OPINION:The constant focus in "Bertie" on how the former taoiseach took money while holding public office was justified because it showed how his political machine operated, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
PERHAPS, WHEN time and distance have given us a larger view of recent events, the most damning moment in the four-part film of Bertie Ahern that ended last night on RTÉ television will be a remark so low-key it could easily be missed.
In the third episode, the former secretary general of the Department of the Taoiseach Paddy Teahon was talking about the making of the Belfast Agreement. Teahon soldiered with Ahern in that process and through many other nights of deal-making.
He praised Ahern's role in the peace talks: "You saw a person display a colossal degree of skill, not just in one aspect but in several aspects." And then Teahon added, almost as an afterthought, the devastating judgment: "I would really have liked if it had been the case that Bertie Ahern showed that determination that he showed in the Northern peace process more often." With the perfect mandarin deployment of precise understatement, Teahon cut to the heart of the questions that hovered around the series. How could a man be possessed of such supreme political skills and yet become mired in such money-grubbing banality?
How could he be so relentlessly strong-willed in negotiations and yet so weak that he couldn't stop himself taking parcels of cash in pubs and hotels? Why does the Belfast Agreement, in which his genius for the mechanics of politics meshed into a great historic achievement, stand out so obviously from all those times when the mechanics seemed to be an end in themselves?
It is not really a criticism of Steve Carson's gripping and well-judged series to say that it was better at raising those questions than at answering them. It may be that no one really knows the answers, not even Ahern himself.
What Bertiedid do, though, was to give future historians a good idea where to look for them. Its most important achievement was the way it stayed true to the nature of its subject by locating him utterly within the frame of local politics. It brought to life the strange truth that Planet Bertie was always in orbit, not around Fianna Fáil or Ireland or the EU, but around Drumcondra. It showed that Bertie's tragedy was that he could not separate the way he wielded power from the way he achieved it.
The big new thing that the series brought into public view was Bertie's gang. While Carson gave us new details on lots of events, his real breakthrough was in putting the Drumcondra Mafia on screen. Some names had leaked into the public consciousness - Chris Wall, Paddy Duffy, Des Richardson, Joe Burke. But knowing about them is not at all the same thing as seeing them in all their unabashed pride and self-delight.
It seems quite clear that the programmes were not edited to make the Drumcondra Mafia look bad. Joe Burke told the Irish Independentthat "I think they treated my contribution very fairly". Paddy Duffy wrote in the Sunday Timesthat "The Mint documentaries are great because they give a true rendition of the amazing story of ordinary man Bertie". They were clearly pleased at their appearance on screen and delighted with the opportunity to be acknowledged as the co-inventors of the Ahern phenomenon. They came across like Simon Cowell or Louis Walsh in a documentary about the Spice Girls or Boyzone. Or, perhaps more to the point, like the guys in the gym who had spotted and trained a world heavyweight champion and would now like the world to acknowledge that they did it.
It might have been reasonable to expect the first episode to deal more with Ahern's relationship to his Old IRA father or with Charles Haughey. But Carson's underlying judgment seemed to be that such things mattered less than something much simpler and more direct: sport. He located the origins of Ahern's male peer group, the gang of young fellas that would become the mafia, in local soccer and GAA clubs.
If that judgment seemed a little suspect at first, the series went on to vindicate it. For it gave us a stunning portrait of Irish machine politics as a sport - played hard, played to win, but also, like any sport, played for its own sake. What Bertiedid very effectively was to show us how this game was played by a master. Even while the series was tending to indulge the rather hackneyed notion of Ahern as an enigma, it was actually dismantling the supposed mystery. It showed Ahern to be something quite simple and easily understood - a player.
The politician who emerged within it was someone with all the well-honed skills, all the self-absorption, all the ruthlessness and all the fixated obsessions of a top-class sportsman. There was even a sense in the interviews with Ahern himself of the sportsman's resignation to ultimate failure. So what, his expression seemed to say, if you fade and fall towards the end, so long as you have been at the top and have three electoral gold medals in your cabinet? In this pursuit, Fianna Fáil was a vehicle, not a destination.
It was telling that the mafia's most violent expression of ruthlessness was saved, not for a war on external enemies, but for a war on Fianna Fáil itself. It was in the takeover of Dublin Central by Bertie's boys that the machine "stepped maybe not on their toes [but] on their f*****g heads".
The machine recognises two kinds of people - those who are with us and those who are against us. In that simple fact lies the essence of the crony culture that surrounded Ahern. There was, in the documentary, an extraordinary lack of self-consciousness about the notion of politics as a network of exchanges in which money serves, not necessarily to buy favours directly, but as a token of being "in".
Barry English, who contributed to the first dig-out even though he barely knew Ahern, explained this with disarming frankness: "I work in the construction industry and my clients are developers and the like and I don't think it does me any harm to be known as a friend of Bertie Ahern's." On the other side of this exchange, Ahern's expression of gratitude to English was equally telling: "He said 'Thanks very much and I'll sort you out.' "
There has been criticism that the programmes dwelt too much on this world in which, as Des Richardson put it in another unselfconsciously illuminating remark, "If I wanted to raise £100,000 for Bertie Ahern, I could have done that in one week." But the concentration on the minutiae of the money was justified, not just by the clarity with which the transactions were laid out, but by Carson's ability to use them as a way in to the mentality of the machine.
For, just as the machine recognises only friends and enemies, it categorises events solely by their utility or otherwise. Thus, in last night's programme, Ahern dismissed the Philip Sheedy affair, which created the largest judicial crisis in the history of the State, as "nothing". Its only significance, in his view, was as a political annoyance. Thus, too, his insistence in last night's programme that he did "absolutely nothing wrong". This might seem to contradict his admission elsewhere in the series that "As a principle, I was probably wrong to take the money from anyone."
He went on to say that he wouldn't have taken the money - if he had known how much grief it was going to cause him. The issue of principle was insignificant compared to the practical consequences. The offence, in sporting terms, was not so much kicking an opponent but doing it in front of the referee and getting caught. When he openly boasted last night, for instance, about his ability to obfuscate and avoid questions, he had a player's simple glee in the perfection of a useful skill. Ahern's mastery of the game made him a complete master of the art of winning power and holding on to it.
The sadness that hung over the end of the series last night is that he was never able to be anything else except a player. The film helped us to understand, much more profoundly than ever before, why he so desperately wanted his monument to be a big, shiny sports stadium.