A lifelong habit of secretiveness is coming back to haunt Bertie Ahern - and the issue of past payments wont go away, writes Mark Hennessy, Political Correspondent
For years, Brian Murphy, a special adviser to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, has worked quietly in Government Buildings dealing with Ahern's relations with the Mahon (planning) tribunal. Highly respected, good-humoured, diligent and utterly loyal, Murphy has laboured on his own on the issue, with many of his colleagues sitting just yards from him left unaware of developments.
For more than two years, Ahern has spent hundreds of hours coping with the avalanche of paperwork needed to satisfy the tribunal's prodigious appetite for details about his finances over nearly 30 years. From the beginning, he has been visibly uncomfortable about opening up his relationship with his wife, Miriam, and daughters, Georgina and Cecelia, to scrutiny of any kind. The first two payments, totalling approximately €50,000 and made to him by a group of 12 Dublin friends in 1993 and 1994, were used to pay costs relating to his marital separation. The payments were revealed in The Irish Times last Thursday week.
More recently, though, he was worried, too, about the impact the revelation that he was given £8,000 sterling by businessmen at a Manchester dinner in September 1994 would have. Convinced that The Irish Times had information about the Manchester payment, Ahern decided to mention the matter himself in his interview with Bryan Dobson on RTÉ's Six One News on Tuesday night.
The first two payments would have amounted to a serious political squall, which would have lasted for days and then subsided if it had been handled promptly and properly, leaving some lasting political damage in its wake.
However, the association of these two payments with the Manchester monies, still shrouded in vagueness five days after they emerged, is politically toxic, and Ahern has made the situation worse every time he has opened his mouth on the affair.
Throughout, Ahern's handling of the crisis has been bizarre, while the Government's public relations has been equally open to question. This was illustrated by the decision last Monday to tell journalists who wanted to interview Ahern to travel to Dublin Zoo for one of his engagements, when they could just as easily have gone to Griffith College an hour later. It was a move which produced predictable ridicule in colour pieces the following morning.
Speaking on Clare FM on the morning of the first Irish Times report, Ahern was calm, though he was far more rattled later in the day when he spoke to assembled journalists in Ennis, where he rejected this newspaper's figures of €50,000 to €100,000 as being "off the wall" but confirmed that money had been paid to him.
Since the eruption of the crisis, Ahern has brought few people into his confidence to help him deal with difficulties that threaten his hold on power - an unthinkable predicament just a few weeks ago.
No members of the Cabinet, with the possible exception of the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, were told in advance that a report was about to break saying that the Mahon tribunal was investigating payments made to him by businessmen. Few, if any, of them have been brought into the loop since, though Ahern's reluctance to share closely guarded information is nothing new to most of them.
Most realised long ago that he listens more often to his "Drumcondra crew", who are sometimes inclined to tell him what they think he wants to hear rather than what he should be told (though how often he heeds even them is open to question).
"He doesn't lift the phone to colleagues. He'll talk about things if you ring him, but he won't go looking for advice. He might talk to Cowen - and, perhaps, Dermot Ahern on this one, judging by Dermot's interview today - but that's it," one member of the Cabinet told The Irish Times yesterday.
However, Ahern has consulted closely with solicitors Frank Ward and Co, tax advisers and the Attorney General, Rory Brady. Brady has acted as counsellor to Ahern for some time, but his tendency to emphasise the importance of the law, and the protocol of Ahern's relationship with the tribunals, over everything else may do little on this occasion for a Taoiseach trying to cope with a political firestorm.
IT IS THE small things that trip politicians up, remarked a weary Albert Reynolds on leaving office, after the crisis caused by Fr Brendan Smyth had destroyed his government in 1994 - just weeks after Ahern went to Manchester for the dinner which is now proving so controversial. For days, RTÉ News, like all other media organisations, had pressed for a one-to-one interview with Ahern, only to be told last Monday evening that he would agree to one the following morning.
Filmed in the sizeable ground-floor function room in his constituency office in St Luke's, Drumcondra, shortly before noon on Tuesday, Ahern seemed well-prepared for the interview, bar the issue of the Manchester payments. Then, speaking to Bryan Dobson, he began to ramble, clearly discomfited.
