Analysis: Bertie Ahern retains his ability to charm and confuse at the same time

It’s seven years since Bertie Ahern stepped off the political stage, but he’s lost none of his ability to hold an audience.

He has a unique ability to charm and confuse and to inform and baffle people almost simultaneously.

“If hindsight was foresight, you know, I’d be a billionaire and so would you,” was just one of the gems at the Oireachtas banking inquiry yesterday.

His evidence was also a mass of contradictions.

After a lengthy opening statement by Ahern, inquiry chairman Ciarán Lynch kicked off the questions by asking the former taoiseach if he believed the fundamentals of the Irish economy were sound when he stepped down from the position in May 2008, just four months before the financial crash.

“Definitely,” was the response from Ahern.

“When I handed over, we were still in a good position,” he would later add.

“At no time did any of the agencies or officials say, ‘Get ready for a boom or bust’.”

Concerns

Yet Ahern accepted that concerns about the health of the Irish economy began to emerge about August 2007 and we now know that preliminary work on a guarantee for the financial system was in train before he left office.

These two things just don’t tally.

Under questioning later in the session from Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath he accepted that the size of the property sector relative to the economy was “too high, too high”.

“I accept responsibility for that. I was head of government. That was ghastly when you look back at it.”

Yet, he wouldn’t take any blame for the operational failures in oversight of the banking sector by the Central Bank of Ireland and the Financial Regulator, in spite of the fact that this dual structure was implemented on his watch.

“None, none,” he said.

This lax supervision allowed the Irish banks to build up dangerous concentrations in their property lending, and exposures to a few large developers – decisions that were to haunt them when the crash came.

“There was hardly any regulation as far as I can see,” he said at one point, without realising the irony of this, given that he was in charge of the country at the time.

Lengthy statement

In his lengthy opening statement, Ahern rattled off most of the positive economic data from his time in charge of three governments from 1997 to 2008.

It’s something he did regularly when in office. He likes to remind people about how many jobs his governments created, the net inward migration, the stellar economic growth, the increase in public spending, the success in attracting foreign direct investment, and the rejuvenation of various urban areas.

But he also accepted that he “did make mistakes” and “didn’t get everything right”.

Competitiveness suffered on his watch, he should have re-introduced the property tax in 1998, and he probablyshould have put away more money for a rainy day rather than spending it on public services.

“I apologise for my mistakes, but I am also pleased that I did get a lot of things right,” he said.

Yet he also told the committee that he was not irresponsible with his budgets, and he rejected the suggestion that his governments ramped up spending in advance of general elections only to pull it back after polling day.

Resignation

Perhaps the most intriguing thing that Ahern said was that he would have stayed on as taoiseach for another 18 months had it not been for the distractions of the Mahon tribunal at the time of his resignation.

This would have put him in the hot seat at the time of the crash, with Brian Cowen as his wingman in the department of finance.

The late Brian Lenihan, who has won the praise of many of those who were central to the management of the financial crisis in the State at the time, would have been off the pitch.

We’ll never know if things would have turned out differently, but it was typical Bertie to put it out there.

The fact that the distractions of the tribunal were of his own making just doesn’t feature in his narrative.