Opinion

Bertie Ahern's views on the north are worth hearing

Bertie Ahern may have come a cropper in the end because of controversy over his personal finances, but the man from Drumcondra had a good run 
Bertie Ahern may have come a cropper in the end because of controversy over his personal finances, but the man from Drumcondra had a good run  Bertie Ahern may have come a cropper in the end because of controversy over his personal finances, but the man from Drumcondra had a good run 

WHEN it comes to the art of politics, there aren't many practitioners as adept as Bertie Ahern.

"The Bert", as he is also known, secured the position of Taoiseach not once but three times.

He may have come a cropper in the end because of controversy over his personal finances, but the man from Drumcondra had a good run.

So when someone like Ahern comments on the political situation in Northern Ireland, it is worth paying attention.

In the question-and-answer session that followed his recent lecture in Queen's University, as part of the Spring Festival of Conflict Transformation, I took the opportunity to ask him for his views.

When it reached endgame, Ahern and Tony Blair were the key figures in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement.

Among its many features, that document provided for the distribution of ministerial positions based on party strengths: the famous - some would say notorious - D'Hondt formula.

Now, for the first time since 1998, parties which could claim ministerial posts in the power-sharing executive are voluntarily going into opposition.

It's not every day that politicians give up the opportunity to hold a top job, so what did Bertie Ahern think of the decision by the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP, not to mention Alliance which has taken a broadly similar course of action?

Essentially his response was that the appearance of an opposition was inevitable and this further move towards normal parliamentary politics was "probably a good thing".

He already derived "great satisfaction" from watching Northern Ireland politicians, after all those terrible years of the Troubles, calmly debating such issues as education, health, roads and the environment.

The former Taoiseach also said it was "a great achievement" for Northern Ireland to establish an executive within weeks of a general election, in contrast with Spain, for example, not to mention the south where, as he put it, the negotiations "went on endlessly".

Although Ahern's main purpose in his lecture was to convey his opposition to Brexit and to emphasise the need, as he sees it, for people in the north to vote for staying in the European Union, he also made some remarks about peacemaking and north-south relations that are worth pondering.

He was critical, for example, of the lack of cross-border political communication down through the years.

Back in 1995, when he was opposition leader in the Dáil, Ahern visited a republican-nationalist area in Belfast where he was greeted in somewhat sarcastic tones by a local woman who recalled that the last southern politician she met was Eamon de Valera, back in the late 1920s.

The historic meetings held by then-Taoiseach Seán Lemass and his successor Jack Lynch with the north's prime minister Terence O'Neill in the 1960s were breaches of this pattern but Ahern felt this kind of engagement should have been taking place long before that.

Although he did not mention it, a vigorous anti-partition campaign was launched in the years after the Second World War but it did nothing to advance the cause of Irish unity.

Ahern had been asked what was the biggest historic error by his own party, Fianna Fáil, in relation to the development of the conflict.

Many would say it was the arms crisis of 1970 when Fianna Fáil ministers were accused of importing weapons for distribution in the north, but Ahern said this was "in the heat of battle" (there was at the time, of course, a widespread fear of pogroms.)

More serious in his view was the lack of interaction between the two sets of politicians on this small island.

He recalled an initiative that he himself took as Taoiseach in 1999 when he invited an array of northern politicians from both communities to the final of the Heineken Rugby Cup in Dublin where Ulster famously triumphed over Colomiers.

There was a buffet lunch at Government Buildings before the game and Ahern cites this as the type of occasion that should have been a regular occurrence down through the decades.

Whatever his other failings or achievements as a politician, Ahern is a natural conciliator.

His friendship with Ian Paisley is not as well-known as the "Chuckle Brothers" partnership between "The Doc" and Martin McGuinness but it was at least as warm.

Ahern told of a visit to Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin where he took the Reverend Ian to see the monuments to Irish-born members of the British forces who died in the two world wars and the DUP leader stopped on the way out to say a prayer at the Republican Plot where the former Taoiseach's parents are buried alongside a host of rebels and fighters against the crown.

No doubt he was motivated in part by personal regard for his friend but also by the feeling that, as he often said to Ahern: "Remember Bertie, we're Irishmen and it's Irishmen have to solve this."