ASSESSMENT:Bertie Ahern's seminal role in bringing about "the greatest ever expression of self-determination by the people who share the geographical space which the world knows as Ireland," ensures him an honoured place in Irish history, writes JOHN BOWMAN
SINCE ANNOUNCING his intention to step down as Taoiseach, most of the verdicts on Bertie Ahern's legacy have cited his contribution to the Northern peace process. Many have even termed his contribution historic. But there has been little attempt to put it in historical perspective.
And what did he achieve? Nothing less than the recasting of British-Irish relations - the greatest change since 1921. Not only does it supercede the 1921 settlement, it is a considerable improvement on it. It represents a realignment of political forces throughout Ireland, with benefits to nationalists and unionists and also to the people of Britain.
The 1921 settlement - arguably, at least, a temporary necessity - left Irish nationalists with a grievance on partition and a more plausible grievance on where the partition line had been drawn.
And it left the Ulster Unionists as a party of permanent government within Northern Ireland, ironically inheritors of the Home Rule model they had been formed to frustrate. That they enjoyed a monopoly of power for half a century proved in the end to be a burden - and unsustainable as was shown.
Ahern had promised on becoming Taoiseach that he would deliver a radical renegotiation of the 1921 settlement. He insisted that the Lloyd George settlement had "failed to resolve the conflict of political allegiances within Ireland" and he promised to replace it with a "deep settlement, incorporating positive elements that have been identified" and which would "address and overcome previous failures going back to 1920, to achieve the basis of a just and durable solution".
Pessimists had argued that the real Northern Ireland problem was that there was no solution. But Ahern, while in awe of the challenge, was not among the pessimists.
He appreciated that the totality of relations within these islands were in urgent need of a pragmatic refit.
The British had long declared that they had no "selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland". And the different factions within Northern Ireland - even if they might differ on their motives - all wanted London to devolve power to Belfast. Another positive factor was the wide appreciation that there was a military stalemate between the Provisional IRA and the British army. Neither side could prevail.
Ahern also inherited from Albert Reynolds a Fianna Fáil policy which had promised to revisit fundamentals - such as the 1920-21 settlement - and the platform created by the Hume-Adams initiative. He also inherited Martin Mansergh as his Northern advisor along with a vastly experienced team of top civil servants in the Taoiseach's Department and Foreign Affairs.
This is the wicket on which Bertie Ahern went in to bat when he took power after the 1997 election.
He was also lucky, not least in his relationship with Tony Blair. That two such politicians came into power in their respective parliaments, and enjoyed two full terms working together, proved to be extraordinarily fortuitous. Both gave enormous energy and time to the Northern Ireland issue.
And they enjoyed the further advantage that the incumbent in the White House when they set about this work was Bill Clinton.
Like Blair he needed a foreign policy success - and although unionists will baulk at such a characterisation, the Northern Ireland issue is seen by many in Whitehall and Westminster as, in part, a foreign policy issue: something to be resolved within the broad framework of Anglo-Irish relations.
Nor is this lost on Ulster unionism. Indeed, the prospect of a Plan B - often threatened but never spelt out, but clearly involving a London-Dublin agreement - was a factor difficult to exaggerate in persuading Unionists to cut the deal they did.
The Ahern-Blair relationship has proved to be by far the most long-lived and constructive in Anglo-Irish relations.
Although not publicly stated, it was implicitly driven by an awareness that the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland was irrational and scandalously wasteful in terms of the resources it absorbed. Both Ahern and Blair shared this big picture and proved a formidable team in cajoling, coercing and persuading the protagonists within Northern Ireland to cut a deal.
In his recent book, Great hatred, little room, Blair's chief negotiator on Northern Ireland, Jonathan Powell, states bluntly that there would have been no agreement in Northern Ireland had it not been for Ahern's "unadorned common sense". Powell, centrally involved for a decade on the British side, credits Ahern with having "no complex about the Brits" and never trying to find a conspiracy where there wasn't one.
