In the long shadow of the Boss

Despite his strenuous and often brilliantly successful attempts to escape from the image and the influence of Charles Haughey, Bertie Ahern was finally brought down by the ways in which he remained too much like his old mentor

IN 1965, THE prince met the king. Charles J Haughey, the 40-year-old Fianna Fáil princeling, soon to be appointed minister for finance, was campaigning in his Dublin North East constituency. On election day, he was introduced to a little young fellow who was a pupil of Haughey's running-mate, Stan O'Brien, in St Aidan's CBS in the constituency. The boy was just 14, but he was already steeped in Fianna Fáil tradition. Both of his parents were from Cork republican stock. His father had been imprisoned by the new Irish State as an anti-Treaty hardliner. Like most of his generation of IRA men, he got relatively little for his trouble. His place in the new State was a reasonably comfortable but modest job as a farm manager in the All Hallows seminary in Drumcondra.

Somewhere in the boy's head there was still an inherited notion of noble self-sacrifice, of Fianna Fáil as an emblem of hard personal struggle and almost ascetic dignity. Many years later, he would talk at different times of the image of the party's founder Éamon de Valera, who "managed to sustain national morale during lean and difficult times by his inspiring leadership". He would declare in the Dáil: "I am especially conscious of the high standards set by the founder of Fianna Fáil. We will strive to live up to those standards of austere integrity and we will not allow anyone to undermine them."

It may have been that inherited notion of austere integrity, of obedience to the demands of a sincere patriotism, that drove the boy to stand out by his enthusiasm during that election campaign. He scooted up lamp-posts to put the Fianna Fáil posters in the best positions above those of Fine Gael and Labour. He organised his friends into little poster posses. He kept watch on the best sites to make sure that his work was not undone by the enemy. His fervour earned him the title "King of the Poster Boys". And on election day, it earned him a little chat with the prince. "I was introduced to him at a polling booth during the election," Bertie Ahern recalled for his biographers Ken Whelan and Eugene Masterson. "I was very impressed by him, really remember Charlie giving a bit of his time to talk to me." The boy who had grown up with notions of leadership in lean and difficult times had entered the shadow of a leader whose ideals of austere integrity were not exactly those of Éamon de Valera.

The two men were of different generations, but their destinies would come to follow a remarkably similar pattern. Both northside Dublin Christian Brothers' boys with provincial parents whose lives had been shaped by the Troubles. Both growing up at an angle to the lower middle-class world around them - one the son of a retired army officer, the other of a farmer in an inner-city suburb. Both with a head for figures and an early career in accountancy. Both becoming minister for finance at the age of 40. Each recognised as the greatest Irish political tactician of his time. Both retaining a conservative Catholicism and a marriage while having a second long-term relationship. And, in the end, both brought down by a comprehensive inability to see the State as something beyond themselves, with rules and necessities that could not be overridden by greed or arrogance. Even as he outstripped the man who stopped to talk to him at a polling booth in 1965, Bertie Ahern could never escape the long shadow of Charles J Haughey.

Through all of these parallels, Bertie Ahern appears, rather deceptively, as a smaller, less flamboyantly tragic, version of his mentor. There is, on the surface, an element of Karl Marx's dictum about everything in history happening twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Charlie flaunted a brilliant intellect at UCD, projected a strident ambition as a young man, and co-founded his own accountancy company. Bertie went to Rathmines College of Commerce and got a job "sorting the books out for the nuns" in the Mater hospital, scarcely a mile from his home. Charlie did Château Lynch Bages and Charvet shirts. Bertie did Bass and anoraks. Charlie rubbed the public's nose in a mansion, a stud farm, a yacht, helicopters, a private island. Bertie squirrelled his money away in perplexing places and retained an outward, indeed insistent, show of modest means.

But this notion of Ahern as a Haughey mini-me misses the central fact of his political career - his strenuous, and often brilliantly successful, attempts to escape from his mentor's shadow. His triumph was the degree to which he invented his own persona and seemed to outdo his master in political skill and achievement. His tragedy was the degree to which, however far he ran, his master's shadow pursued him. It says much in the end that his hope for history's judgment of Haughey - "People remember him for the many good things he did and not just the issues for which he had been asked to account by the tribunals." - is now precisely his hope for history's judgement of himself.

