The former minister for finance, Mr Charlie McCreevy, has rejected any suggestion that he was forced by the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, to take up Ireland's European Commission post.
Speaking on RTÉ's Week In Politics programme, Mr McCreevy said he had travelled to Mr Ahern's constituency office in St Luke's, Drumcondra, in late 2003 to seek the Commission posting.
"Last September, the day of my birthday in 2003, I went to Luke's and I said to Bertie that I wanted to go to Europe. Then over the Christmas, for personal reasons, I decided not to.
"I said to Bertie, 'I am not going'. It wouldn't suit me personally and everything else. Then in July he came again and said he was offering it to me before anybody else. He said, 'Make up your mind'.
"Then, I thought about it again and I went back to my original intention. That is the truth," said Mr McCreevy, who is now in charge of the Commission's Internal Market portfolio.
He sharply rejected any suggestion that he was exiled to Brussels because of Mr Ahern's need to change the tone of the Cabinet: "It wasn't like that. It loosened up other Cabinet places.
"It did allow him to do an additional change. With me going, he made three changes," said Mr McCreevy, although he said it was "possibly true" that Mr Ahern had heard complaints from FF backbenchers.
Questioned about his denial of interest in the Commission job in Cork on June 28th, when he said he had "no travel plans", Mr McCreevy said he had no choice but to do so: "A Minister for Finance can't give a signal at any time that he was going.
"You wouldn't be able to operate. It is not possible to do it like that," he said, adding that he rejected Mr Ahern's opinions "hundreds of times" during their time together in Cabinet.
However, Mr McCreevy acknowledged that the Taoiseach had been "able to handle me better than most" since 1997: "A Minister for Finance and a Taoiseach have to get on well.
"We operated very, very well. And we liked one other. It is a help to like one another. It is very, very easy to dislike me, and to fall out with me. It would be impossible to fall out with Bertie.
"We mightn't always agree, we would invariably also hang together at Cabinet meetings and outside of it as well and sort it out ourselves, because you can't operate in any other way," he said.
Dealing with his role during the heaves against the former taoiseach, Mr Charles Haughey, Mr McCreevy said death threats were made against him to his wife during one of the challenges to Mr Haughey's leadership.
Asked to compare the 1992/1994 Fianna Fáil/Labour coalition to the FF/Progressive Democrats alliance today, Mr McCreevy said some of his decisions since 1997 could not have been made with Labour.
"I would think that the FF/PD government has been more successful than any FF/Labour government could have been, in economic terms," he said.
Criticising the performance of some government advisers over the years, Mr McCreevy: "There are some that I would not send to a toilet at the bottom of the stairs."
Top civil servants try to "take over" ministers, he said: "But a minister should be able to stand aside and make up his, or her own views. There seems to be a situation now where people want to have a consensus about everything. It is a kind of a tyranny put forward by your own great organisation, RTÉ, and The Irish Times. I have always railed against it."