"He was quiet and understated, lacking Tony's soaring rhetoric, but he was always looking for a way through, and was far better at working the bars and corridors at a negotiation, while Tony tended to stay in his room."
Other insiders confirm this picture. George Mitchell in his memoir recalls bumping into an exhausted Ahern at 2am on Good Friday morning: "George, we've got to get this done. We've got to get this done." And David Andrews attests that Ahern "could and did out-sit anyone" in stamina and perseverance.
Nowhere were these characteristics more needed than in his relationship with the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble. Powell reveals that Ahern left one particular meeting threatening to hit Trimble.
YET ON THE DAY of his retirement, Trimble was fulsome in his praise of Ahern's achievements, citing in particular his leadership in ending the irredentist claim in de Valera's constitution.
Some commentators even credited Ahern with selling to the southern electorate a 180 degree U-turn on this point. This is an over-simplification. It is probably not a misunderstanding. After all, a Trimble spin that characterised Ahern's changes on Articles 2 and 3 as a U-turn suited the Unionist interest, given that party's historic targeting of these clauses in de Valera's constitution.
Deeply aware of Fianna Fáil's traditional role as the mainstream custodian of the aspiration to unity, Ahern was prudent in his handling of Articles 2 and 3.
He would see himself and his party travelling towards the same goal which de Valera envisaged: while accepting that the route is now through a complex political maze.
Moreover, he had acute antennae when it came to the political culture unique to Irish nationalism/republicanism. The image above his desk was that of Padraig Pearse who had famously warned that whoever "in the name of Ireland accepts as a final settlement anything less by one fraction of one iota than separation from England is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation that it were better for that man that he had not been born".
This is a classic expression of that which Thomas Paine had warned against in his Rights of Man in 1792: "the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave". Indeed Paine had called it "the most ridiculous and insolent" of tyrannies. But the prevailing political culture among Irish nationalists - and especially the more fundamental republican wing - reflected Pearse's view. They hadn't read Paine's seminal republican text.
Ahern's whole handling of the national question shows him adroitly navigating the road- blocks left by Pearse and stamping his own mark on history. I have argued elsewhere that this was also the hallmark of Eamon de Valera who sided with Paine rather than Pearse when the choice presented.
A keen student of history, Ahern correctly saw Fianna Fáil as the mainstream constitutional republican party. He set out to reinforce that in the public mind - and not least among Fianna Fáil supporters who can be vulnerable to ceding that republican ground to whoever shouts with the most Anglophobic voice.
In a context in which Ahern was bringing Sinn Féin in from the cold and had seen them inflict so much damage on the SDLP, this took adroit political skills.
On the national question, any expression of pragmatism can attract the sneer of heresy. De Valera had heard it in his time when he was accused - "Three-quarters of a nation once again" - of contenting himself with the aspiration to unity while he consolidated his power base south of the Border.
But although Ahern won widespread support in the Republic for the Belfast Agreement with its recasting of Articles 2 and 3, he was a key player in a much more significant endorsement: the 17 out of every 20 voters throughout the 32 counties who supported the same agreement when it was put to a plebiscite North and South on the same day.
Never before in their history had the people who share the island - in all their different traditions and loyalties - been so supportive of one central idea: that the way forward was to adopt a sophisticated model of governance which showed mutual respect for those different traditions and aspirations.
This pragmatic recasting of the totality of relations within these islands is better suited to the world of the 21st century. But it also passes one supreme republican test: having won 85 per cent support from the combined electorate North and South, it is the greatest ever expression of self-determination by the people who share the geographical space which the world knows as Ireland.
Bertie Ahern's seminal role in bringing this about ensures him an honoured place in Irish history.
Dr John Bowman is a broadcaster and historian. He is author of De Valera and the Ulster Question: 1917-1973which won the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for its contribution to North-South understanding