BERTIE AHERN never had much time for psychological ambiguities or analyses. "I see myself as a very uncomplex person," he told the Sunday World in 2000 in an unconscious echo of Haughey's "deep down I'm a shallow person" self-assessment.

"I can never understand these journalists who say they can't work me out. I think they try too hard. They should just take it as it is." But to take him as he is, one would first have to decide which "him" to take. The conservative Catholic, or the serial monogamist? The man who declared himself a socialist in 2004, or the one who told his biographers six years earlier that "I don't believe in all that socialist stuff. I've never met a socialist in my life"? The famously frugal Dub, or the man with rakes of cash cluttering up his office? And, most importantly, the man who was disgusted by Charles Haughey or the man who idolised him?

There was never anything "uncomplex" about Ahern's relationship with his mentor. The silence that spoke volumes in his resignation statement on Wednesday morning was the absence of the two words: "Charles Haughey." In a carefully crafted valedictory message, intended both for now and for the future, he said: "In November 1994, I was elected leader of Fianna Fáil, the Republican Party. This was for me and my family an extraordinary honour. To follow in the footsteps of de Valera, Lemass and those other giants of this nation's history was both a daunting prospect and an historic opportunity." Haughey was an unnamable "other giant", a presence both massive and incapable of being acknowledged. And yet he was certainly, inescapably there.

The nearest we can come to a sense of the way Haughey haunted him is through the very effusiveness of his emotional tribute to the Boss at the latter's State funeral in 2006. It was not a speech he had to make. Or, if he did have to speak, he did not need to speak in such extraordinarily grandiloquent terms about a man who had been so flagrantly corrupt: "a patriot to his fingertips"; "the most consequential of Irishmen"; "grace under pressure"; a man of whose "memory . . . there will be no end". The passionate extravagance of the speech, so out of character with Ahern's normally colourless rhetoric, and the way he called him, in his peroration, "Charlie, (pause) Boss," gave it the air of a penitent's recantation. It was an act of defiance, aimed, not just at the usual Haughey critics, but at the man who had airbrushed Haughey from Fianna Fáil history and described his behaviour in taking money from businessmen as "appalling" and "unacceptable": Bertie Ahern himself. He was making things right with the Boss he had betrayed.

The gesture of repentance was eloquent both because it went against Ahern's immediate political interests and because he had built his own political persona on studying the Boss and doing the opposite.

HAUGHEY PRACTISED - superbly - the politics of division. He divided the world into friends and enemies and gave no quarter to the foe. He used the hatred and mistrust of others to galvanise his supporters and paint himself as a giant assailed by pygmies. He looked for the political wedges and pushed them hard. He revelled in his own magnificence, using mockery, arrogance and contempt to mark himself out from the common herd. He acted boldly and brazenly.

Ahern turned this political persona on its head. He abhorred division and looked for the consensus that drove his achievements in Northern Ireland, social partnership and internal party unity. He defeated his enemies by pretending he had no enemies at all. He created an ideological stance so amorphous that he could be right-wing and socialist, developer's friend and environmentalist, republican and pal of Paisley, sometimes all at the same time. He underplayed his own keen intelligence, sometimes deliberately resorting to gibberish, not caring if it made him look stupid and inarticulate. He downgraded the grandeur of his office by being available to open pubs, hairdressers, supermarkets. He acted cautiously, even timidly, upsetting as few people as possible.

He had charisma, but it was the opposite to that of the Boss. Haughey's charisma was wholesale, best deployed in the formal settings of the party platform or the Dáil chamber. Ahern's was retail, up close and personal. Haughey's depended on a distance that placed him, mentally at least, above the rest. Ahern's depended on the opposite illusion of intimacy and equality. Haughey was self-consciously theatrical. Ahern's was the theatre that disguised theatre, the performance of unself-conscious ordinariness.

It is pure myth to suggest that this strategy made Bertie Ahern a more successful electoral leader than Haughey. He was not in fact a great vote-getter. His three elections as leader produced three of the four lowest percentages of the vote for Fianna Fáil since the party first came to power in 1932. His best performance - in 2007 - garnered just 1.5 per cent more of the vote than the infamous Albert Reynolds-led crash of 1992.

