Few regrets for former Taoiseach

Bertie Ahern was in Ennistymon on Friday to launch the National Tourism Conference. He spoke to Nicola Corless about his tenure as Taoiseach, tourism and the recent flooding

BERTIE Ahern is pleased when he thinks back on his time as the country’s leader but hindsight is 20/20 as the saying goes and there are things he says he would do differently, if he had his time again.
Against the backdrop of some of the worst flooding in living memory in Clare, many people are pointing the finger at the development on floodplains but more stringent legislation on the issue is not needed, according to the former Taoiseach.
“All I can tell you is that the engineers and architects at the time who are all very professional people, they stand over the developments,” Mr Ahern said. He recalled the floods seven years ago in his Drumcondra constituency, pointing out that the parts flooded were not necessarily new developments erected in boom years.
“We had three big floods in 1902, 1954 and 2002 and that was in a built-up area that was always built up. I think this is the problem; you get hit now and again. There is no doubt about it. I don’t know whether it is climate change, if it is development, or what it is. But the local authorities will tell you and the engineers will tell you, there is stringency. But I suppose when the land is developed, the difficulty is that the drains will drain into the river far quicker than if it was just land.
“Every year in this decade, we have had places flooded that were not flooded for a long time and I saw Cumbria in England last week, which hadn’t been flooded in a thousand years, according to the records. I don’t know the cause of it but I do think that if it is anything to do with development that people should be able to investigate this and see that we are living by the highest standards,” he stated.
Mr Ahern said he had seen, first hand, the distress of families affected by flooding in Ennis, where he had been signing copies of his autobiography earlier in the day and he sympathised with them. Addressing the delegates at the conference, he acknowledged that this had been a particularly difficult year for many families and businesses and for Irish tourism.
“Tourism worldwide has been deeply affected by the global difficulties right throughout 2009. That was always going to be a challenging year for our tourism industry on this side of it as well. I’m very conscious of the demands this brings to the Irish hospitality sector that we all want to support the huge efforts the industry is making with marketing of special offer packages, which I think is working fairly well. All tourism destinations have been affected by the downturn. In fact, Ireland has probably performed very well this year compared to other competitors in Europe,” he reassured the conference delegates.
Tourism is particularly important to the Mid-West region, a fact acknowledged by the former Taoiseach. The numbers of transatlantic flights to and from Shannon has diminished in recent years and one company operates all flights from the regional airport to the European mainland. So does the airport have a future?
“I remember back a number of years ago when people were arguing about whether the transatlantics would come to Shannon or would they go to Dublin? I was emphasising at the time that what we need to be concerned about was that we had them on the island of Ireland. I did warn about this and that is what is happening now. The flight to Washington is gone, so many of the transatlantic flights are gone from Ireland. It is hard to know where aviation is going to go. I think it is a real worry where it is going to end up,” he replied.
“There are people here from America and from Europe and the UK and Northern Ireland and that is something we have to keep working, working, working at to try to build up tourism as long as we can,” he added.
Of his 11 years in power, Mr Ahern presided over a period of economic growth driven primarily by construction and the property bubble. He acknowledged that “we should have stopped them [tax incentives for property developers] a bit quicker. We did stop them in 2005, which was before things turned down.”
“We wouldn’t have the regeneration of Limerick and Cork and Waterford and Galway and Dublin if we hadn’t had tax incentives. We wouldn’t have had that kind of property. A lot of people say to me now, ‘we have an awful lot of unemployment in the construction industry’ but it wouldn’t have been there if we didn’t generate it in the first place,” he asserted.
“One of the things now that I think people maybe forget, or perhaps they don’t forget but at least we point it out to them the whole time, is that in the last recession, there was less than a million people working. Now there are still two million working. We had 2.3 million working, we are back to two million. It is still far different and there is far more activity. The housing was needed. There are a small number of houses not filled or sold but 70% of the houses built for the past 20 years are all sold, people are living in them and people are happy in them. There are very few foreclosures on mortgages. I was checking the figures. I saw that thing on The Late Late Show a fortnight ago and I rang the aid societies to find out how many there were. There has just been a handful. So there are not big foreclosures,” he continued.
Mr Ahern also regrets the formation of the office of the financial regulator and listening to the “media campaign run at the time about the banks overcharging. We should have left it over to the Central Bank. The Central Bank is far stronger and powerful. The regulator, in my view, wasn’t a great idea.”