"The only other thing, Bryan, totally separate and nothing to do with this, but I don't want anyone saying I didn't give a full picture. I did a function in Manchester with a business organisation, nothing to do with politics or whatever, I was talking about the Irish economy, I was explaining about Irish economy matters, and I'd say there was about 25 people at that. The organisers of it, I spent about four hours with them, dinner, I did question and answers, and all the time from 1977 up to current periods I got 8,000 on that, which you know whether it was a political donation," he said.
The quote left most in Leinster House bemused, but Ahern's continuing failure to deal with the issue in the Dáil the following day left the Opposition quietly scenting blood. Pressed by Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny to give more details about the Manchester gathering, Ahern avoided a series of specific questions from him. "The only other time I was in receipt of anything was when I was given a sum of money by a group in Manchester on a particular occasion attended by about 25 people," Ahern said. "I dealt with this properly in terms of taxes. It had nothing in particular to do with the present matter at all, but I did not want somebody to come out again and say I had got this particular sum of money. That was the only point I made on that particular issue. That was in 1994. I checked the date and believe it was the 1994-95 season. Subject to correction, I believe I was minister at the time. That is what that was about - there was no other issue. When I went through all my other records dating from 1977, I noted that was the only other donation I was not able to account for out of literally hundreds of cheques and records dating back 29 years."
Standing outside RTÉ's broadcasting suite on the top floor of Leinster House that evening, Fine Gael's political director, Gerry Naughton, was convinced that Ahern's Achilles heel had been revealed, opening up ground for Kenny, who did not want to focus overmuch on the first two payments lest he be accused of intruding into Ahern's private life.
The decision to go on RTÉ's Six One News was taken following days of deliberation involving the Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil press director Olivia Buckley, who was pushed into the frontline when it was decided by the Taoiseach, it appears, that she, rather than Government press secretary Mandy Johnston, should take the lead role with the media. The Taoiseach's ability to respond to the crisis was hampered by the departure yesterday week of the Government's outgoing director of communications, Joe Lennon, to take up the post of director of communications for the Health Services Executive.
The RTÉ interview was a major risk. "You can only do a Richard Nixon-type Checkers speech once," says one media expert, referring to the former US president's famous 1952 speech in which he defended himself against allegations that he had improperly taken money.
Quickly dubbed "Bertie's Oprah moment", the interview had all the signs of being influenced by Fianna Fáil's Washington-based media experts, Shrum, Devine, Donilon. However, party insiders insist that the US consultants were not involved - emphasising, instead, the toll the experience took on Ahern.
"He was very down over the weekend, really depressed. One of his drivers was in tears looking at him," says one loyalist.
Ahern now knows, or should know, what Albert Reynolds meant by "the small things". Twelve years on, few can remember why Reynolds's 1992-94 Fianna Fáil/Labour coalition, one of the best administrations of moderns times, collapsed.
Back then, Leinster House got caught up in a frenzy, driven by tensions between Reynolds and Dick Spring, by public outrage, by a succession of new chapters to delight and interest the media and, not insignificantly, by exhaustion.
There are echoes of 1994 about today, but there are enough differences between today and 1994 to ensure that Ahern's nine-year grip on power, though loosened, can remain if matters are handled with extreme delicacy in the coming days.
Though the crisis has caused difficulties in the relationship between Ahern and the Progressive Democrats leader, Michael McDowell, the two have worked closely and well together since 1999, in stark contrast to the sulphurous relationship that existed between Reynolds and Dick Spring.
Relations, though, will have become more brittle, particularly following a telephone conversation on Thursday between the two about the press briefing given by Ahern in Co Cavan, during which he defended accepting the money and denied he'd been in any way compromised. The Tánaiste had missed the broadcast of Ahern's Cavan comments on RTÉ's News At One because he'd been speaking in the Seanad on the International Criminal Court Bill.
Shortly before 3pm, McDowell, who had by then returned to his Department of Justice offices in St Stephen's Green, received a transcript of the Cavan comments broadcast on RTÉ. Having read it, McDowell, say close friends, was despondent, conscious that the Taoiseach had failed to answer the questions, thereby raising serious issues about McDowell's decision the previous evening to offer support to Ahern, however qualified.
Outside the Legal Aid Board offices in Upper Mount Street after 4pm, McDowell was grave, warning that his concerns "have not been addressed entirely or completely" by Ahern's interview.
