Taoiseach of the greasy till

A hundred years ago the great Michael Davitt was putting the finishing touches to his final testament, a book called The Fall…

A hundred years ago the great Michael Davitt was putting the finishing touches to his final testament, a book called The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, writes Fintan O'Toole.

It was a celebration of the end of ascendancy and the rise of democracy in Ireland, the triumph of republican egalitarianism over the snooty pretension of the landlord class.

A century on, last weekend Ireland was exporting to the home of republicanism, France, a new brand of home-grown feudalism. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, spiritual heir to Davitt's revolution, was a willing and central participant in the spectacle of Lord Nicky and Lady Georgina's display of contempt for the local peasantry.

A boy-bandocracy is no worse than an aristocracy. The bad manners of celebs are no more hurtful than the disdain of duchesses. But neither are the pretensions of the new elite any less outrageous than those of the old gentry.

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In January last year the village of Rathfeigh in Co Meath was taken over by the wedding of Westlife's Bryan McFadden to Atomic Kitten's Kerry Katona. The event had been sold to OK magazine. A huge Garda operation was mounted in order to keep both local people and the media away from the ceremony. The inhabitants of the area were bullied off their own streets. The public realm was forcibly privatised, for no reason other than the protection of OK's property.

Aristocracies tend to feel hard done by, however, and Lord McFadden subsequently complained that the ungrateful peasantry did not realise how costly the whole show was.

"If the truth were known we actually lost money on our wedding. Don't get me wrong, it was wonderful, and the magazine was great to us. However, the OK deal paid us only £300,000, but the whole wedding and honeymoon cost us £400,000. So I actually lost money on the deal, and to top if off the press were very hard on us." One might have hoped that the ingratitude of the great unwashed and the traumatic experience of actually losing money on one's own wedding might have had a salutary effect.

The Rathfeigh affair had one saving grace, however. It was our own affair. We may have been making a show of ourselves as a democratic society, but at least the show was local. It did not have the exquisite additional embarrassments of making a show of the country abroad and of having the Taoiseach humiliate this State by making himself part of a Hello! magazine purchase.

Politicians, of course, are as much entitled to private family occasions as the rest of us and should, if they wish, be left alone. But Bertie Ahern did not ask to be left alone.

Far from being quiet and private, the wedding of his daughter to another member of the Westlife nobility was sold in advance as a PR package to Hello! It was staged in the way it was purely to maximise the income that could be generated from it.

The result was an extraordinary exercise in crass bad manners. Imagine for a moment that Jacques Chirac's family descended on Sneem for a wedding, that the church was blocked off, the streets taken over by kick-boxing heavies with guns in their belts, the locals treated as inconvenient yokels to be kept in their place, and all because the event was the property of a celebrity magazine.

Irish people would be outraged, but more to the point, so would the French. The very idea of the country's leader behaving in this way in a foreign state would be regarded as a national humiliation.

While tabloid photographers are not the most powerful magnets for public sympathy, they do have the right to walk the streets without being kicked, threatened or roughed up. Especially when Westlife itself is a calculated mechanism for attracting crowds and flashing cameras.

Has there ever been a more undignified spectacle in the history of the State than that of a Taoiseach literally standing by while Irish citizens are roughed up by heavies acting for the foreign celebrity magazine to which his daughter's wedding has been sold?

Bertie Ahern has survived in office by making himself, not a politician, but a soap star, the decent if shambolic father with a wandering eye but a heart of gold. But the thing about soap stars is that when they lose their appeal, they get written out of the script pretty fast.

The deliberate Ahern strategy of making a public drama of his private life worked brilliantly for a long time. It made him a character - "Bertie" - rather than a public official. Apart from anything else, having a slightly awkward past which can't be fully explained, is not a problem for a character, but an asset.

But when the soap star tries to leave Coronation Street for an aristocratic role in Upstairs, Downstairs, the result is too often risibly repellent. The cuddly hero can become the tacky villain almost overnight. In that sense, the grotesque spectacle of a Taoiseach allowing himself to become a bit-part player in Hello!'s show may well prove to be the beginning of Bertie's long goodbye.