PADDY Duffy, Bertie Ahern's press officer, speech writer and friend, has complained about the tone I recently used about Bertie. He made the point, fairly, that no leader of Fianna Fail had been as consistently unequivocal in his condemnation of the IRA.
He had a party to keep together, which still nourished traditional republican viewpoints, yet Bertie had still taken a stance on the IRA which required courage and determination.
Bertie Ahern is certainly a man of peace. If he is wrong in believing that Sinn Fein can be conciliated by talk, his error is commonplace. My belief that there is virtually nothing to talk about places me in a small and ignored minority.
When Bertie Ahern talks about the traditions he must retain and conciliate within his party, what are those traditions? And how is his party different from Fine Gael? Both call themselves the Republican Party. Both have traditionally been the apolitical embodiment of Catholic values, of different intensity, at different times.
These are real forces in Irish life. What defines them? What is the essential continuity of, say, a Fine Gael family which so marks it out from a Fianna Fail family living in a similar house in the same area?
It is part of a matter of style, of accent, of attitude. Fine Gael children are more likely to be called Mark and Emma, and probably play the piano. Fianna Fail children are more likely to be called Fiachra or Niamh.
But where does this difference come from? After all, are both parties not drawn from the same pool of people, admittedly with certain class differences - Fianna Fail having a strong, small farmer component and Fine Gael having a strong farmer tradition, with strategic alliances with Border Protestants.
Two Parties
But that does not explain the enduring tribal difference between the two parties which, in ideology and economics, are virtually indistinguishable. What is the difference?
The difference is this. The origins of Fianna Fail are tribal, certainly, and rise from the plain, Irish speaking indigenous Gaels. Fine Gael has different origins. They are people of the Old English and Norman Catholic stock who remained a distinctly different class within Irish life for centuries.
The common myth is that after the imposition of the Penal Laws, the twin strands of common Catholic in Ireland, the Anglo Normans and the Gaels, which had briefly united at Kilkenny, were finally subsumed within one another during the Penal days.
Yet entire castes do not vanish like that. History carries echoes long after the final drum has been hit, just like fields carry the marks of ancient agricultural systems long after those systems and those that worked them have completely vanished.
It was reading Conor Cruise O'Brien's magnificent biography of Edmund Burke which caused me to realise the enduring nature of the tribe. Burke and his mother's family, the Nagles, were intensely aware of their Norman origins and the loss of their status rankled greatly. If Normanness had survived as long as the end of the 8th century, could not its print be found over coming generations?
Norman And Gael
Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are tribes, though it is not always easy to define the differences. Yet we know that socially there is a difference. Fine Gael people are more likely to be formal, restrained. Fianna Fail types are more gregarious, easy going, relaxed. More craic. Norman and Gael.
Names mean nothing in this theory. Fitzgeralds can be Fianna Fail or Fine Gael or Labour and are.
After 30 seconds talking to Patrick Cooney, you would be convinced you are talking to a Fine Gael type. Fine Gael types have been cultivated in the imprint left in Irish Catholic life by the Anglo Norman Catholic gentry which suffered so disastrously in the wars of the 17th century and the Penal Laws of the 18th century.
These people might have lost their lands but they had not lost their pride or their sense of distinction of being grand Catholics.
Their orientation towards Britain is also different. The Gaelic chieftains remained largely aloof from the religious and monarchical wars of the 17th century but the AngloNormans, calamitously, did not. That tradition of engagement with an English speaking island by the native English speakers of Ireland continued right through the Penal Laws and into the 19th century and the Irish Parliamentary Party.
Habit, custom, inclination and affinity kept this caste alive not simply family transmission. It could recruit and did from people of Gaelic stock, just as people of Norman stock became thoroughly Gaelicised. The important thing is that the undulation the Anglo Normans created in the upper ranks of Irish society continued to affect the attitudes of people living within that undulation.
Twin Tribes
Generally speaking, therefore, within Catholic Ireland there remained the twin tribes - the jacquerie, which ultimately expressed itself in Fianna Fail, and the jacobites, Anglo Normans who for long remained loyal to King James.
The jacobin Fianna Fail is more Gaelic in its easy manners and its tradition of chieftain type leaders. The jacobite Fine Gael is more Norman in its precise attitude to law. Both jacobin and jacobite, Gael and Norman, covet land. Could Albert Reynolds have ever been Fine Gael? Peter Barry ever Fianna Fail? We know from their personality types - never.
Even those without such party loyalty are obviously Norman - Mary Bourke for one. Who has not met the lofty, patrician Norman Catholic, confident, reserved, poised, though she be ardently republican, like Maire Comerford, or austerely pious, like a terrifying Mother Superior of the Sisters of Charity?
Logically, then, that good and peaceful man Bertie Ahern should be leader of a party called Fine Gael and John Bruton, of course, should be leader of that patrician clan, Fine Normanach.