level of ambiguity unparalleled among the ranks of Irish leadership. Since he announced his departure a month ago, commentary has been almost uniformly positive. Before that, it was unrelentingly negative.
In the immediate future, one suspects, it will become negative again, as the Mahon tribunal reasserts its claim on his attention. And then, all but certainly, the scribes of history will begin the recording of perhaps the most glorious political career since Independence.
It is doubtful if Bertie would have emerged from the pack had it not been for his suitability as a foil for Charles Haughey. In the turbulent Haughey years, his easy, emollient personality became useful by virtue of the Boss's need for someone plausible to sweep up in his kingly wake.
And it might plausibly be said that, because Bertie was such a creature of Haughey's difficulties, the Haughey era is really only ending this week. In those years, Bertie was like a child with a difficult parent: hypersensitive to the next crisis, a low-key counterpoint to the ego of his master, a fixer, a go-for, a diplomat, a cleaner-upper. He always seemed to be running around putting an acceptable face on things. He learned young how to gloss things over, how to keep the neighbours sweet, how to create diversions at the slightest change in the atmosphere, how to placate the affronted and comfort the crushed, how to coax people back from the brink of finality.
Bertie emerged in the Haughey era as something of a cartoon character, a figure of necessary light relief, a reassuring caricature, a shambolic Dub you couldn't help liking. Something about him made you laugh instinctively, though without malice. In the mingled menace and macho of the Haughey years, he contributed a different tone. But he also attracted a degree of condescension, which he pretended not to notice, but which he stored up as both motivation and ammunition. He was a man who enjoyed being underestimated because it allowed him to shuffle in where others could not go.
We tend to forget now that, even 12 or 15 years ago, Bertie was an unlikely Taoiseach. He was attractive politically, but not particularly impressive as leadership material. His skills, developed in the Haughey bunker, seemed inappropriate to the top job. The inevitability of his becoming Taoiseach seemed to be more to do with Fianna Fáil's family dynamics than the national interest.
But nobody minded very much because it was Bertie. In retrospect, we can see that he came to chiefdom at a time when the talents he honed as Haughey's ambassador to reality became opportune to an extent that, even in the deep unconscious of the nation, could not have been foreseen or planned.
MASS MEDIA have not simply changed the nature of politics - they have altered the very molecular structure of politicians, or at least of the kind who end up as leaders. Once, the primary talents required of a leader were megaphone skills, flamboyance and charisma.
On television, however, such qualities overwhelm everything, bursting out through the technology. TV, because it magnifies, requires subtlety, understatement and a kind of natural plausibility that can only be faked. This suited Bertie, who merged with his new role in a way that changed him as much as it changed the role. The old expectations of flamboyance and menace lingered for a while, and in this period Bertie seemed an oddity, a misfit, the cartoon figure he had always appeared. But slowly he redefined both himself and the position.
He had already begun to change his appearance, dress and hairstyle, though never in a way that undermined his underlying Bertieness. Now he acquired an air of authority, though without losing his affability.
Politics is no longer much about standing at the head of your people and leading forward, but of going around whispering in ears, persuading the maximum number to see things differently. Bertie was a master of the intimate, conspiratorial whisper, capable of persuading almost anyone that he was on their side and somehow bringing everyone with him despite the permutational impossibilities this implied. He had that knack of managing to get people on the front of the wagon without losing some off the back. He was fortunate to hit the top job at a time when negotiating and diplomatic skills were the assets most in demand: domestically in coalition, in the EU, and in the Northern talks.
Bertie grew into the times and the times grew into Bertie. Leadership is about more than innate qualities: it is also about alchemy. Bertie was a leader who found his greatness in the crucible of power, rather than coming to power because he was great. He had become confident enough under Haughey to realise what he was capable of. Gradually he brought to bear on his role and office precisely these aspects of his personality that had made him such an unlikely Taoiseach to start with. Public persona-wise, he was a mass of contradictions.
Separated and in a new relationship, he never failed to appear on Ash Wednesday with a dark blob of ash on his forehead. Orally inarticulate, his personality did a lot of the talking, but there was, too, a talent for the kind of symbolism that makes words superfluous. His Catholicism, his equal fanaticism for GAA and Man U, his celebrity family: all these contributed to the creation of a new sense of leadership for a much changed and contradictory era. This enigmatic everyman seemed to embody the contradictions we all found ourselves living, and in doing so gave us all a little more sure-footedness in fast-changing times.
And, perhaps through the good graces of speechwriters who were in tune with this remarkable alchemy, he sometimes delivered quite seminal statements about the condition of Irish society, like his vigorous attack on aggressive secularism last year.
Gradually we began to realise that, although Bertie was very much one of us, he possessed an extraordinary capability to make things happen. We began to relax and congratulate ourselves on our prescience in choosing him.
THE MEDIA ALWAYS misunderstand Bertie's bond with the Irish people, but nevertheless the allegations about his private finances emerged from an intuitive desire to strike at that understated connection.
The purpose was not merely to insinuate something dodgy, but to undermine the whole edifice of Bertie's exaggerated ordinariness, his hitherto scrupulous aversion to drawing attention to the Bertie Ahern underneath the newly-forged "Bertie".
The image he had so carefully constructed in the beginning to create a force field through which Haughey could stride back to power - of a humble political journeyman, uninterested in the trappings of power or wealth - was badly compromised by revelations suggesting his private finances were as flush as they were chaotic. The idea that Bertie might be interested in money and houses was as damaging to him within his own culture as the taint of corruption was to him outside it, because it summoned up the ghost of his mentor and caused a new meaning to seep into the leadership persona he had forged for himself.
It was the return of the repressed, and occasioned a chilling revisitation of the thought that Haughey might not have been joking when he called Bertie "the most skilful, the most devious and the most cunning".
As he had always been able to do, Bertie sensed that the wind was changing. He had come from an era when things were done in unorthodox ways, but this culture was giving way to a new literalness with which he was less comfortable, in which his contradictory elements do not translate cleanly.
His own public has begun to see through him, not necessarily in a terrible, ethical sense, but in the sense of being reminded that Bertie had sold them a version of himself that was, even if necessarily, only partly real. It had worked for a while, and now was no longer working. Bertie had tried to be the reassuring antidote to Haughey, but gradually the cloak of ordinariness had started to slip. The enigmatic everyman was returned to earth.
The curtain falls to ambiguous applause.