His real brilliance lay in making electoral mediocrity irrelevant. While Haughey's divisiveness repelled allies, Ahern's emollience attracted them. He traded the notion of having all the power most of the time for a strategy of holding power permanently by ceding a little of it to others.

Yet to define yourself as the opposite to someone else is still, in a sense, to be dominated by that someone. The very thoroughness of Ahern's reversal of his mentor's example has an eerie symmetry to it. A ballroom dancer mirrors his partner's movements in reverse, moving the right foot when the other moves the left and vice versa. Ahern remained locked in this kind of dance because he still moved to the same tune that had swayed Haughey - the siren song of being, in your own mind, the embodiment of the State.

BERTIE AHERN changed Fianna Fáil in many ways, mostly by making it seem like an ordinary political party. He threw overboard much of the emotional ballast of the "national movement" - the mystical idea that Fianna Fáil was not a machine for holding power but rather embodied, as Haughey would have it, "the spirit of the nation". He dropped the anachronistic evocations of an agricultural, essentially rural Ireland. He dispensed, once and for all, with the "core value" of single-party government. He ditched, most potently and with most historical resonance, both the rhetoric and the substance of traditional Irish nationalism.

But what he could not change (or perhaps did not want to change) was the habit of mind, forged both by ideology and force of habit, of thinking of Fianna Fáil as the true essence of Ireland, and therefore as having an innate right to power.

The notion of "l'état c'est nous" and thus, for the leader, "l'état c'est moi" never left him. The righteous fervour that made him King of the Poster Boys combined with the sense of personal entitlement he imbibed from Haughey to create for Ahern a fatal lack of distance between himself and the State he supposedly served. That identification of himself with the State was manifested when he decided, even though he was still married, to install his "life partner" as an official First Lady. It was hinted at when he tried to create a monument to his own sporting tastes by spending €1 billion of public money on the Bertie Bowl.

It showed when he announced, in all innocence, that he appointed his friends to State boards, not because they gave him money, but simply because they were his friends. It showed in the way he hung on to office long after his departure became inevitable, allowing the business of government to be held hostage to his personal drama.

It appeared in his willingness to allow all his senior ministers to sacrifice their credibility, and therefore the dignity of their offices, in their slavish defence of his.

It showed above all when he excused his acceptance of private donations while he was minister for finance by reference to his family circumstances, as if it were obvious to all that a crisis in his private life was a national emergency. When, in his resignation speech on Wednesday, he explained his extraordinary financial dealings in the mind-1990s by the fact that "my family, personal and professional situations were rapidly changing", the elision of the personal and the political was striking.

THIS INABILITY TO separate his private comforts and interests from the high offices of State he occupied lies behind his apparently genuine belief that, as he reiterated on Wednesday, "I have done no wrong". It is an attitude directly inherited from Charles Haughey, who remained, to his grave, sincerely unrepentant. At its root is the notion that, at least in its highest reaches, power is personal. It inheres, not in the office, but in the office holder. And it does not therefore matter much if the person holding it departs from the standards he sets down for others. Right and wrong are not objective categories, but expressions of what is good or bad for the person in power.

There is a tragic irony in the fact that Bertie Ahern, who did so much to make himself and his party as different as possible from Charles Haughey, was brought down by the ways in which he remained too much like him. He could never be confident that, in condemning Haughey's corruption, he was not being a traitor to the spirit of the nation. He could never put a psychological space between himself and the other satellites whose orbit around the Boss he once shared - Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor, Pádraig Flynn. He could never come up with a way for Fianna Fáil to reinvent its relationship with power, to throw out the sense of entitlement along with all the other baggage he ditched so ruthlessly.

In that speech at the Boss's graveside, Bertie Ahern concluded that "Charles Haughey would ruefully acknowledge to me that he enjoyed the proverbial nine lives. Charlie, Boss, the last of those lives has now been extinguished." He was not to know then that there was one last life left to the man who had stopped to talk to him for the first time in 1965. Beyond the grave, the forces he set in motion were still exerting a tragic pull on Bertie Ahern's destiny. The question now is whether, with one last sad exorcism, they have finally been laid to rest.