Bertie not all bad

I AM among a tiny minority of people who believe that history will be kind to Bertie Ahern and will have a far greater understanding of him than there is today.
I don’t mind being in a minority as long as I believe I am right. There are those who might say that Bertie Ahern was the worst Taoiseach of all time. Of course, there are others who might say that Brian Cowen is far more deserving of that title.
The general consensus is, however, that Bertie Ahern destroyed the Irish economy and that he was aided and abetted by Brian Cowen as Minister for Finance and later as Taoiseach.
I was never a great fan of Bertie Ahern. He was too sweet for my liking. I always preferred a person who told it as it was rather than somebody like Ahern, who could persuade you that the sun was shining as you tried to fight your way through a blizzard.
This country was lucky that Bertie Ahern was Taoiseach when the leadership of the IRA wanted to talk peace. Neither Albert Reynolds nor John Bruton would have the patience nor the skill needed to get all sides together and persuade them to do a deal as Ahern did.
Efforts have and are now being made to downgrade Ahern’s role in the peace process but history will be able to examine all the evidence in a dispassionate manner and I am sure that all fair-minded historians will acknowledge his major part in the whole procedure.
Some would seek to argue that while he might have been good for the North, he was bad for the South. That ignores the reality that what was good for the North was also good for the South and what was bad for the North was also bad for us down here, as the Troubles affected every one of us.
Ahern’s peace efforts were not confined to the North. He also sought and achieved industrial peace down here. Social partnership was never stronger than under his leadership but it is popular today to criticise the consensus that existed then between Government, employers and trade unions.
The alternative would have been industrial chaos. Schools and hospitals would have closed down. Public transport would have ground to a halt and the gardaí would not have turned up for work.
It is easy and popular to say now that Bertie Ahern should have taken on the teachers and the nurses and the gardaí and refused their wage demands. And so he should have. He should also have refused to grant social welfare increases that were far higher than the rate of inflation. We know that now because the country is broke.
Bertie Ahern gave us what we demanded and, because of that, we elected him three times in-a-row. If he had refused to give us what we wanted, he would not have been elected or re-elected.
It’s as simple as that. Now Fine Gael are portraying themselves as the party of rectitude. They are saying that Richard Bruton as Spokesman on Finance warned consistently about public spending going out of control.
He certainly did that but I have gone through his budget speeches in the Dáil in the years before the last general election and nowhere can I find any place where he said the teachers or the nurses or the gardaí or the old-age pensioners should not be paid so much. If anything, he wanted all of them to be paid more.
However, as I have said so often here before, that is politics. “Anything they can do, we can do better. We can do anything better than them.”
That, actually, is democracy. So Ahern gave us what we wanted and we in turn voted for him. Now we are biting the hand that fed us. We are blaming him, not for refusing our demands, but for granting them.
Some of us are also blaming him for things he had no control over, such as the collapse of the banking system. Even one caller to Pat Kenny’s morning radio programme last Friday blamed him for water shortages all over the country. A letter to The Irish Times on New Year’s Day accused Bertie Ahern of denying the people of Dublin Central the right to express their views on him.
That’s because he will not be going forward for election again. Bring that condemnation to its logical conclusion and all those of us who are not contesting the next election will be denying the right of the people of Clare, Galway, Limerick or wherever to “express their views” on us.
I do not claim that Bertie Ahern was the best Taoiseach of all time. Neither do I say he was the worst. What I am saying is that he was the Taoiseach we wanted at election after election and we wanted him because he gave us what we asked for.
I am also saying that it is a bit rich for us to be turning on him at this stage. The times to do that were at the general elections in 1997, 2002 and 2007 when we could have dumped him.
We didn’t do that, so we have only ourselves to blame.