ECONOMICS:So, what is Bertie Ahern's legacy in economic terms? In 2002 and 2007, Fianna Fáil and the PDs almost certainly benefited from the perception that their economic management skills were superior to those of any alternative government, writes Jim O'Leary.

SO, BERTIE Ahern's span as Taoiseach will run to just under 11 years. This will make him the second longest-serving holder of the office; eloquent testimony to his celebrated political skills.

Interestingly though, of the five Fianna Fáil taoisigh who have served for more than two years, he is the only one never to have headed a single-party government. This reflects the relatively low share of the vote won by Fianna Fáil under him.

Indeed, with the exception of Albert Reynolds, Ahern has been Fianna Fáil's poorest vote-getter. In the three general elections fought under his leadership, the party secured just 41 per cent of national first preferences on average.

The corresponding figures for de Valera, Lemass, Lynch and Haughey were 45 per cent, 46 per cent, 47.5 per cent and 45 per cent respectively.

Ahern's success in winning and retaining power therefore was down to his capacity to do deals with coalition partners and, a related factor, the happy knack of Fianna Fáil winning substantial seat bonuses during his era.

His period as Taoiseach has been one of generally impressive economic performance and it is tempting to conclude that his political success was a function of economic success. It's not as simple as that though.

Had prevailing economic conditions determined the outcome in 1997, they would have propelled the Bruton-led Rainbow Coalition back into office.

Likewise, prevailing economic conditions did not make Ahern's re-election in 2002 a sure thing.

The Irish economy stumbled badly that year, with GNP recording its slowest growth rate in a decade. Nor was the economic background particularly auspicious for him in 2007: house prices had started to soften, the building boom was running out of steam and the air was thick with forecasts of a sharp slowdown in the overall pace of activity.

Still, in 2002 and again in 2007, Fianna Fáil and the PDs almost certainly benefited from the perception that their economic management skills were superior to those of any alternative government.

In 2002, this was in large measure due to the incoherent policy platform of Fine Gael; in 2007 it was due to the fact that Fianna Fáil (and the PDs) had by then comprehensively appropriated the credit for the economy's transformation of the previous two decades.

How valid is it to ascribe to Ahern-led governments the credit for the Celtic Tiger? This is too big a question to answer in the space available.

Suffice to say at this point that, insofar as credit for economic success is due to government as distinct from other agents of change, Ahern- led governments and, more generally, governments in which he served, are due a large share of the plaudits.

One counter-argument is that the economy actually grew at its most rapid pace under John Bruton in the 1994-1997 period, and that Ahern was lucky in what he inherited.

The riposte, delivered as I recall with some aplomb by Brian Cowen during last year's election campaign, is that the Bruton administration was a mere punctuation mark in an otherwise unbroken 20-year span of Fianna Fail-led government dating back to 1987 and is entitled to correspondingly scant credit for anything on that account. Ouch!

No doubt Ahern had a vision of a dynamic prosperous Irish economy, but he never came across as someone who had strong and clear views about the policies that needed to be adopted in order to achieve that vision, unlike his long- time finance minister Charlie McCreevy.

On the other hand, he was strongly attached to a particular type of process for developing and implementing policy that was always defined by negotiation, consultation, inclusion and delegation, and sometimes by less desirable features, like obfuscation and procrastination.

Herein lay his great strength as a unifying force, a strength that was evident at so many levels, at home and abroad.

Second only to the Northern Ireland peace process, the most distinctive part of Ahern's legacy is social partnership. At one level, social partnership is simply the institutionalisation of the way in which he likes to do business.

It is a process defined, not fully perhaps, but in large measure by the attributes listed above.

At another level, social partnership is claimed as the key ingredient in the economy's transformation, the sine qua non of the Celtic Tiger. I don't buy that and never have done.

Indeed, I have spent a good deal of time down through the years subjecting the quantifiable claims made for social partnership (its supposed contribution to industrial peace, to wage predictability, to wage moderation and competitiveness) to empirical testing and have satisfied myself that they are hollow.

That said, one has to acknowledge that not everything that matters can be measured and that the benign effects of social partnership may fall into this category.

It may be enough at the end of the day that people simply believe in it. If so, Ahern can claim much of the credit.

He was the high priest, he preached it and he lived it.

Jim O'Leary is a senior fellow of the department of economics at NUI-Maynooth. He can be contacted at jim.oleary@nuim.ie