Americans Could Use Bertie

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

Americans Could Use Bertie

June 8, 2007

By Cormac MacConnell

DO ye know what America needs? America needs our Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern and needs him urgently.

This amazing Teflon Taoiseach has been returned for a record third time at the top of the election pile. As I write this piece, in the wake of the election, Bertie is carpentering together his third government in a row.

By the time it has run its five-year lifetime (and Bertie’s governments always last the full term) this incredible man will have been a record 15 years in office.

He is already the longest serving leader in Europe. He has already surpassed Eamon de Valera’s achievements in this regard! He is only 56 years old and brisk as a bee.

He was widely expected to lose this election. Instead he was smiling broadly out at us from the front pages of all the morning newspapers after the election.

Soon Bertie will have formed his third solid government, will be relaxing for the summer break, and doubtless would be ready to put on his political harness again for a fortnight or so and come over to help his friend George W. Bush sort out the dreadful mess he has created over your poor heads.

I’d say that the man who finally solved our perennial Northern Ireland problem (with just a little help from his friends) would do that for George and, give or take, it would take less than 21 days. And God knows ye need his skilled services so badly just now.

At the start of our general election campaign, to show the man’s skills, he was in the wars on every front. His personal finances and his private life were the main issue in the campaign. And these, without going into detail, are juicily interesting to the masses.

He had no bank account at all, it seems, in the period following his marriage breakup (and when he was minister for finance), and there were strange details surrounding the purchase of his subsequent home — too complicated to go into here — and he is a central witness in a Mahon Tribunal investigating that house purchase and other matters.

Yet every time the opposition parties raised the issue during the first two weeks of the campaign Bertie’s ratings shot up! The opinion polls showed him as being the country’s most popular politician at the beginning of the battle, and his popularity kept heading skywards all along the way.

Effortlessly, eight days before polling, he took on his chief opponent Enda Kenny of Fine Gael in the inevitable TV debate and won that hands down. Smiling all the way!

And when the count was over the man described by Charlie Haughey as the “most ruthless and cunning of them all” nearly achieved an impossible overall majority for Fianna Fail. And this happened while his coalition partners, the Progressive Democrats, lost their leader, the abrasive Justice Minister Michael McDowell, who immediately retired from politics altogether!

D’ye know why America needs Bertie? It is possible, maybe even probable, that by giving the Progressive Democrats two of the most sensitive ministries, justice and health, that Bertie, five years ago, was distancing himself and his party from responsibility for the very issues which were the hottest potatoes on the doorsteps for his canvassers to handle.

If so, that is what Haughey meant about him being the most ruthless, devious and cunning of them all. Those are qualities which America needs today (even yesterday) to dig the nation out what is rapidly and daily developing into a diabolical mess in the Middle East.

Bertie is far too long on the road to be a practitioner of the knee-jerk politics and strategies which poor Bush is perfecting by the hour. As he displayed in the lengthy Northern peace process Bertie, like many Arabs, somehow talks his opponents into his way of thinking. Midway through the campaign, wasn’t he joined at the site of the Battle of the Boyne by a smiling and backslapping Ian Paisley.

Meanwhile, despite great expectations, even a skilled politician like Gerry Adams was unable to manage more than four seats for Sinn Fein.

The Irish developed the political skills over there that made Tammany Hall a byword, that created dynasties like the Kennedys of Boston and the Daleys of Chicago. Both of those clans, like the Aherns, were led by men who were more often sinners than saints but who, like the still-charismatic Clinton, were brilliant political animals.

Good politicians of every hue have that predatory instinct about them. They are always looking at the jugulars of the opposition, and the very best of them have a veneer of easy charm atop that.

We’re describing Bertie Ahern. If he can lead the divided and riven clans of an island of people who are essentially One Man Republics for 15 years then, for sure, solving the problems of the U.S. is akin to a holiday chore.

Personally, after many years, I’ve turned against Fianna Fail and Bertie ever since the workplace/pub smoking ban. I’m a stupid One Man Republic, if you like, swimming against a politically correct tide.

So be it. I did not give his party a single “stroke” in this recent election. All four of the candidates I voted for including the Sinn Fein candidate for the first time ever were eliminated in the early counts as Bertie beamed ever more brightly from a lamp post outside the count center in Ennis.

Try and borrow him for that fortnight asap.

And all your problems will be solved.

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