Next week marks Bertie Ahern's 10th year as Fianna Fáil leader. He has a lot more to do, he tells Mark Brennock, Chief Political Correspondent.
In the typical Bertie interview there are a few standard statistics-based litanies: Falling unemployment, economic growth, improving pupil-teacher ratios, more money spent on health. The message is: You guys concentrate on the negative all the time. You don't point out how good things are.
In an interview to mark the 10th anniversary next week of his election as Fianna Fáil leader, he makes these points again, but there is a new message that he is keen to put across too. "Life is still tough" for a lot of people, he says.
He also remarks on the fall-off in voluntary work in support of schools, sports clubs and community organisations, which has come with growing economic prosperity. The successful must give something back to society.
His eyes have been opened, he says, by learning that the Rutland Street School in inner city Dublin has tempted children from deprived backgrounds to attend school by offering them breakfast when they get there. He was taken aback by a recent report on Travellers showing how many were still living on the side of the road. He is proud of the economic progress, but says he wants to be remembered for improving the lot of the underprivileged.
It has been said for months that the Taoiseach is genuinely surprised and annoyed that his Government is seen as right wing. After the local and European elections in June, the party decided to reposition itself as a party of social justice.
In interviews, the Taoiseach usually emphasises the first part of the party's 2002 election slogan: A Lot Done. This week he is keen to acknowledge social problems and to emphasise the second part of that slogan: More To Do.
His personal political outlook defies typecasting. He is not in the centre, but often seems to be on both sides. On every issue of importance in Irish society Bertie Ahern can convincingly give expression to apparently opposing positions.
HE IS A traditional daily Mass-goer throughout Lent and gives up drink for the month of November. He is also a non-traditional separated man who had a long and public second relationship.
He leads a Government implementing much of the traditional right-of-centre economic agenda, but this week insists, "I am one of the few socialists left in Irish politics."
He led Republican Ireland to historic compromise in relation to Northern Ireland, while keeping a portrait of Pádraig Pearse above his desk. He was against the invasion of Iraq while facilitating the invaders' passage through Shannon. He led his party away from the mire of Charles Haughey, Ray Burke and Liam Lawlor, while being slow to disown them unambiguously.
He is left and right, traditional and unorthodox, religious and secular, social democrat and economic liberal, Croker and Old Trafford. Some see this as a Machiavellian riding of two horses. However, he rejects the suggestion that he deliberately positions himself on both sides of every significant divide in Ireland. It just comes naturally, he says.
"I genuinely believe in being an inclusive person," he says. "I don't have to work at it because it comes naturally to me." It's about being tolerant, and seeing things the way the other person sees them.
"For this year I have studied [ Ian] Paisley. I have studied Paisley's tactics. I would, in negotiations, study the other person and try to understand their views."
He says he knows people often demand of him that he express his own view on an issue or "take a stand" when he is reluctant to. "But it's not a question of what is my view. Ultimately, only things that have a consensus . . . are likely to succeed. Why does the European model work? Because two world wars have forced people to come together and not have wars any more, and now they try to find consensus."
He is much more a chairman than a chief: what others call dithering, he calls consensus-seeking. This is exemplified when he is asked his view on the liberal agenda issue of the moment, gay unions or marriage. There is no consensus now, he says. He knows gay people who have other priorities in terms of taxation and inheritance rights. The Government is committed to treating gay people as equals in society. We need calm, rational debate, he says. And at the end of a very reasonable discourse on a complex subject you realise he has expressed no view at all.
It is a style that has worked well for a decade. Today, his term as taoiseach equals that of Seán Lemass. Next Friday he will have been party leader for 10 years. There is no fantastic replacement leader waiting in the wings. But he says he has no intention of pursuing Eamon de Valera's record of 21 years as taoiseach, which would require him to remain in the job until 2018, the year he turns 67.
Now 53, he still intends to quit politics when he is 60 [ September 2011]. "I just think you would have been around a long time [ 35 years]." But he adds that his appetite for the job is as strong as ever, and while he sees things he has done, he also sees things he hasn't done.
He gives a preamble first to emphasise the positive. Gone are "the 17 per cent unemployment, the deprivation that was in the inner city when I started being a political activist, Gardiner Street, the slums, the squalor, the 14 flats to one toilet. The changes are immense." Emigration is now voluntary. Educational participation has shot up.
BUT THERE IS now a "new agenda" of problems. "We have by and large created a very good corporate Ireland, a very good business Ireland.
"We have good sports, good leisure Ireland. But there is still a section of people, a lot of them in my own constituency; even though we are putting a lot of money into new flat blocks, life is still tough for a lot of those people." He says there are discrepancies in the pupil-teacher ratio between schools in upper middle class areas and those in less well off areas.
In Rutland Street School, in his own constituency, "when we started doing breakfasts in the school, the percentage of people coming with their kids went up dramatically, and that was a bit of an eye-opener for me. It wasn't the parents who brought them to the school, the kids came to the school because they were getting a breakfast". He refers to the recent report on Travellers which talked of the number of people still living on the roadside. "When you go to bed these nights and you think of people by the roadside" it doesn't do your heart good, he says. "They are the kind of issues I would like to see through and I look forward to doing that for another seven years."
He says that accompanying the new prosperity, the fall-off in social involvement and voluntary activity by citizens is notable. He has twice read the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by American Robert D. Putnam, on how people are becoming increasingly disconnected from family, friends, community and democratic structures, and it has struck a chord with him.