McDowell's decision, within days of becoming Tánaiste, not to reappoint Mary Harney's programme manager, Katherine Bulbulia - who had worked closely with her opposite number in Fianna Fáil, Gerry Hickey, and who was one of those who persuaded Harney to stay on as party leader before the summer break - may have removed a useful line of communication, too, at a time when many in the Progressive Democrats are complaining that they are being left out of the loop.
In jovial and relaxed humour early yesterday in Farmleigh, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, invited journalists to pose questions about the affair.
Strongly supporting the Taoiseach, Dermot Ahern may have also been sending a message to the junior Coalition partners that they must not raise the bar too high, by saying that he did not understand the PD's concerns.
For now, Dermot Ahern and others are betting that McDowell has left room for manoeuvre.
Asked what questions needed to be answered by Bertie Ahern, the PD leader said on Thursday: "Well, a very significant number: who the donors were, as best that can be done; what the nature of the [ Manchester] event was; what the funds were intended for and what they were used for. And all of those issues, and what category of payment do they fit into? Was it a gift, a loan, a political donation, a personal donation? All of these issues have to be clarified."
In the political maelstrom, where judgment can become clouded and rushed, McDowell may have difficulty accepting that Ahern should not name names - which he clearly cannot, or does not want to do.
The Thursday afternoon call between the two men was made after Ahern stopped his chauffeur-driven Mercedes S350 in Kingscourt, Co Cavan. Then he was quickly ushered into a small office for a further round of telephone calls when he reached Cavan town.
BESIDES ESCAPING DAMAGE in the Sunday newspapers - the importance of which cannot be too highly emphasised - Ahern must cool the situation between now and Tuesday, when he is due to face Opposition questions in the Dáil, though he will have to inform McDowell about the content of his statement long before he goes into the Dáil that afternoon.
The list of possible outcomes is limited: Ahern could be forced out; or he could stay, with his political credibility badly damaged; or the Progressive Democrats could pull out of government (which McDowell does not want to do, but which he believes is becoming increasingly inevitable).
The PD leader faces his own political problems too. "If the PDs get so close to FF that they are tarred, then we are buggered. He has to be careful that that doesn't happen," says one PD.
The one outcome that is highly unlikely, however, is that Ahern will quit, or be told to do so, and then be replaced by Brian Cowen, with the Coalition proceeding smoothly on. Cowen, the accepted leader-in-waiting, would have to reverse the habits of a lifetime for such an outcome to happen.
"His default mode is loyalty. He would not tolerate that happening in a month of Sundays. No way," says one TD.
HOWEVER, AHERN'S POLITICAL obituary is not yet written, especially because he is still the most popular politician in the country, even if he has had much of the gloss removed from him in recent days.
In Co Cavan on Thursday, Fianna Fáil went to considerable lengths to stage-manage the crowd that greeted him during his whistle-stop tour of the county, carrying out a dozen engagements during the day - but there was little denying his genuine popularity.
However, there were moments when Ahern's air of calm and composure evaporated, revealing flashes of anger, as when he snapped at Independent Network News political correspondent Ken Murray.
"In light of past revelations about politicians in the past, and your comments at the 1997 ardfheis, why didn't you reveal this before?" Murray asked.
"I did, into the tribunals," Ahern replied.
"But why not in public?" pressed Murray.
"Because the tribunal told me that anything I reveal is confidential. The point is, I'm not allowed. Do you understand how the tribunals work? I mean, you're long enough covering them," he snapped.
Such moments with Ahern are rare, but they have become known by the press who spend their time reporting on him as displays of "Bertie's inner gurrier".
Following visits to Ballyjamesduff, Cavan, Shercock, Cootehill and elsewhere, Ahern finished up back in Cavan's Kilmore Hotel, where he stayed until 10pm greeting people and signing autographs.
Rallying the FF troops for the next general election, he made no reference to the current controversy when he told party supporters that he had that day just become the longest-serving Taoiseach since Eamon de Valera.
To cheers, he told them that he would "be leading FF back into government next year", though he did not expect to beat "the Long Fella's" record.
Right now, Bertie Ahern could be forgiven just for wanting to be certain that he will last this week.