Pragmatism not principle ruled the day for PDs

Inside Politics: It says something about the nature of Irish politics that the dramatic disclosures of the past few weeks boiled down in the end to the stark political options facing the Progressive Democrats, rather than the standards of behaviour and accountability required from our senior politicians. Pragmatism rather than principle ruled the day as far as both Government parties were concerned.

Tánaiste Michael McDowell, found himself in a quandary as the crisis narrowed itself down to the question of what he would do next. He had the choice of walking out of Government, and allowing Fianna Fáil to continue on its own, or staying in and swallowing his pride at having being taken for granted by the Taoiseach, who appears incapable of telling the full story on any subject to anyone.

After 24 hours of total public silence, Mr McDowell eventually came up with a formula of words yesterday designed to give him a way out of his problems and one that would allow him to remain on in Government.

Acknowledging that the relationship between the Coalition parties had been damaged by Bertie Ahern's actions, he said. "The Government is safe if the damage that has been done to the Government in recent times is repaired."

How that damage is going to be repaired will depend on how far the Taoiseach will go to save his Tánaiste's blushes. Mr Ahern's great strength as a politician is that he does not stand on his dignity, so despite his strong political position with Independents lining up to support Fianna Fáil, he won't be too bothered by having to throw a bone or two to the PDs.

The strong message coming from Fianna Fáil is that the Taoiseach is not going to be dragged into the Dáil for yet another explanation but a clarification at a "doorstep" interview with journalists would not be out of the question.

Mr McDowell was always going to be put in an invidious position by the nature of the controversy that developed over payments to the Taoiseach.

Nonetheless, he must shoulder a lot of the blame for the fact that it was he, rather than Mr Ahern, who ended up in no man's land when the music stopped.

The Tánaiste's basic error was that he tied himself too closely to the Taoiseach in the early stages of the controversy. As Mr Ahern's story changed and evolved Mr McDowell huffed but he never put enough distance between himself and the head of the Government to give himself adequate room to manoeuvre.

It was striking that when the Taoiseach came into the Dáil last Tuesday to explain the controversial Manchester payment, Mr McDowell sat beside him and applauded warmly at the end of the speech.

Not only that but, on occasion, during questions from the Opposition, he whispered advice and encouragement. It was this closeness that made the revelation about the Taoiseach's house the following day all the more disconcerting for Mr McDowell. After backing Mr Ahern's patently implausible story about how he received about €60,000 from businessmen for his personal use in 1993 and 1994, Mr McDowell discovered that he had not been told the salient fact that one of the people present at the Manchester meeting had actually sold the Taoiseach his house.

It raised the question about how much more Mr Ahern had not told his Coalition partner and it prompted Thursday's rift between the two men.

The silence of the PDs for 24 hours was a new tactic but if it was intended to take the pressure off the party it did not work. While it did give the Tánaiste time to consider his options, the media focus remained on the PDs and did not shift back to the various questions that Mr Ahern's succession of statements had thrown up.

Although there was intense media speculation that the 24 hour silence of the PDs presaged a walk out from Government, the mood within the party was very different. The feeling of almost all the party's TDs was that they could not leave office on the question of whom the Taoiseach had bought his house from. They all desperately wanted a way to stay in and they encouraged their leader to find a way out of the mess.

Mr McDowell found a formula to get over the immediate problem but, even assuming that the Taoiseach reciprocates, he is not out of the woods yet.

He faces the immediate problem that there may be a series of further relatively minor and non-fatal revelations about the Taoiseach's personal finances.

This will create even more difficulty than one big knock-out punch, which would at least clarify the position and make it easy for the PDs to walk. The real difficulty faced by the junior Coalition party is that if it now stays the course until the Taoiseach decides to dissolve the Dáil it will be wide open to the accusation that it has compromised its stance on the kind of the ethical standards that should apply to political life.

The PDs will have a hard time making the argument that they can ever again serve in the watchdog role that Mr McDowell himself elevated to the centre of political debate in the last election when he went up the lamp-post.

What has been truly unfortunate for him is that the controversy over the Taoiseach arose when he had just taken over as Tánaiste. The conspiracy theory that Mary Harney resigned because she knew the controversy was coming is obviously far-fetched, although the Taoiseach's claim that he did tell her something about the loans is puzzling.

Mr McDowell's problem is that while he had developed a good working relationship with the Taoiseach on issues of common concern in his role as Minister for Justice, the role of Tánaiste requires him to develop a very different and much more coldly calculating relationship with Mr Ahern.

It will be little consolation to Mr McDowell that Ms Harney went through a long learning curve in her dealings with the Taoiseach. In her very first months in office she was burned by the Ray Burke episode when she went public to defend the then minister for foreign affairs without being kept fully in the picture by Mr Ahern.

The same thing happened a year later over the Rennicks payment to Mr Burke when she was again kept in the dark about what Mr Ahern knew.

When the Taoiseach failed to tell her about his involvement in the Sheedy affair in 1999 Ms Harney came close to pulling out of government. She refused to attend a cabinet meeting and for 24 hours it seemed the coalition might come apart. With minister for finance Charlie McCreevy acting as intermediary, Mr Ahern finally defused the crisis by agreeing to go into the Dáil to answer questions on the issue.

Then in April 2001 Mr Ahern again apologised in the Dáil to the tánaiste for telling her about a payment of €76 million to the GAA while he was pushing the Stadium Ireland project.

Those events gave Ms Harney an insight into the Taoiseach's modus operandi which enabled her to work with him in relative harmony for the following five years. The spat in recent days over what the Taoiseach told her about his involvement with the tribunal was a reminder that after almost a decade of working together there was still a level of mutual incomprehension.

The focus on Mr McDowell and the PDs in recent days has taken attention away from the fundamental issue at the heart of the controversy: whether it is appropriate that leading politicians should accept substantial sums of money from business people for purely personal use.

This is the proposition that the Taoiseach has advanced to justify his actions 12 years ago and he remained adamant throughout that his behaviour was totally compatible with the current guidelines on ethics.

If after all the ethics legislation, and the tens of millions of euro spent on the raft of tribunals, we have come back to the position where politicians feel free to take money from anybody they like for their personal use, then nothing has changed since the days when Charles Haughey, Ray Burke and Pádraig Flynn were able to use their positions of power to enrich themselves.

The paradox of the current crisis is that there is no great political pressure on Mr Ahern over his admission that he took "loans from friends and gifts from strangers" but Mr McDowell has taken a hammering from some for not leaving office because of the Taoiseach's behaviour and from others from questioning that behaviour at all.

Ultimately the voters will make their judgment at the ballot box in the next election and only then will it be possible to say if the issues at the heart of the affair are of real concern to the public or not.