There was once an Irish tradition of people giving their time voluntarily to community organisations, St Vincent de Paul, schools, sports clubs and churches. This is fading.
When he is out of the country, local diplomats are asked to find a suitable Catholic church where he can attend Mass. But religion is absent from his public persona. Asked about the recent public mixing of religion by George Bush and Rocco Buttiglione, he says: "I'm totally opposed to wearing religion on my sleeve and I don't like that and I don't think people should do it." He quotes a 1960 speech in which John F. Kennedy insisted there should be no barrier to his becoming the first Catholic president of the US. "So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again - not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me - but what kind of America I believe in." Kennedy went on to express belief in the absolute separation of church and state.
"I think religion gives you some values," says Ahern. "Some of them I manage to stick to and some I don't. That's for me. It's not something to push on to people. But I greatly admire people in the churches, allof them. I think they are good people. My own private faith should not impinge on my public role and it doesn't."
After 9/11, he says, he took an interest in the Islamic world: after Omagh he took an interest in the Church of Ireland. He says as a private individual, he believes involvement in a church - whichever one - is good for people. "I've got more and more interested in recent years in the Koran and listening to more and more Muslims around my own constituency. You do get a sense of security and support from being close to a church. That's not craw-thumping . . . When times are rough for people, if it's a bereavement, a difficulty at work, a difficulty with relationships", listening to the analysis given by church people is a good thing, he says.
The private Bertie tends to remain private. The message before every interview with the Taoiseach is that he won't discuss his personal life. His separation from his wife Miriam and the end of his long-term relationship with Celia Larkin are well known. Asked whether his own experience of being in public life makes him believe Irish people are tolerant, he says: "Yes I do. The political system is very fair, very tolerant, and so are the media. There is a small element of the media that goes after these things for colour. People are caring, they are understanding, and they don't seek to use it . . . I think for a person like me, that's something you appreciate very greatly."
He agrees with the observation that he has very little interest in having personal wealth. "I don't. I have a modest house and I feel lucky enough to have it. Obviously, I have commitments to my family that I have been very happy to contribute to. I have a modest house in a nice area, my own home area, and I am happy with that.
"People mightn't believe this but I have a very socialist view on life. I have it in my mind that I own the Phoenix Park, and I own the Botanic Gardens, I own Dublin Zoo. Because the State participates in these things, I am free to go in there whenever the opening hours are.
"And I don't feel I need to own any of these things. They are there.
"I don't feel I need to own a huge house with a huge glasshouse when I can go down the road 10 minutes and do it [ visit the Botanic Gardens]. It's just the way I think about things. What is the best form of equality? It is the fact that the richest family in this area can go on a Sunday afternoon to the Bots, and the poorest family can too. And they can both share the same things. So I have fought for 15 years to improve the resources of things like that, the Phoenix Park, Dublin Zoo, and also things like sport."
He acknowledges that this view of collective property rights is not one shared by many wealthy people and property owners, most of whom would like a few acres of their own in Dublin 4 and 6. "I know that, but I can truthfully tell you that that isn't for me."
He says he could have taken a job as chief executive of the Mater Private Hospital, which was offered to him after an interview in the 1970s. Or he could have set himself up as a tax consultant for hospital consultants, as he had been encouraged to do, but chose not to.
"If I had done those things I would be a very wealthy guy. But I opted not to do that. If I can go on my annual holidays to Kerry, get a few days sometimes, if I can get now and again to Old Trafford, if I have enough money for a few pints and if I can look after Miriam and the kids, I don't care a damn, I couldn't care. And tomorrow if I hadn't got very much it wouldn't matter. I'm well paid so I can't moan. But if I hadn't got that I wouldn't moan too much either. I have no desire to have a big house, no desire to have land. I'd consider it a nuisance, actually."
He acknowledges that not many of the people hanging around the Fianna Fáil tent at the Galway Races would have this attitude to money and property. He says again he would like people who have been successful to give something back to society. But he insists that these people are the engines of the growth that is needed to help others.
"The only way we will ever succeed in helping the people in need is having a strong economy that generates the wealth so that we can redistribute the wealth.
"If there are not the guys at the Galway Races in the tent who are earning wealth, who are creating wealth, then I can't redistribute that. I can talk a lot about what we can do for the less well off in society, but I can't do anything for them."
When it is put to him that Fianna Fáil is no longer the anti-Treaty party, or the party of the men and women of no property, he agrees to an extent. It is still "a very Republican Party . . . we still care, we care about the language, we care about things Irish". And in relation to the fact that it has a lot of wealthy members and backers, he says: "But we are a party of people who have come through the ranks. If you go through a lot of our people who are doing very well now, their fathers would have been very ordinary Joe Soaps. As Irish life has lifted they, having done absolutely nothing wrong, have achieved good success. Many of them are still prepared to go out and do their work on the ground and put work into the party."
And there is no demand from party members and parliamentary party members for cuts in capital gains tax or increases in capital allowances. Rather, the priorities emerging from "the hard core of Fianna Fáil people" concerned maximising increases for social welfare recipients, producing a good financial package to deal with disability and improving social housing.
"All our discussions have been about trying to help the less well off in society, the homeless, the Travelling community, so I think that the heart and soul of Fianna Fáil are still there."