Mea culpa, Mea culpa, Mea maxima culpa

I blame myself for believing in Bertie Ahern down through the years. Ahern was on the take and I didn’t want to believe it. The evidence was there from the time he started telling tall tales to the Mahon Tribunal about the sources of money in his account. But I, like thousands of others across the land, closed my eyes and ears to that evidence.
Because I liked Bertie Ahern and because I liked the hard work he put in to ensuring there was peace in our island in our time.
Obviously, there are two Bertie Aherns and I am afraid history will remember him more for the greed that was in him than for the good.
We will not be able to praise him for helping to bring about peace in the North without also remembering the Mahon Tribunal Report. Bertie Ahern was not a man to cultivate enemies. He was not a divisive or an abrasive figure like, say, Charlie Haughey or Brian Cowen or Des O’Malley. Consensus was his middle name. He liked to agree with everyone and to have everyone on his side.
I remember shortly after he was first elected Taoiseach in 1997, the Opposition parties came into the Dáil with all guns blazing and aimed at Ahern over some issue I have forgotten about now.
Everybody was expecting Bertie would give as good as he was getting. But he took the wind out of the sails of the Opposition by going along with them, agreeing to meet them later and sorting out whatever problem existed.
No need to get angry or excited was his motto. The Opposition were pushing an open door. They had a friend in the new Taoiseach, although they might not know it. Or that was the image he wished to portray.
That was his style during all his time as Taoiseach. He hardly ever lost the rag. Socialist TD Joe Higgins put it another way. You might as well be trying to play handball against a rick of hay as to get a reaction from Bertie Ahern.
So his decision to resign from Fianna Fáil rather than stand up and fight against his expulsion came as no surprise to me. It would not be in his nature to fight.
That’s why he was able to talk to the IRA. He understood where they were coming from. He could sympathise with their aims if not with their methods.
He was lucky, of course, that Bill Clinton was in the White House and Tony Blair in Number 10 Downing Street and also that the IRA wanted to talk peace.
But Ahern had the ability of being able to talk to the most anti-Irish elements in unionism and convince them he was not their enemy.
Ahern deserves to be remembered primarily for the fact that we have had peace on this island for a long time now. Unionists and republicans are working together for the first time in our long and bitter history.
He should also be remembered for negotiating industrial peace down here. Some will say the price was too high.
They will say he gave in too easily to trade union demands and that as a result we are paying public sector workers far more than we can afford. They will say this country is broke today because of Ahern´s soft-touch culture down through the years.
It’s a pity we didn’t have the benefit of hindsight then. We were happy there were no major or prolonged strikes during most of Ahern’s tenure. The teachers were in their classrooms, the guards were maintaining the peace, the trains and buses were running on time most of the time and the ESB workers kept the current flowing into our homes.
Now we are paying the price for all that. But would we have it any other way if the Celtic Tiger were ever revived?
Talking about the good side of Bertie Ahern makes it difficult for me to talk about the other side. While the Mahon Tribunal did not accuse him of corruption, it rejected his evidence about where he got a lot of his money.
There was a culture in Fianna Fáil – and to a lesser extent in Fine Gael – of using politics to feather the nest. I hope that day is over.
When you get a culture of wrongdoing, those involved try to believe they are doing no wrong. Alright, they don’t want others to find out about it, they know they have something to hide but they are able to persuade themselves they are doing no harm. If they get a brown envelope stuffed with cash for their pains, they like to believe they are entitled to that money and f*** the begrudgers.
An off-shoot of this culture is the curse of Dallas-type mansions built on good farming land but rezoned for residential purposes by ignorant and greedy councillors.
When I feel like looking kindly on Fianna Fáil all I have to do is open my eyes and look at all those monstrocities they allowed to blight the landscape.
They are all over North Clare, Connemara and West Kerry. They have destroyed our beautiful countryside.
I also look at the housing estates built where people were never meant to live.
The row about septic tanks now would not have arisen if proper planning procedures were adhered to.
That row is nothing compared to the war that is going to break out if the local authorities ever get around to inspecting even a fraction of those tanks.
Sure, let us remember Bertie Ahern for the good he did. Let us also hope there is an end now to the culture of greed that has shamed us all.